How Trump silenced himself

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0:41So maybe, Tim, this is one example of it backfiring just a little bit. Pick up on some of the things Michael was saying. This is what it sounds like when the media, as one, decide they will not cover Trump. That was on Newsmax, the most sympathetic channel there is to the president. And it's beginning to look like that Donald Trump's media ban is backfiring spectacularly. So what's he going to do? Surrender or be defeated in the courts? Welcome to the News Agents.

1:22The News Agents. It's John. It's Maitlis. It's Lewis. And this time yesterday we were wondering what would be the reaction of the US media to Donald Trump's ban on the three news organisations? And I think we all thought that, oh, well, you know, it's a dog eat dog world and there will be no solidarity and the media organisations will go their own way and life will continue without CNN or MSNOW or Politico in the White House press office press pool. And we were wrong. what has happened is that they have stood united stills photographers have stood united and so Donald Trump was off to New York to go and see Zoram Amdani ahead of the UN General Assembly and there weren't cameras there to film him departing there weren't cameras there to film him arriving there weren't the stills photos of made available to all the news organizations and suddenly Donald Trump, who loves nothing more in the whole wide world than a camera, didn't have one in front of him.

2:32I cannot tell you how unusual that is. I mean, unprecedented, because the reason there is always this central camera, pool camera, and it rotates between the different broadcasters, but the point of the pool camera is it is there to witness a moment of history at any single point in the US presidency. In other words, if there had been an assassination attempt, as we have seen in the past, if there had been a moment when something cataclysmic happened, you would have wanted it to be recorded, not just by some fellow on a smartphone, but by a registered media outlet. And that didn't happen. And so actually, the fact that we're talking about Trump and Mamdani, Trump was never meant to be at that press conference with Mamdani.

3:20He crashed a press conference, from what we understand. He turned up a Mamdani side. I mean, he called ahead, invited himself, all the rest of it. He called ahead to say, I will be with Mamdani, to find the press corps that he just rejected. I mean, I think this is... I think this is... In a long history of... A chequered history between Trump and the media, I do genuinely think that this is a moment. I mean, previously it had always been said, and of course there's truth to this, that Trump has enjoyed an abrasive but ultimately deeply symbiotic relationship with us, right? You know, we feed off him.

3:59Just us. Just us personally, in particular, John especially. But, you know, basically we feed off him and he feeds off us. And he, on some, there's actually a bit of a sort of dark arrangement in a sense, which is that people like us and people in journalism slightly rail against him, but actually that we sort of almost depend on him for our kind of news life support. I think this is genuinely a moment because Trump is going one step further from simply using us and using the media to further his own ends. Right. This is to me what's last 24 hours has been that this is not so much a media ban, but actually attempt to basically introduce a licensing system for journalism.

4:36I.e. you only get a license to report on me if if and only if I like what you do. Now, that is a continuation in development on things he's tried to do before, including in the Trump first term. But I think this is the first time in concerted time that you've seen different media organisations with very different ideological stripes actually responding in a way which is to say this is the line. So I think it is a real moment in the long history. We should point out that Fox, you know, like Newsmax, were part of that pulling away. Yeah, exactly. That's what I mean. Yeah. So there was absolute unity across the whole spectrum of opinion in US media that this was not acceptable, what Donald Trump has done.

5:15And he put up on Truth Social the most tortured and painful sort of message last night in the kind of small hours of the morning here about what was going on. He said, well, they've taken legal action against me and it's going to go before a judge who I appointed, but who isn't on my side on this. So it's probably going to have to go to appeal. And so even though Trump has taken out the ban, it's the case is going to be heard by a Trump appointed judge. But the judge in the first term was someone who said that the ban on CNN's Jim Acosta, another failed attempt by Donald Trump to control who has access to the White House, fell apart.

6:01And so he's saying, well, so we're going to lose that and we're going to have to go to appeal. And you think, my God, this is so tortured. But isn't that interesting that he already knows because of the First Amendment, because of the importance of it in the American Constitution, that he will lose and he will then appeal. Neil, I do think it's worth just going over some of the facts of the boycott, because it's really interesting what's going on here. Last night, we know it was meant to be the CNN pool that photographed him, filmed him going to New York. Because CNN was not permitted, four other major TV broadcasters then pulled out.

