Trump just banned more press from the White House and launched a State TV channel. Here’s how the press should make him regret it.
On Friday, Donald Trump, America’s first President with an ego as delicate as a Faberge egg, announced on Trash Social that he was “proud” to ban CNN, MSNOW, and Politico from the White House for the crime of “FICTION and LIES,” which is how he describes any sentence that does not end in a lavish fellation of his latest disaster, scandal, crime, or pratfall.
On Saturday morning, Betsy Klein, Akayla Gardner, and Cheyenne Haslett showed up for work and had their hard passes confiscated at the gate like they’d been caught shoplifting MAGA hats from the White House gift shop. “Other Fake News Media Outlets to follow,” he added, which is the kind of thing a man says when he’s enjoying himself.
He was enjoying himself. That’s going to end soon, and this article is a list of strategies to make what’s already turning into a media disaster for Trump even more painful and humiliating.
Asked about it later in the Oval, he offered this: “You need a free press. You need a fair press and an honest press. They purposely write negative news.” Translation: you may have a press, provided it’s the kind I like, which is the definition of a press in exactly the oppressive regimes’ places where we used to build radio transmitters to broadcast into.
This isn’t a media strategy. This is a tantrum engineered by Odd Job Cheung and First Lady Natalie Harp, and it hands the American press the single best story they’ll get all year, if they have the spine to run it right.
You’ll pardon a Cold War throwback, but this is Vremya but with less editorial independence.
If you didn’t spend the Cold War reading Radio Liberty transcripts for fun, Vremya was the Soviet Union’s 9 p.m. newscast. Every night, the same thing: Brezhnev pinning a medal on somebody, a tractor factory in Sverdlovsk exceeding its quota, a stern segment on American unemployment, and the weather. It still runs today in a slightly slicker package.
Bad news did not exist. When Chernobyl melted down, Vremya gave it fourteen seconds, well down the rundown. The audience knew it was garbage. They watched it anyway because there was nothing else on, and then, when the lights were out, secretly listened to the BBC and Voice of America on shortwave to find out what had actually happened.
That’s the model. State-run Trump media where the Golden Age is now and forever and the Dear Leader is the wise and powerful Forever President, a state broadcaster covering Trump the way a golden retriever covers a tennis ball; eagerly, with lots of slobber.
The White House already planted the seed back in May: the White House Wire, a taxpayer-funded knockoff of the Drudge Report that aggregates Fox, the Daily Caller, and the administration’s own posts under all-caps headlines. Actually, it’s a ripoff of Danny Bongdildo’s eponymous Bongino Report, a weak-dick imitation of Drudge that went nowhere fast.
Drudge, the O.G. aggregator, rightly laughed at White House Wire.
The White House’s “new media” briefings feed their hand-picked influencer types, held in a separate building where the actual reporters can’t wander in. The in-house video shop cranks out Trump-as-pope and Trump-as-Jedi AI-slop memes at an industrial scale, all so First Lady Natalie can show Donald they’re doing the work.
Which brings us to last night’s TrumpTV announcement.
MAGA’s constant bleating about imaginary communists has always been projection. It wasn’t enough that Fox, OANN, Newsmax, CBS, and far too many in the mainstream media were obedient stenographers of Trump for over a decade. Now, he’s cutting out the middleman. Why let CNN film the president when the president can film the president?
The plan, brilliant in the minds of morons like Stephen Chung and First Lady Natalie Harp, is already shitting the proverbial bed.
Here’s the problem with state media, and it’s the same problem in Moscow, Caracas, Havana, Beijing, and Budapest: it only works when there’s no alternative. Vremya had a captive audience. Trump doesn’t. He’s launching an agitprop station to an ever-shrinking, aging base who feels under attack from his very policies and decisions.
Trump can’t survive without the cameras
Think about who we’re dealing with: Trump obsessively watches cable news for hours a day, calls network owners and reporters to complain, and obsesses over ratings. First Lady Natalie spoon-feeds him loving coverage from rando sites with names like RealTruthTrumpUltraMAGAEagleForumNewzBlaster.ru and he’s deeply addicted to glowing coverage.
He’s been at war with a free press, and damn near won it, but this is his Stalingrad, his bridge too far…if only the media will take this moment and strike a blow for press freedom.
Attention is oxygen for Donald Trump. Every strongman in history who nationalized the news did it so people would stop looking around for any other information.
Because a ban only works if the banned outlets change their behavior.
If the networks keep running his clips, keep cutting live to the Oval every time he decides to opine on a dog show, and keep treating a Truth Social post as breaking news, then he gets exactly what he wanted: control of the feed at no cost.
If they don’t, he’s a man yelling into a room he emptied himself. Yesterday’s disaster on the South Lawn, in which we saw an episode of “Old Man Yells At Clouds,” was a hint at how to break him.
So here’s the plan.
Every network, every wire, every paper, every independent journalist has a roadmap. Here’s how to strike a blow for press freedom, starting now.
