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Nobody’s watching Trump TV

Facing a blackout from the traditional media, the president has launched his own rival YouTube channel. Trouble is, nobody's watching it

Rats in a Sack

Photo: Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via Getty Images

When Donald Trump banned three outlets – CNN, Politico and MS Now – from covering the White House for reasons he is yet to articulate, the rest of the broadcast news media was quick to swing behind them in a rare show of solidarity.

CNN had been scheduled to be the television “pool” camera crew for Trump’s trip to New York on Monday – a role which rotates among the major broadcasters, where they follow the president and share the footage with all outlets – but was refused access. Other members of the pool, Fox News, NBC, ABC and CBS, refused to fill in, in what was an unusual move for the dog-eat-dog US media.

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Photographers also said they would limit their coverage of the notoriously vain president, while some broadcasters did show images, but without sound. Trump was inaudible in live footage at a ribbon-cutting ceremony unveiling the new South Lawn helipad at the White House on Monday as there was no microphone. Even the host on the ultra-loyalist Newsmax, which carried the silent footage, conceded: “This is one example of it backfiring just a little bit.”

Now Trump is filling the gap with what cynics may conclude may have been his end-goal all along: launching his own streaming service, Trump TV, showing all his greatest speeches without the interruption of any pesky journalism.

Trump TV, which is streaming on YouTube, launched on Monday, although initial figures suggest it may not displace traditional media quite yet. Although the official White House YouTube channel, on which Trump TV sits, has 3.2 million subscribers, the new stream initially had only about 8,000 live views 15 minutes after it was launched.

That later dipped to around 4,000, and by Tuesday morning, when it was broadcasting eight-month-old footage of Trump scribbling his Sharpie on an executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico, the number had dropped again, to just 1,600.

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Later on Tuesday, fewer than 2,300 were tuning in to watch live coverage of Trump attending a signing ceremony with the prime ministers of Denmark and Greenland, while, over on the second stream, those watching vice president JD Vance holding a press conference on fraud numbered in the hundreds.

The White House announced Trump TV as “a 24/7 livestream of the administration’s greatest hits, unfiltered”, but it appears not even the most fanatical of MAGA supporters want that. How long until Trump – famously obsessed with TV ratings, going back to his time on The Apprentice – quietly drops his ban and allows the trio of broadcasters back in the building?

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