6:40And then other media outlets have started following suit in their own different way. So we now know that NPR, not a big surprise here, National Public Radio, who have been sort of defunded over and over again by the Trump administration, say they won't use audio. Photographers have been turning their photos into their news desks and the news desks are saying, actually, we're not going to print those. We're not going to publish those before midnight. In other words, everything is having a delay on it. So sort of midnight tonight of the day they were published. They're delayed. Trump meanwhile has started his own Trump TV White House TV channel on YouTube.

7:18But we've had a number of independent newsrooms saying we're not going to use the videos. We are PBS, public service broadcasting is saying we won't publish stills or videos from Trump TV. And so then you're in this very weird place where, you know, the propaganda arm of the White House is pushing this stuff out. but actually nobody is really looking at it on YouTube and none of the big broadcasters, which is where it gets amplified and aired, is agreeing to take it on. Well, and I think this is what I mean also about this big and interesting moment in that long relationship between Trump and the media because of course Trump's implicit critique of the media and also his sort of strength that he often states is that he can go around us.

8:00He can go around the media. Ultimately, that's the age that we're living in now. And in many ways, of course, that is true. and he certainly has been very successful and the MAGA movement has been very successful in creating and incubating like a whole ecosystem of alternative outlets, including Newsmax and so on. But it is interesting that they can't quite go that one step further, which is create the media themselves, i.e. that stream that you just mentioned, Emily, the Trump TV. White House promotes that feed online and the channel purports to show top past moments, announcements, and the latest and greatest from the administration all in one place.

8:38Well, the Daily Beast reporting that so far at 7pm it had 8 ,000 viewers. Not a big chunk of America. Not a big chunk of America. What, is it 350 million? Yeah, huge. By 9pm Eastern, the stream was attracting only 3 ,000 viewers. So actually people didn't even like what they were saying in particular when they found something else. So it's interesting that even there, when they believe that they are able to go direct to people rather than even through, frankly, some of their little propagandists on Newsmax, they don't quite have the success in the allele, which probably tells you something not just about the fact about the media's ongoing power, but it probably also tells you something about the fact of where Trump is himself in terms of the power of his own politics right now.

9:18He's now polling lower than Joe Biden at his absolute lowest. The month before the 2024 election. That is how unpopular Trump is. And although, of course, he's got his base, it's interesting. and this is you say Emily this is probably the thing that will hurt him most I think we're getting to the point now where so many people whether it's the media Americans even possibly some who have previously identified themselves with him they've just stopped listening yeah well this is why I said at the start that I think the only options ahead of Donald Trump now are surrender or wait to be defeated in the cause and again he did this kind of apparently CNN were reporting and they've got good contacts in the White House, that it was all Natalie Harp who had sort of shown him the way he'd been reported.

10:07Travels with Natalie Natalie. Yeah, travels with Natalie Natalie, had been reporting and how Politico had been beastly to him and how CNN, and so he just said, right, I'm doing it. Yeah, he showed, well, he showed, I think, I mean, we should explain, Natalie is sometimes called the human printer because Trump is very allergic to anything electronic except for his phone, and she prints out things like graphs and all the rest of it. And I think the graph she specifically showed him was about Politico's coverage of him. Politico is one of the banned outlets. And it was how she rated their negative coverage.

10:39So he looked at this graph and said, Politico hates me. Right. They're out. They're no longer allowed in the White House that does not belong to him, obviously. But, you know, the ratings of Trump, as you say, are absolutely rock bottom. And will anything hurt him more than ratings? No, nothing. Nothing hurts him more than ratings. But look at something else that's happening. You have got, at the moment, Trump going to see Zoram Mdani and saying, this guy's got great potential. He could be a great mayor. What is the Republican Party's message for the midterm elections, by which they think they're going to seize control, is don't let the socialists in.

