The White House launched Trump TV. Will it change how the president communicates?

0:00It's Consider This, where every day we go deep on one big news story. Today, a fight with the press is changing how President Trump is covered. For the past 10 years, there has rarely been a day when President Donald Trump has not been on our TV screens giving remarks or holding court with reporters. But due to Trump's battle with the press, some of his exchanges sound like this. So it's an honor to be here. I'm surprised that CNN is here covering me. The United Nations allowed us in, sir. You should not be here covering me. You said you weren't going to cover me. You shouldn't be covering me.

0:32That's President Trump interacting with CNN's Caitlin Collins on Tuesday at the United Nations, just days after he banned that outlet from the White House. Collins addressed the exchange later on air. Now, I should note, Kate, CNN, of course, never said we were not going to cover the president. It was actually the president who tried to stop us from being able to cover him. Major news outlets, including NPR, have suspended their pool coverage or are not broadcasting video or audio of Trump in solidarity with the networks that were banned from the White House. And that means most of Trump's events will not be fed to network TV through the press pool.

1:06In response, the White House has created Trump TV, a YouTube channel streaming President Trump's old speeches. Consider this. How will this standoff change how Trump communicates?

1:23From NPR, I'm Scott Detrow.

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2:24It's Consider This from NPR. The White House has launched an official YouTube channel streaming 24-7 content of, quote, the latest and greatest from the administration. It's called Trump TV and comes amid escalating tensions between President Trump and the media that covers him. To discuss, we have Mark McKinnon on the line. He worked as a political consultant for former President George W. Bush and Senator John McCain and is a TV producer himself. Welcome. Hi. Glad to be with you. Mark, you know TV. You know politics. I figured you're a good person to talk to about this. And let's start with this.

2:55Just politically speaking, in this moment of so many different amateur media outlets, how much does this standoff affect how Trump's message is getting out? Well, first of all, I think you saw from the coverage at the U.N. that people are going to find lots of different ways to cover him. But it's not going to be the coverage that he wants, and that's what he's trying to do. He's trying to control this. Back up just a little bit. I mean, all that Trump really cares about, people say he ran for the power, he ran for the money. No, no, no. At the end of the day, Donald Trump ran for president because that's the best way to get attention.

3:28He thrives on attention. That's the oxygen to his soul is just being the center of attention. And he knew running for president would be the hottest spotlight in the world. He didn't even think he was going to win. He thought he was going to run for a while and endorse Chris Christie. So now he's got the spotlight, but he doesn't like the nature of it at times, and he thinks that he can control it. So he started this thing called Trump TV, which is just a YouTube channel, which I think it's currently getting fewer views than the Muppets go to Disneyland. Let's not insult the Muppets here. Have you watched Trump TV at all?

3:59I mean, what do you make of this? Yeah, I just tuned in to check it out. I mean, all it is is, first of all, it's just a rebranding of what was already there. They've just been posting clips to the site. But the reality is that voters on either side of the aisle, they don't go to television or go to TV, any TV, to get propaganda. They want it filtered by somebody. They don't just want raw propaganda from anybody on either side of the aisle. So it's going to be a failed experiment. And I think that ultimately it's just going to drive Donald Trump crazy because you're going to have these situations where, like we saw yesterday, where there's going to be a situation that Trump wants out there and the audience is getting no audio and therefore they're not going to carry it.

4:42And that is death for Donald Trump. I'm thinking about a counterpoint here, though. Truth Social emerged after Trump is banned from Twitter and Facebook, a ban that was, of course, reversed when he won in 2024. But he creates this alternative landscape. A lot of people criticize it, say it looks junkie, say it looks amateurish. And here we are all checking truth social day and night for the latest news from the president of the United States. Hasn't he had success creating his own lanes in the past? Well, he has in the past. And again, I think that's because people had a fascination. But I think that fascination is worn out and they're looking for something new and different because what they were promised hasn't been delivered.

5:21So the last place they're going to go to find that is, I think, on Trump TV. I only give it a week or so before it runs out of oxygen. What do you think happens next, though, with this broader standoff between Trump and the outlets covering the White House? Well, I'm glad to see that the press is unified in their support for the outlets that have been barred from the White House. So the press is showing great solidarity. At the end of the day, I think that Trump needs the press more than the press needs him right now, or at least he thinks he does. So I think at the end of the day, he's going to pull it down and realize that he's not getting what he wants, which is ultimate wall-to-wall coverage from everybody worldwide.

6:04Do you think the balance of that relationship has changed in the past year in terms of who needs what more? Yeah, I do. I mean I think there's an exhaustion with Trump. I mean I think that's true with voters. I think it's true with the media. I mean that would go for anybody who's been a two-term president. I worked for one, and I saw it as his media guy. People just, you know, they get tired of you, and they want to change the channel. And then again, it's just an irony that the guy who understands TV most of all, that he would be now at a point where he's so upset with the coverage that he wants to turn it off, which is, again, he's like turning off his own respirator.

6:41That is longtime political consultant and TV producer Mark McKinnon. Mark, thanks so much for talking to us. Keep kicking it. Thanks. This episode was produced by Megan Lim and Kai McNamee with audio engineering by Ted Meebane. Our director is Jonas Adams. It was edited by Mallory Yu and Tidbeet Ermius. Our interim executive producer is Courtney Dorning.

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