On Monday night, the Trump administration launched what appears to be a nascent cult-of-personality state media channel: “Trump TV: The Essentials” consists of a stream of Donald Trump ’s speeches and administration official appearances, available on the White House’s YouTube channel.
The rollout came on the same day that CNN, MS NOW and Politico filed a First Amendment lawsuit over the administration’s decision to bar the three news outlets’ reporters from entering the White House. The lawsuit is being heard by U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly, whom Trump appointed to the federal bench during his first term (and who sided with Jim Acosta in the CNN reporter’s 2018 lawsuit to restore his White House access.) Department of Justice lawyers are defending the White House decision by claiming that access to the White House is a privilege, not a right, and that the affected networks forfeited that privilege by publishing sensitive national security information.
As the fight over the outlets’ White House press credentials plays out in court, Trump seems set to promote his cult of personality on Trump TV. Never one to miss a chance to self-promote, the timing suggests the ban might have been part of a larger media strategy all along. One day after its launch, The Guardian described the aesthetic and appeal of an “anchor-less channel [that] dispenses with traditional broadcast norms”:
With no schedule, no on-screen description of what is being shown, and zero context for where or when a clip was recorded, the effect of having the channel on in the background is less like watching a news network and more like installing Trump wallpaper — a 24-hour fever dream of self-soothing propaganda for the MAGA faithful.
But early numbers show that the channel does not have much drawing power as Trump struggles with a record-low approval rating of 32% . According to the Daily Beast :
The channel launched at 7 p.m. with around 8,000 viewers, but the audience had dropped below 4,000 just 90 minutes later. By 9 p.m. Eastern, the stream was attracting only about 3,000 viewers, a tiny audience compared with the millions watching the major networks at primetime. … The stream has been floated as a replacement for the “fake news” traditional media, but as their leading morning shows kicked off at 6 a.m. Trump’s channel floundered further at just above 1,000 viewers. This was during a speech on anti-fraud initiatives from May. As it switched to another old Trump speech, it dipped below 1,000.
Given how tightly Trump’s aides control what information reaches him, it’s possible the president is unaware that his propaganda channel is a massive flop (even if he is famously obsessed with television ratings .) But no matter how pathetic its view count, or how quickly this round of press bans gets resolved, Trump TV sets a dangerous precedent.
“An America cannot have state TV,” said former White House Correspondents’ Association President Weijia Jiang in a “Fox News Sunday” appearance. “You need independent actors to be able to be the observers. And if the government is only showing you what it wants, then you have to question: ‘What are we missing?’”
“This threatens press freedom.”
“Look, every administration, every president hates the press,” she continued. “There should be tension. We wouldn’t be doing our jobs, and neither would they, if there wasn’t that friction.”
The majority of Americans understand that the administration’s propaganda push is meant to hide wrongdoing and avoid further revelations of egregious human and civil rights violations and staggering corruption. CNN, MS NOW and Politico reiterated this point in their joint statement about being banned from the White House press pool.
“Left unchallenged,” they wrote, “this threatens press freedom and the public’s right to independent journalism free from government interference.”
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Now Streaming: Constitutional Misconduct
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