11:19They're a danger. They're a menace to society. And later this week, Donald Trump is going to be laying out the red carpet for President Xi. And so, hang on, what's our messaging? That communists and socialists are so dangerous and you're breaking bread with them and being best mates with them? President Xi will probably admonish him for press freedom. We would never do that. No way. But I do think it's worth pausing on that extraordinary press conference that Trump sort of muscled in on with Mamdani. Mamdani is a very clever communicator, but also an incredibly lucky politician because this was kind of made for his audience.

11:57The first question he took and he explained it was the moment where he said, we don't, in New York, we don't ban people. I told the president we're going to have all members of the press here on the lawn and that's something I believe in. And then Trump is asked directly about his media ban. You can listen to the exchange here and his answer, but if you're watching this, the most perfect moment is just seeing Mamdani's face. where he tries to stare into the long distance without any seeming expression of what's actually going through his mind. Just imagine yourself in this world. It's interesting because they said they were going to boycott me, but they never boycott me.

12:39So I wasn't very worried about that. Look at all that press. But no, I'm not. I'm only doing it because I think the press also is an obligation. And, you know, I won in a landslide. I won the election in a landslide. I've done great things. I've done a lot of great things. I've settled eight wars. We have the best economic numbers for the country in the history of our country. We have$21 trillion pouring in. The biggest number ever, any country, was three. Nobody's ever done what we've done. I never get anything positive. It's always negative. Even having to do with the war, we've done so well.

13:13We have told, look, they're not going to have a nuclear weapon. Let me just put it that way. And they're not doing well. Zoramah Dhani, I reckon, has got written on his hand, no smirking. Just don't smirk. Don't smile too broadly. Donald Trump, as for saying, well, you all follow me, look at all the cameras there. Well, the cameras are there because you have gatecrashed Zoramah Dhani's news conference. And that is the only reason, the way you could get yourself in front of a camera. It is a bold communication strategy, isn't it? You ban the cameras, you ban the microphones, and then you complain that no one's covering your triumph.

13:45I mean, even for Trump, it's hard to see how you get from A to B to C on that one. I know. But this is what happened, you know, during Covid and lockdown in America, that suddenly there were no kind of people turning up at the Oval Office. He couldn't do any rallies. And that's when he, for the first time ever, he'd come to the briefing room in the White House and he started doing these rambling kind of, you know, where he would spend nearly three hours at the microphone because he just wanted a camera in front of him. Isn't that the point of Trump, though, that he's not content with being president?

14:17He has to also be his own communications director. And now he hasn't got a press secretary. He's decided to be his press secretary as well. I mean, if you go back to the first administration, his first time, do you remember that there was something very similar? And this is why we make the case that this has happened in various iterations time and time again. Sean Spicer, who was his then press secretary, actually also shut off the cameras. He also made a point of never calling on CNN. And I think it was Scaramucci that then came in and said, this is ridiculous. We're going to change all that.

14:53You've got to let the cameras in. Scaramucci obviously was at that job in 11 days time. But to the point about the Trump TV, which I think is really interesting. Again, this is something that he has learned from other authoritarian figures. If you go back to 2019, just before the Israeli elections, Netanyahu, Bibi launched, Bibi TV, Likud TV, four months before he went to the polls, he basically set up his own channel. Again, it was like a webcam. You know, these things are never that clever or that glossy. And he gets this guy in, an interviewer who is a friendly interviewer, to interview him.

15:33So it looks as if he's been put through the paces, fireside chat, let's say. And that is his way of trying to sort of push the propaganda without using any of the media that he thinks, you know, aren't telling the good story. It was also something that Chavez did in Venezuela, right? You start your own TV camera, you start your own sort of station or YouTube or whatever. It is exactly the political playbook of populists who are falling out of popularity. And I think that's really key because, as you said, Lewis, you actually have to set up something that feels like an opposition for anyone to take it seriously.

