Trump TV is on the air and boy does it suck! If you watched the minute-long teaser trailer put out by the White House, you might believe the channel is serving up a steady diet of comfort-food reruns like Modern Family, Seinfeld, and Family Guy. One would naturally arrive at the conclusion since those shows feature prominently in said trailer.
Of course, like all things Trump, the ol’ bait-and-switch was in play. There are no beloved television characters on Trump TV, unless Howard Lutnick is your idea of a Central Perk mainstay. Trump TV has exactly zero episodes of old TV shows, not even The Celebrity Apprentice. What it does have is old footage of Trump doing Trump things, which mostly involves talking and falling asleep while other people talk.
When I tuned in this afternoon, I joined a whopping eight hundred other souls reliving Trump’s riveting August 31 remarks on healthcare from the Oval Office. I watched and watched and watched some more. Not all at once, of course, because too much exposure to Trump can lead to venereal disease and worse. There were the healthcare remarks and “President Trump Participates in an Arrival Ceremony with the President of China,” and his U.N. speech from earlier in the week when he threatened to annihilate Iran (again) and what seeing so much Trump at once reminded me is that our president is a terrible public speaker. Maybe TrumpTV should get somebody else to play Trump? Alec Baldwin’s not doing much these days.
If TrumpTV sounds like this is just a rebranding of the official White House YouTube channel, that’s because it is. Not sure why they decided to bother renaming it except that our president clearly enjoys things named after him, even stultifyingly bad things like Trump TV, Trump University and Donald Trump Jr.
As dumb (did you know the word “dumb” has a “b” at the end? A lot of people don’t know this. I learned it from watching Trump TV) as all of this is, it’s worth putting it into context. Last week, the administration barred CNN, Politico, and MS Now from the White House. A couple days later, we’ve got Trump TV on the air.
I’m no scholar on the subject, but who needs education these days? It seems to me that banning what you perceive to be unfavorable press outlets while launching a media outlet of your own is pretty high up on the authoritarian to-do list. Of course, this being Trump, the endeavor is not even half-assed. (A federal judge temporarily blocked Trump’s ban, and ordered that these three news outlets have their access restored. The Trump administration, it appears, is ignoring him.)
In the meantime, those craving even more Trump can tune into Trump TV for such compelling viewing as “2025 United Nations General Assembly Highlights” (that malfunctioning escalator moment was, sadly, not included) and a perverse ‘music video’ entitled “16 Months of Zero Releases at the Border” which features a country song with the lyrics “Somebody’s been shot/somebody’s been abused.” I assume the lyrics refer to an immigrant being abused by Trump’s ICE goons.
The idea of a dedicated “news” network bearing the president’s name – even one as stupefyingly pointless as this – ought to disturb Americans for the same reason Mussolini TV never caught on. (I don’t think there was an actual Mussolini TV, but I maintain it wouldn’t have caught on.) Because one cannot trust the government to deliver the truth.
I’m not saying all governments deliberately lie to their people, but enough of them do, and they do so often enough, that the idea of a free press seems like a pretty good solution—a necessary one, even.. This is why the Constitution specifically enumerates the importance of their role in the First Amendment. You think Jefferson liked being on the receiving end of all those “Dusky Sally” op-eds in the tabloids of the day? Of course not, but all of our Founders recognized democracy demands transparency.
Didn’t somebody once say “Democracy dies in darkness”? Ah yes, that was Jeff Bezos, the oligarch whose purchase of the Washington Post was accompanied by a pivot from holding the powerful to account to killing editorials that might endanger his government rocket ship contracts.
Now, with the Paramount/Warner Bros. merger set to proceed after Gavin Newsom sold out his state by strong-arming his attorney general to settle the thing over the objections of several other states, the president’s wish of “reforming” CNN into another kind of Trump TV is likely to be granted. We are almost surely going to see the Ellisons do to the network what they’ve done to CBS News: install Bari Weiss or some other accommodating flunky and clean house of anybody that might question the White House too harshly. After all, this is not a group used to being questioned at all, let alone by the likes of “sleazebag” Kaitlan Collins.
There’s a difference between setting the narrative and controlling it. Trump has mastered the first but is woeful at the second. Trump TV is his attempt to bridge the gap. By showing “highlights” of his administration on a loop, I suppose the idea is to buttress the bulls--t idea that this is a team that gets things done for the American people. They do not, and no amount of rebranding will change that sad fact. Maybe it will catch on like one of those ASMR fireplace videos, although at least those fireplace videos provide a valuable service.
