Are you currently at an airport? Strapped to a hospital bed, with various tubes protruding from your body? Maybe you’re on a treadmill or visiting an elder care facility? Chained to a radiator in the basement from the Saw movies?
If you said yes to any of these questions, you might be watching cable news while reading this column. Or maybe you’re one of the hundreds of people currently watching Donald Trump’s answer to cable news, Trump TV – a YouTube streaming channel that airs nothing but White House-sanctioned content 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Kudos to you for multitasking, and thank you for the click. I know Jacob Soboroff is hard to look away from, but at least finish this.
I don’t typically watch cable news. Or broadcast news. I feel like the best way to consume vital information is through the glorious written word, full of context and detail, rather than various “experts” yelling at each other about which one is the harbinger of the antichrist. Instead, I can yell all I want at a newspaper or an internet article and no one can tell me not to. Except the people in the dentist waiting room with me.
Trump TV is kind of like cable news, if it served absolutely no purpose and had even fewer human beings watching. I gave myself the challenge of watching this neverending digital pathway to hell for one single hour, hoping I could capture whatever joy is being derived from this American horror story.
When I first logged onto the stream, I was “treated” to a 11 March 2016 speech Donald Trump gave in Hebron, Kentucky – which Trump on more than one occasion pronounced “Keentucky”, presumably to mimic local speech patterns. That Donald Trump is just a good ol’ country boy, after all.
I came in right smack-dab in the middle of the remarks, which very clearly were not prepared. As someone hyper-allergic to cable news, I don’t often witness the president’s speeches in full. I immediately felt as though I were succumbing to a form of intense psychosis, where reality had begun to melt before my eyes, like an ice cream cone that’s sat out in the sun too long.
Trump was describing the stairs at the event, stairs he had to walk up and down. Stairs that he traversed despite his own natural sense of self-preservation. “I might slip, it’s soaking wet,” he said of the stairs. “They’re steel stairs. Four sets of stairs.” I immediately begin to imagine him counting the stairs. Slowly.
From there, he played his greatest hits and mocked Joe Biden for falling down. But the big swerve was a backhanded compliment to Barack Obama for not falling down. “The only thing is how he bobbed down. He bobbed. I couldn’t believe that he made it without a major, noticeable fall.” The shock on his face that a healthy adult man would not trip on his descent from an airplane certainly made me wonder. You can tell this man has thought a lot about the best ways to not fall down stairs. Eventually, Dr Oz showed up, and I needed to mute my computer. My Uber Eats order had just arrived, and I didn’t want my neighbors getting the wrong idea when I opened the front door.
We got a brief respite from Trump up next, with a re-airing of Melania’s ad … excuse me, speech about how great artificial intelligence is, from 16 January. “The most powerful skill is knowing what to ask,” she declares. I realized the thing I should be asking right then was: “Why am I watching this?”
I hung in a little longer for one more event: the National Prayer Breakfast from 6 February. Paula White-Cain, senior adviser to the White House Faith Office, opened the proceedings by saying: “No president in modern history or perhaps all of history has done more to elevate and protect religious liberty” than Donald Trump has. Except maybe George Washington, who presided over the ratification of the first amendment to the US constitution. The first amendment enshrined freedom of religion into the country’s laws. Also, awkwardly, freedom of speech and freedom of the press. You know, the press Donald Trump kicked out of the White House.
Trump TV seems like the next escalation of the president’s obsession with and animosity toward cable news. I remain flabbergasted that someone could care about anything on television that much.
At last census count, 342 million people live in the United States. Of that population, between 2 and 3 million watch cable news in a given day. The vast majority of those people watch Fox News. And the majority of that majority is over the age of 54.
When I say “no one watches cable news,” I am only being mildly hyperbolic. To coin a term, I’m being “semibolic”. Just a “hint of bolic”.
Yes, there are people who can’t seem to just turn their TV off out there, but MSNOW, CNN, and Fox News aren’t capturing the same level of enthusiasm as the latest episode of HBO’s Lanterns or your local bird-watching club. That cable news retains any significance in our daily discourse is a testament to how fiercely committed our nation’s leaders are to using it as a battlefield for their ideological warfare. And as a retirement community for ex-politicians.
When Trump tried to ban CNN, MS Now and the website Politico for allegations of unfair, dishonest coverage of his administration, journalists had a reasonable fear for the state of freedom of the press in this country. Covering the goings-on at the White House is not, as Trump says, a “privilege”. It is a solemn duty. One that defines what’s left of our democracy. Maybe now, I’m being fully hyperbolic, but I’m a journalist. I should declare my own bias on this topic.
Trump’s media blackout gambit backfired, as Fox News joined with their cable cousins to abandon coverage of the president’s activities, thereby ending the press pool that provided audio and video for news outlets. Without the press pool, no one can hear what Trump says during his speeches. Thankfully for those who use Trump speeches to calm their nerves before a midday nap, they can count on Trump TV to help them off to slumberland.
Back to the Trump TV live stream. He was wearing the same purple tie at the prayer breakfast that he’d worn in Kentucky. If you were not an attentive viewer of Trump TV, you might think you were watching the same speech. I realized that just about everything on this stream is from this year, that we’ll probably never see anything from, say, 2020. But I couldn’t stick around long enough to find out, and Trump TV doesn’t seem to list its programming lineup anywhere.
I left the house during the National Prayer Breakfast, just as Trump was getting going, declaring “something is wrong” with the Republican congressman Thomas Massie from … Kentucky. You know, the state Trump loves so much. I started to wonder if today’s Trump TV schedule was merely a troll directed at Massie, who lost his re-election bid in the Republican primary, to the former Navy Seal Ed Gallrein, whomm Trump endorsed. The absurdity of using a 24/7 YouTube stream to subtly mock a political rival for an audience of 800 people seems far more possible when you remember the person behind this project is Donald Trump.
I took a 30-minute walk with my dog, and when I got back to my desk, I was shocked to learn that Trump was still talking at the National Prayer Breakfast. Specifically about the size of our military budget, which I believe was a direct quote from 1 Corinthians 13:4–8. As Trump droned on (pun intended), the view counter kept going down. Even the die-hards were getting bored.
The launch of Trump TV has been a fairly obvious disaster. Unlike cable news, YouTube has real-time data to tell you how many people are watching something. Multiple media outlets took a swipe at Trump for this folly, though in his defense, most YouTube streams get pitiful concurrent viewership unless it’s MrBeast or live footage of a police chase on an LA freeway. Trump TV was obviously never meant to be anything significant. No one in charge of this stream is trying, unless you count trolling Thomas Massie as “trying”. There are no graphics or lower thirds other than a number to text for “updates” from the White House. There’s no slick editing or editorial perspective outside of the purple tie/Massie element.
But is this any worse than the ideologically minded focus of cable news – with the three major channels pointing their rhetorical ICBMs at each other all day long? Maybe Trump TV is actually the best way to consume our sitting president. Nothing else presents him in all of his repugnant glory: vain, myopic and worst of all, deeply, deeply dull. This holiday season, turn on Trump TV for your conservative family members. There’s always a chance that the uncut, unfiltered lethal dose of nonsense will break the spell for good.
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Dave Schilling is a Los Angeles-based writer and humorist