16:12If you call your channel a place to see the greatest hits, of course nobody's going to go. This is why I think that this, this, this is, that was Trump there in that clip, living in, as he always does, but an even more extreme version of his own fantasy land. this is a man who I think has not been weaker at any point in his political career that is literally true in the sense that he is polling at 32 % which is the lowest he's ever polled but comparing him to where he was this time last year I see this as all the point of embodying really his political weakness comparing him to where he was this time last year this time last year he felt unstoppable he was, the project not just him but also those around him seemed genuinely intense on reordering and remaking American society.

17:00I would say pretty much from the ICE protests onwards, from which he had to retreat, he has been on one slow and now I think increasingly rapid decline. You add Iran on to that as well, possibly the worst foreign policy disaster for the United States, certainly since Iraq. The mail-in ballots, which has now been overturned at the Supreme Court. And he has stopped making almost any political argument to the average American voter about anything, other than that he's brilliant and he spends all of his time. He has nothing to say to them about the cost of living. He has nothing to say to them about inflation.

17:33In fact, at one point, he basically said to the average voter, you should stop complaining about it because I'm so great and Iran is so great. And he spends most of his time now, according to the most detailed and exhaustive reporting, at least from The New York Times and others, basically going back to where he started, which is a real estate developer, remaking and reconfiguring, not American politics, but just building lurid, gaudy monuments to his own triumphs. And watching TV. Including the Ark to Trump. Exactly. And watching TV. But how long is that going to last when he's not on it? And this is what I mean about this being the embodiment of that.

18:10He has stopped talking in any way or even just stopped being interested in actually executing and doing politics in talking to any ordinary American. The only person he's now interested in speaking to is his closest acolytes, the sort of lurid fantasies of his own brain and the 7 ,000 saddos who are, at least for a brief period, tuned into Trump TV. It is absolutely kind of, it feels like Shakespearean that he's kind of reaching nemesis now, where it's just everything that he thought he could control, he can't. And you're seeing it in his poll ratings over the handling of the economy, over his handling of the Iran war.

18:46And the more he stands with Zoramandani and says that the American economy has never been greater. We've never been winning so much. It's just jarring. Donald Trump's secret sauce always used to be that visceral sense of where American public opinion was. He was way better than Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election. He got what blue collar America was thinking in a way that Hillary Clinton never got close to. Did in 2024 as well. And now we're in this situation where Donald Trump is saying things that just do not chime and going on about how he's going to build the ark to Trump. And it's going to have a special place for snipers on the roof.

19:25And in the columns, there's going to be storage for drones and ammunition. And you're just thinking, what the hell is this? What is this fantasy that he's living that seems so far removed from everything else? And the icing on the cake, of course, the Kennedy Center, which was, you know, named after John F. Kennedy, who was assassinated. And he's saying, I'm going to rip down the Kennedy Center unless I can have my name on it. Just to go back to this whole question of banning the media, I was quite surprised. I mean, I actually learned for the first time today that Obama had tried the same thing in 2009.

20:00He actually attempted to exclude Fox News just for a pool interview with a Treasury official. And actually, the media did act in exactly that way back then. And the other networks said they wouldn't participate unless Fox was reinstated. I think the difference, and we've said it a million times, is that Obama kind of hears what's going on. He's surrounded by people who aren't scared to presumably offer him, you know, a few candid advice when needs to be. And he relents and he goes back. what has happened with Trump and it really is the almost the bigger the more interesting story of the times you can have one madman in the centre we get that but it's the enablers that are the most extraordinary part of this whole period of our history and for somebody like J.D.

20:46Vance it's exquisite to hear somebody you know a Yale educated lawyer trying to explain what president has done is absolutely fine Just listen to that clip. The problem is they are effectively propaganda arms of the left. If you look at just the independent analysis, Harvard analysis of the reporting of CNN or Politico, it's somewhere between 92 and 98 percent of their stories about Donald Trump are negative. That's not honest and fair reporting. That is propaganda. And when you're engaged in that kind of propaganda, you should not expect to get special access to the People's White House. I've heard a lot of people say that we've banned Politico.

21:30Politico will still write their crazy articles. They will still misrepresent what we say and do. What's different is that they don't have an office in the White House anymore. But if you're going to have that White House office, I think it's reasonable for us to expect that you're at least going to try to be fair. And if you're going to be a propaganda arm of the left, why would Donald Trump give you special access to his White House? Let's just explain what's wrong with that. The White House is not Trump Tower. It's not Trump's personal home. He is the president, which is an office of state. The White House does not belong to him.

