The US President, Donald Trump, attacks American media not simply because he dislikes criticism, takes offense at journalists, or acts out of momentary irritation. Such an explanation is too simplistic, almost pedestrian. It is convenient for his opponents, as it allows them to frame the entire conflict as a psychological quirk of one individual. However, the reality is significantly more complex.
Trump’s war with the media is not an emotional outburst. It is a systematic political technology. It encompasses ideology, electoral calculation, business instinct, legal pressure, administrative resources, media management, the battle for audience share, and a profound understanding of the new attention economy.
Trump does not merely berate CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, or PBS. He is waging a war against them for the right to define what counts as a fact, what constitutes a scandal, what is considered a threat, what is deemed normal, and who possesses the moral authority to explain America to itself.
For an external, non-American observer, one thing is crucial: Trump’s conflict with the press cannot be reduced to the trite formula of "politician versus journalists." It is a clash between two centers of power. On one side is the old liberal media class, which has controlled the language of American public politics for decades. On the other is a populist leader who realized that in an era of social media, podcasts, influencers, and platform polarization, traditional newsrooms are no longer the sole gatekeepers to the mass consciousness.
Trump is not asking the media to be fair. He is attempting to strip them of their status as the supreme arbiter.
Fake News as a Political Weapon of Mass Destruction
When Trump says "fake news," he is not merely accusing a specific newsroom of a mistake. He is dismantling the very presumption of trust in the media institution. In the classical liberal model, the press is the "fourth estate," a mechanism of oversight over the government, an instrument of public scrutiny. In Trump’s logic, the mainstream press is not a watchdog of power but an independent political player embedded within the liberal establishment.
Hence his constant vocabulary: "corrupt media," "dishonest press," "enemy of the people," "fake news." These are not random insults; they are the branding of an enemy. He does not wish to prove to his audience every single time that a specific story by CNN or The New York Times contains an error. His task is broader: to convince his supporters that this entire media circuit is inherently hostile, politically charged, and morally compromised.
This is called audience immunization. If a voter is convinced in advance that major media outlets are lying, then a new publication against Trump is perceived not as an investigation, but as just another episode in the system’s war against the leader. Then, criticism itself ceases to function in its former mode. It does not weaken Trump within his base; it often strengthens him.
The logic is simple: if "they" are attacking him again, it means he must be doing something right again.
America No Longer Trusts Its Newspapers
Trump did not create the crisis of trust in American media. He mounted it.
According to Gallup data, by 2025, American trust in newspapers, television, and radio had fallen to a historic low - only 28 percent stated they trusted the media a "great deal" or a "fair amount." Roughly seven out of ten Americans said they trusted the media very little or not at all. For a country where freedom of the press has been touted for decades as one of the pillars of national identity, this is not merely sociology. It is an institutional collapse.
The partisan divide is particularly significant. Among Democrats, trust in major newsrooms remains significantly higher. Among Republicans, it has collapsed almost to the level of political contempt. Pew Research showed in 2025 that Democrats are far more likely to trust sources such as CNN, MSNBC, NPR, PBS, ABC, CBS, NBC, and The New York Times. Republicans, by contrast, rely more frequently on Fox News, The Joe Rogan Experience, Newsmax, The Daily Wire, Tucker Carlson Network, Breitbart, and other right-wing or anti-elite platforms.
This means that the United States no longer has a unified national media landscape. There are parallel informational republics. They have different heroes, different scandals, different sources of trust, different moral tribunals, and different versions of reality.
Trump operates precisely within this fractured environment. He tells his base: you are right not to trust these channels; you are right to feel looked down upon; you are right to see major newsrooms as part of a hostile class.
He does not impose distrust from above. He converts existing distrust into political energy.
Liberal Newsrooms as a New Political Class
Trump’s supporters see American media not as neutral journalistic organizations, but as the cultural vanguard of the liberal class. To them, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, The New York Times, and The Washington Post are not just newsrooms. They are part of the same social bloc as the Democratic Party, universities, Hollywood, human rights NGOs, large foundations, the Washington bureaucracy, and segments of the judicial and legal system.
This claim is not entirely invented. American journalism is indeed concentrated in major urban centers - New York, Washington, Los Angeles, Boston, San Francisco. That is where the language used to describe the entire country is formed. But that language is often foreign to voters in rural Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, Iowa, Texas, or Florida.
To a significant portion of conservative America, major media outlets do not speak to the people; they speak over the people. They moralize, lecture, apply labels, despise religious conservatism, ridicule patriotic pathos, look suspiciously upon gun culture, view tough immigration policy with skepticism, and often depict a Trump supporter as a morally inferior being: a racist, a provincial, a bigot, an ignoramus, a threat to democracy.
Trump understood before many other Republicans that an attack on the media could become not a side issue of a campaign, but the central nerve of a new right-wing politics. He is not just defending himself from the press. He is seeking revenge on behalf of those who felt humiliated by the press for years.
Scandal Management: Striking the Source, Not the Fact
One of the main functions of Trump’s anti-media strategy is the neutralization of scandals.
