Op-ed by Summer Lane | Photo: Alamy
President Donald Trump talked with RSBN this week about battling with the mainstream media as he heads into a 2024 presidential campaign, addressing the differences between his 2016 run, his 2020 bid, and his current race to recapture the White House.
“The media is fake. It’s corrupt. It’s bad – not all of it, but a lot of it; most of it,” he told RSBN’s Brian Glenn during a special interview at Mar-a-Lago. “It’s very bad and very dangerous. And it’s hard to believe when you think: They don’t want to have borders, they don’t want to have good education, they don’t want to have tax cuts. I gave them the largest tax cuts in history, I gave the largest regulation cuts in history. They don’t want that.”
He pointed out that the media has been selective in their coverage of things “like the disaster of Afghanistan, that horrible, horrible period of time, which is the most embarrassing time ever” for the United States.
He touched on the media’s obsessive coverage of his 2016 campaign for president, noting that “we sort of snuck up on them” and that the press vowed that they would “never let that happen again.”
“And then, for 2020, they were nasty no matter what you did,” he added. “…And that continues to this day. They won’t cover positive things. And if something’s negative, they make it extremely negative. They lie and they put it out.”
Trump emphasized the power of his social media platform, Truth Social, in his new battle against the American press. “Truth Social’s been amazing,” he said. “…Truth Social’s been real media, it’s been real. And I get my word out very well through Truth.”
His success with Truth Social has come amid the reinstatements of his previously-suspended accounts on the Big Tech platforms of Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
His account on Twitter was restored in November 2022, and Meta president Nick Clegg recently announced that Trump’s accounts would be reactivated on their platforms in the coming weeks.
Trump noted that Big Tech wanted him to return to their platforms, “but you know, it’s not exciting like it used to be because there’s no dialogue, there’s no people fighting a little bit – mentally fighting.”
He decried how he used to make statements on Facebook or Twitter, “and all of the sudden it’s red-flagged.”
In 2016, the president used the mainstream media, or the “Fake News,” as Trump has often called them, to garner massive publicity and free press. In 2020, the media turned their full might against Trump. From stirring up false and now-debunked narratives of Russian collusion to suppressing sensitive and politically important stories like the shocking contents of the Hunter Biden laptop, the media has been unrepentantly hostile toward Trump for years.
Thankfully, there has been triumphant vindication for the president in recent days. Columbia Journalism Review’s Jeff Gerth recently published the results of an 18-month investigation into the false narratives that the media spun around the “Russia Hoax.” In his report, Gerth noted, “Today, the US media has the lowest credibility—26 percent—among forty-six nations, according to a 2022 study by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.”
SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has heralded the reinstatement of countless conservative accounts along with President Trump’s. A riveting, multi-drop release of shocking “Twitter Files” at the behest of Musk has also revealed the stinking corruption hiding beneath the surface of Big Tech.
The Twitter Files unveiled evidence of dirty collusion between federal agencies at the Big Tech giant, revealing yet another method in which information was manipulated to control a weaponized narrative against President Donald Trump.
In fact, in a recent policy pitch in January, Trump laid out a multi-pronged plan for combatting Big Tech giants who get caught censoring content. He proposed a seven-year “cooling offer period” for employees caught engaging in censorship schemes or information surveillance, as reported by RSBN.
A 2024 presidential bid promises to look a little different now that Trump has the capacity to utilize the free speech reach of his own platform. “I think Truth has been, really, a very big development,” he said. “It’s doing tremendously well. Millions of people, and you’re not going to be red-flagged.”
