Donald Trump Jr said his father has discussed banning mainstream media journalists from the White House press briefing room.
The president-elect’s son said on his podcast, Triggered with Donald Trump Jr, that they were considering opening up the briefing room to podcasters like Joe Rogan when asked if it was “time to take away” seats belonging to traditional media.
“I wonder now, as your father is assembling his team, as maybe (the incoming White House press secretary) Karoline Leavitt is looking at the new press briefing room chart, maybe it’s time to reorder that chart and maybe take away some people’s seats,” Daily Wire political commentator Michael Knowles pondered.
“We’re gonna break some news here,” Trump Jr replied. “Because I literally had this conversation with—I was flying back…I was on the plane with my father, I think it was coming back from the SpaceX launch with Elon [Musk] last week. And we were talking about the podcast world and some of our friends and Rogan and guys like you.”
Trump Jr said his father was considering his options “given how the media has behaved.”
“We had the conversation about opening up the press room to a lot of these independent journalists,” he said. “If the New York Times has lied, they’ve been averse to everything, they’re functioning as the marketing arm to the Democrat party, why not open it up to people who have larger viewerships, stronger followings?”
“We had that conversation. That may be in the works,” he added.
However, whether or not podcasters like Rogan, who is based in Austin, Texas, will logistically be able to attend daily briefings at the White House is another matter.
Trump often lashes out atthe mainstream media and the “failing” New York Times. Last night in a Truth Social rant, he demanded an apology for its “junk” coverage of him, singling out its correspondent Maggie Haberman for particular criticism.
“Will the failing New York Times apologize to its readers for getting years of ‘Trump’ coverage so wrong,” the president-elect wrote in the post.
“They write such phony ‘junk’, knowing full well how incorrect it is, only meaning to demean.”
Pivoting to Haberman, Trump mockingly misspelled the reporter’s name as he wrote: “Magot Hagerman, a third rate writer and fourth rate intellect, writes story after story, always terrible, and yet I almost never speak to her.”
During the campaign Trump, 78, courted young male voters by engaging with YouTubers and “bro” podcasters, many of whom were young, wildly popular with Gen-Z and sympathetic toward his MAGA movement.
Trump sat down with podcasters like The Nelk Boys and Theo Von. He also went on Logan Paul’s Impaulsive podcast, gifting him a t-shirt featuring his Fulton County, Georgia mugshot.
His 18-year-old son Barron and friend Bo Loudon were reportedly responsible for getting Trump to sit down with Kick influencer Adin Ross in August and, towards the end of the campaign, he appeared on Rogan’s podcast, where he reached an audience of nearly 40 million.