22:03It belongs to the American people. And fundamentally, journalists can report as they see fit. they will report according to what they are told, according to what they see, what they hear, and they will deliver news even if it is uncomfortable because, frankly, that is the job. And banning people from the White House, as he said, doesn't actually stop journalists doing their job. It just stops the public from understanding what was going on in that room at the time, which is a disservice to the American people, not the networks involved. And just when J.D. Vance there says they have a duty of fairness.

22:44No, it was a Republican president who got rid of the whole idea of the fairness principle in American broadcasting. thing that was ronald reagan who wanted to pave the way for fox news to be able to start rupert murdoch was granted citizenship so that he could own a us tv network and it was all done so that you could have right-wing propagandist uh news outlets who were there to give a different one from the liberal viewpoint so when straight from bush one so when jd vance says that these people have a responsibility to be fair no it was your party that got rid of that and allowed it it's not the british ecosystem of ofcom and to impartiality you are in a situation where tv networks can go whichever direction they choose and you enabled that well i i thought the most revealing bit at the end is where he talks about um he's entitled to remove them from his house and as emily said it's not it's not his it's not actually his house this is the problem like trump Trump is confusing, I think, increasingly the White House with with and press access to to the White House with like Mar-a-Lago membership.

23:55Like it's kind of loyalty is expected. Criticism is discouraged. And there's always someone being escorted out of the building. Right. So like it's not quite like that. And my prediction is this not only when they see that Trump stream TV or whatever it's called completely fails, he is going to be, if anything, Trump is going to be even needier for press attention after November in the next two years. Why? Because as soon as the midterms are over, the bandwagon already really starts to move on for the 2028 presidential campaign. And whatever lurid fantasies are in Steve Bannon's mind, there ain't no way that Trump is running in that election.

24:27And there ain't no way that he's going to be president after 2028. So the bandwagon will move on and he will be desperate to try and stay relevant and for the limelight to remain on him. I would say the one silver lining is possibly for Republican hopefuls in the midterms who are already trying to distance themselves from Trump. maybe the less he's seen on TV the easier it becomes for them. Lewis what you just said I think is right but I think is even scarier. I think that if Donald Trump is that desperate for attention what will he do? What will he say? What kind of wars will be unleashed? He's just put out a post on Truth Social about we're not short of munitions.

25:03We've never had so many munitions. You know and you think oh my god he could start a war somewhere else because you know he wants to deflect attention away from Epstein or whatever it happens to be at any given moment that is giving him grief. And that, I think, is even scarier still, frankly. Dictators of Latin America not sleeping easily in their beds after November. We'll be back in just a moment.

25:39we're taking you into the streets of london now with andy hughes um who is the crime agents podcast and has been given exclusive access to Operation Gallium. Now we should explain, Andy, that this is the Met Police's largest crackdown on gang violence. And the stuff you've discovered is really extraordinary. It's about the kind of, what would you call it, the video gamization of violence now, right? Yeah, that's right. So the context to this is that right now in South London there is a devastating gang war going on. Already this year just in a small pocket of South London there's been 11 murders in eight months so there's been several casualties.

26:25I got exclusive access to the Met's Operation Gallium and their undercover officers whose job it is to target the most serious gangs in London and one of the officers made an astonishing revelation when I I asked him about what is fuelling this violence. And he told me about basically an online game. It's a gang scoreboard whereby gang members are awarded points for violence, for stabbings, for shootings and for murders. And the more serious the crime, the more points you get. Have a little listen to what one undercover officer told me. They call it a scoreboard. So in a lot of rap videos or drill videos and on social media, you'll hear about people scoring or getting on the board or something like that and that's usually in reference to this not always but most of the time it is essentially it is a method of keeping track of how active somebody is on the the gang scene so being active is seen as a good thing and it increases street credibility when you're active it means that you'll be out there I don't know looking to start fights, stab people.