Cable news networks and broadcast channels appear to be noncommittal on airing President Donald Trump’s forthcoming address on Thursday.
Trump announced on Truth Social that he would be making a primetime address to the nation at 9 p.m. Thursday, but did not give further details on the subject matter.
MS Now first reported that the president is planning to speak about voting machine security and announce apparent declassified intelligence reports that the White House claims reveal plans by other countries to interfere in the 2020 election.
Major broadcast networks, including ABC News, CBS News, and NBC News, as well as cable networks like Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC, have not responded to the Daily Beast’s repeated inquiries about their Thursday night programming.
Schedules for upcoming programming at 9:00 p.m. on Thursday also still show regularly scheduled programs, not the president’s address.
The White House typically asks broadcast networks to preempt their usual programming to air a presidential primetime address, which are typically a rarity and reserved for major updates about the country as a whole.
But it remains unclear if the White House has asked the networks to preempt their programming, CNN reported. The White House did not respond to numerous Daily Beast inquiries.
Television networks have previously declined to preempt their programming to air a presidential primetime address.
In 2022, major broadcast networks ABC, CBS, and NBC declined to air a speech by former President Joe Biden, in which he warned about threats to democracy, deeming it more political than newsworthy for live coverage. His speech was played live on CNN and MSNBC, but it was not aired on Fox News, the most-watched cable news channel.
The major broadcast networks also declined to air a primetime address by former President Barack Obama in which he presented his immigration reform plan in 2014. Cable news channels including Fox News and CNN did air that address, but Politico reported at the time that the broadcast networks deemed Obama’s speech too “overtly political” to broadcast.
Trump’s forthcoming speech follows years of the president falsely claiming that he won the 2020 election and that Biden’s win was fraudulent, despite no evidence to support those claims, and with Trump’s legal team at the time never presenting evidence to support them.
In the Oval Office on Tuesday, he confirmed that he would be discussing “free and fair elections” in his primetime address.
“It doesn’t get bigger, because without free and fair elections, you don’t have a country,” the president added. “We’ll be discussing other things too, but it’s going to be a very big announcement.”
Trump has been fixated on his idea of “election integrity” for more than 10 years, since he first would not commit to conceding the 2016 election if he lost to Hillary Clinton. But he has increasingly grown obsessive about the election he lost nearly six years ago.
At every chance he gets, Trump repeats debunked claims that election irregularities made the results of the 2020 election fraudulent. His second administration is filled with people who have promoted his falsehoods about the 2020 election.
Earlier this year, his former Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, also traveled to Fulton County, Georgia, to watch as the FBI executed a search warrant related to the 2020 election, in a very unusual move for an intelligence director.
Trump infamously called Georgia’s secretary of state in 2020 as he pressured him to just “find 11,780 votes,” the exact number needed to overturn Biden’s victory in the state.
Some Democrats are already speaking out against the speech before it’s aired, warning that he will try to further undermine faith in elections.
Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff, who is running for reelection in the 2026 midterm elections, said the president is “reheating debunked conspiracy theories and launching bizarre new lies because he fears losing these midterm elections.”
House Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told MeidasTouch that networks shouldn’t even bother airing the speech, saying “I think we have an ethical obligation not to air things that undermine our elections and are not rooted in fact.”
Former CNN anchor Jim Acosta, who left the network at the start of Trump’s second term, also said that networks should not air the president’s speech.
“In dictatorships, the state media have to go along with the government, and they have to air these crazy lies to the public to brainwash people,” he said on his independent venture, The Jim Acosta Show.
“We have a choice in this country,” he continued. “The networks have a choice in the country, and they should absolutely, positively not air this madman on Thursday night.”
