We’ve been afflicted with the Donald Trump show for far too long. For more than a decade, American public life has been suffocated by a relentless, 24/7 reality television nightmare centered on his insatiable ego. The entire political existence of the self-described “king of ratings” has depended on a toxic, symbiotic relationship with the press that consists of bombastic press conferences and constant visual dominance designed to suck all the air out of the room. But when a clown’s only trick is shouting into a live microphone, the absolute worst thing that can happen is for the cameras to simply turn off. It’s clear by this week’s spectacle that Trump cannot survive the possibility that America has finally changed the channel.
On Friday, in a fit of authoritarian pique, Trump banned CNN, POLITICO and MS NOW from the White House press pool. It was a classic bully move. Yet, in a rare and long-overdue display of institutional solidarity, the rest of the press corps refused to play along. Major networks including NBC, ABC, CBS and even Fox News suspended their pool coverage of the president. Photographers from major wire services and news organizations like The New York Times and The Washington Post stopped publishing new images of the octogenarian chief executive.
The immediate result was an unadulterated farce. Stripped of his apparatus, Trump stepped onto the White House lawn to host a ribbon-cutting ceremony for his prized new helipad. He preened, grabbed his oversized scissors and opened his mouth to boast, but no one could hear a single word over the deafening roar of Marine One’s idling engines. The White House’s own official feed lacked the audio equipment that network pool crews typically provide. Viewers were left watching a silent movie of a shrinking figure gesticulating wildly into the wind. Even anchors on right-wing channels like Newsmax were forced to admit on air that the media ban was backfiring.
Trump got the closest thing to a full media blackout that modern television has ever handed a sitting president and his answer, apparently workshopped over a single weekend, was to build his own tiny replacement network out of recycled clips and call it a triumph. On Monday, the White House rolled out “Trump TV: The Essentials Station,” a 24-hour YouTube livestream on the official White House channel. The promotional hype promised an unedited, nonstop look at the administration’s “greatest hits” to circumvent the supposed censorship of the mainstream media. What they delivered instead was a glorified, automated graveyard of old clips. Viewers who tuned in expecting cutting-edge propaganda were greeted by a two-month-old Trump speech from Mount Rushmore, followed hours later by a rerun of a months-old address regarding creative uses for artificial intelligence and, eventually, a year-old broadcast of a dinner with Britain’s King Charles III. On Tuesday morning, while Trump was actually delivering a live address to the United Nations General Assembly, his own channel was airing his remarks from a prayer breakfast held at the White House in February.
The numbers tell the story. “Trump TV: The Essentials Station” went live on the White House YouTube channel Monday at 7 p.m. Roughly 8,000 people tuned in for the premiere. Ninety minutes later that number had been reduced by half. By the next morning, as the cable news shows Trump was supposedly trying to render obsolete came on the air, his own channel had cratered to a little over 1,000 viewers, out of more than three million subscribers to the White House’s YouTube account. The viewership figures were a brutal reality check for a man whose self-worth is entirely tied to Nielsen points.
Trump has spent a lifetime mistaking attention for affection and ratings for legitimacy. Reporting and testimony from Trumpworld have long suggested that his 2016 campaign began at least partly as a vehicle for attention, leverage and perhaps a Trump-branded media enterprise. He was reportedly shocked by his victory over former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. But once he discovered that the presidency provided a permanent camera crew, a global stage and an endless supply of people forced to listen, he developed an addiction that makes the rest of his behavior easier to understand. Stripped of the drama generated by actual journalists asking tough questions, however, Trump’s unfiltered echo chamber is excruciatingly boring.
Trump TV’s desperate launch fits a decades-long pattern of grandiose vanity projects that inevitably collapse under the weight of their own cheapness. Before he became president, he was a brand in search of a platform. The list of failed enterprises bearing his family moniker is as long as it is embarrassing. There were the frozen steaks, the fraudulent university, the ill-fated airline shuttle, the bankrupt Atlantic City casinos and a short-lived dating show spun off from “The Apprentice” that was canceled after two seasons. There was the failed search engine, the closed charity, the cheap furniture line and the mortgage company launched right before the housing bubble burst. Trump TV is merely the latest entry in a long line of hollow grifts.
