Even in its heyday, “The Apprentice” never earned ratings like this.

President Trump’s appearance in network prime time on Tuesday — a nine-minute speech from the Oval Office on border security that mostly recycled his usual talking points — drew roughly 40 million television viewers, according to statistics released on Wednesday by Nielsen.

That audience fell short of Mr. Trump’s State of the Union address last January, which drew about 45.6 million viewers, and past landmark presidential moments, like Barack Obama’s announcement of the death of Osama bin Laden in 2011, which reached 56.5 million people.

But Mr. Trump’s appearance edged Mr. Obama’s 2016 State of the Union address (31.3 million), a 2014 speech that Mr. Obama delivered about the Islamic State (34.1 million) and, for good measure, the first-season finale of “The Apprentice” in 2004 (28 million).

The decision by broadcast networks to pre-empt programming for Mr. Trump, who requested time to discuss the government shutdown, touched off a vigorous debate.

The speech itself made little news, and critics questioned why network executives had agreed to grant Mr. Trump such a large platform. Executives said they believed that the shutdown, and its adverse affects on millions of Americans, were inherently newsworthy.

Mr. Trump told a group of news anchors at a private lunch on Tuesday that he hadn’t been inclined to give the address and that his public-relations blitz on border security was “not going to change a damn thing.”

Viewers still tuned in, including nearly 16 million across the three big cable news channels — Fox News, CNN and MSNBC — a major jump in their usual weeknight audience. An additional 24 million watched special bulletins on the four major broadcast networks, which cut into entertainment fare like the CBS procedural “FBI.”

Fox News’s coverage attracted the biggest audience of any channel, with about 8.2 million people watching Mr. Trump’s speech. Among the broadcast networks, CBS averaged about eight million viewers, followed by NBC (about seven million) and ABC (about 4.4 million). NBC won among adults ages 25 to 54, the audience most important to advertisers. The Nielsen measurement does not include Americans who watched online livestreams of Mr. Trump’s remarks.

It was Mr. Trump’s first formal Oval Office address, and he thanked supporters afterward on Twitter “for soooo many nice comments.”

“A very interesting experience!” the president wrote.

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