As President Donald Trump’s campaign sponges up grassroots donations for his reelection bid, it’s leaning on a largely unnoticed pool of support: a network of pro-Trump media organizations that lure in readers with splashy, ideologically driven content, harvest their email addresses, and then sell them back to the Trump campaign.
News outlets such as Trump Train News, American Action News, UnitedVoice, and RightWing.org appear on their face to be standard—if occasionally unpolished—conservative media operations. They largely aggregate reporting from other news organizations, put a pro-Trump spin on the stories, and top them with clicky headlines geared to catch the eyes of social media users and email newsletter recipients.
Few if any of the websites are up-front about the companies running them: digital marketing firms that use the sites and the lists of email subscribers they build to sell paid advertising space to political campaigns and interest groups—often the same political interests the sites routinely and favorably write about under the pretense of news coverage.