Unable to command the airwaves from the Oval Office this week, Trump was forced to decamp to New York City to find a camera. In an ironic twist, the self-proclaimed media titan had to rely on a joint appearance with New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani — that reportedly angered some Republicans — to get his face back on television screen feeds. Standing at Gracie Mansion in the heart of liberal America, the president squeaked to reporters about how he had somehow beaten the boycott, boasting about the crowd of journalists while visibly shrinking in stature. Mamdani gracefully reminded the audience of the critical importance of a free press, while Trump predictably rambled about himself.
Later, at the United Nations, the president threw a visible tantrum when he spotted CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins in the briefing room, whining that she should not be allowed to cover him because of the network’s stance. Collins calmly noted that her credentials were issued by the U.N., not the West Wing, and proceeded to press him on national security concerns surrounding his unsanctioned military maneuvers in Iran.
It’s becoming clearer every day that the country is already moving past the Trump show. Beyond the broadcast networks, the wider media ecosystem is tuning him out. An analysis of nearly 70,000 hours of political podcasts conducted by The Wall Street Journal revealed that mentions of Trump’s name on conservative platforms have plummeted by nearly 70% from their 2024 pre-election peaks. His audience is exhausted.
None of this is merely embarrassing. It is also very possibly illegal — and not in some abstract, symbolic sense.
For 75 years Congress has barred federal agencies from spending appropriated money on publicity or propaganda that lawmakers haven’t explicitly authorized, a restriction currently codified as Section 718 of the Financial Services and General Government Appropriations Act. Any government resource used to produce partisan content that glorifies an official or an administration runs straight into that wall, and there is no minimum dollar threshold that makes a violation too small to count. Under the Antideficiency Act, federal employees who knowingly commit the government to spending beyond its appropriations for such content face fines up to $5,000, up to two years in prison or both, with a five-year statute of limitations that will still be running long after this administration leaves office. Slapping the Trump name on the Kennedy Center, hanging his portrait on federal buildings and, now, producing a taxpayer-funded YouTube channel that exists to replay his own speeches with no disclosed staff and no editorial standard — all of it likely clears that bar. Nobody expects this Justice Department, led by Trump’s former personal attorney Todd Blanche, to prosecute itself. But somebody is eventually going to have to answer for how the funds behind Trump TV were spent and justified.
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Become a member to support Salon’s progressive journalism. Join today!The legal fight over the press ban itself is proceeding on a parallel and even more consequential track. CNN, POLITICO and MS NOW sued the administration Monday, arguing that stripping their credentials without notice or a chance to respond violates due process and the First Amendment. Their case leans on Sherrill v. Knight, the 1977 D.C. Circuit ruling that grew out of a reporter’s fight over a revoked White House press pass and established that access, once granted to bona fide journalists, cannot be pulled arbitrarily or because officials dislike what someone writes. The judge assigned to the case is Timothy Kelly, a Trump appointee who, in an earlier chapter of this same fight, ordered the White House to restore then-CNN correspondent Jim Acosta’s credentials back in 2018, citing that very precedent.
In its response this week, the Justice Department didn’t just defend the specific ban. It asked the courts to overturn Sherrill entirely, arguing that access to the White House is a privilege rather than a right, and that the president should have the same discretion over the whole complex that he has over more sensitive spaces like the Oval Office. The filing is not a defense of one bad decision. It is a request for permission to make the president’s media ban permanent, to convert selective access into a standing tool for punishing unfriendly coverage every single day this administration remains in office, regardless of how this particular ban is ultimately resolved.
The cruelest, most effective thing the press could do right now is exactly what it is already doing: nothing. Keep the boycott going. Let the Trump TV feed play to a couch of true believers and stray insomniacs. Trump has spent his entire adult life treating attention as oxygen, and for the first time in a decade, the room has actually gone quiet around him.