When a negative publication emerges, Trump rarely acts according to the old playbook: acknowledge the issue, provide a legal explanation, go on the defensive, wait for the noise to die down. He almost always attacks the source. Not "what is written?" but "who wrote it?" Not "is the accusation true?" but "why is this newsroom acting against me again?" Not "what happened?" but "who benefits from this leak?"
This is an effective tactic of agenda-setting diversion. The substance of the scandal recedes into the background, and the question of media legitimacy takes center stage. His supporters are no longer discussing the facts of the investigation, but the "deceitfulness" of the journalists, the double standards of the Democrats, the political agenda, the interests of media corporation owners, and the work of the "deep state."
As a result, a critical publication loses its destructive power within the Trumpist electoral core. It becomes not proof of guilt, but confirmation of a conspiracy.
This is communication immunization. The audience receives a vaccine of distrust in advance. After that, almost any negative material is perceived as being infected with a political virus.
Trump Understands Television Better Than the Television Executives
The paradox of Trump is that he simultaneously hates the mainstream media and makes excellent use of it.
He is a man of the television era. Before politics, he lived for decades within the logic of ratings, scandals, branding, hype, sharp phrases, confrontational frames, and commercial attention. He understands a simple thing: a calm explanation rarely becomes an event. Conflict almost always becomes an event.
A journalist asks a tough question. Trump answers even tougher. Television channels show the clip. Social media boosts the video. The liberal audience is outraged. The conservative audience applauds. Headlines multiply. Opponents talk about Trump again. Supporters see him as a fighter again.
For an ordinary politician, negative coverage is a problem. For Trump, the problem is a lack of coverage. Even hostile media, by criticizing him every day, keep him at the center of the American stage. They attempt to expose Trump, but simultaneously fuel his centrality.
He has turned the media into a machine for his own presence.
The Second Term: From Rhetoric to Administrative Pressure
The main difference in Trump’s second term is that the conflict with the media has ceased to be merely a war of words. It has become an administrative practice.
It is no longer just about social media posts, not just about rallies, not just about phrases against CNN or The New York Times. It is about courts, regulators, access to the White House, government funding, licenses, corporate deals, and the control of leaks.
In December 2024, ABC News agreed to pay 15 million dollars into the fund for Trump’s future presidential library and an additional 1 million dollars for legal fees to settle a defamation lawsuit following an inaccurate statement by George Stephanopoulos regarding the E. Jean Carroll case.
In July 2025, Paramount, the owner of CBS, agreed to settle a lawsuit from Trump regarding Kamala Harris’s interview on the program "60 Minutes" for 16 million dollars. The money was also earmarked not for Trump personally, but for his future presidential library and related expenses. Legally, it looked like a settlement. Politically, it was a demonstration that even large media corporations might choose to pay if the cost of conflict with the White House becomes too high.
Against this background, it is especially important that Paramount simultaneously had significant corporate interests, including media deals and regulatory issues. This created a situation in which editorial conflict, legal risk, and business interests were all in the same plane. For Trump, this is the ideal architecture of pressure: strike not only at the journalist, but at the owner, the shareholder, the license, the deal, the capitalization, and corporate tranquility.
The FCC, Licenses, and the Fear Within Media Conglomerates
American media consists not only of journalists, editors, and anchors. It is composed of corporations, holdings, cable networks, broadcast licenses, streaming platforms, advertising markets, shareholder value, mergers, and antitrust regulation.
Trump understands this infrastructure perfectly. Therefore, his pressure works not only through the public humiliation of journalists but through the systemic vulnerabilities of the media business.
The Reuters Institute noted in 2025 that under the Trump administration, the American broadcast regulator initiated complaints or investigations into CBS, NBC, ABC, PBS, and NPR - but not into the right-leaning Fox News. This is not a minor detail. It is a political signal to the entire market: an editorial line can have a regulatory cost.
For a corporation, it is not just a lost lawsuit that poses a danger. It is the audits, the delays in mergers, the risk to licenses, the rise in legal expenses, the reputational noise among investors, the pressure on management, and the politicization of antitrust procedures. It is precisely here that the conflict with the media shifts from the sphere of ideology into the sphere of political economy.
Trump strikes where modern journalism is most dependent: its corporate shell.
The AP and the War Over the Right to Call Things by Their Names
One of the most symbolic episodes was the story involving the Associated Press. After the Trump administration began promoting the name "Gulf of America" instead of "Gulf of Mexico," the AP maintained its own editorial standard: to use the traditional international name while acknowledging the American administration’s decision for domestic usage.
The White House’s response was harsh: it restricted the AP’s access to specific events featuring the president, including venues like the Oval Office and Air Force One. The AP filed a lawsuit, citing a violation of the First Amendment and an attempt by the government to punish the agency for its editorial choice.
This was a dispute not just over a geographical name. It was a dispute over who controls language. Can the government force an independent agency to use a politically approved term? Can the refusal to adopt presidential vocabulary become grounds for restricting access? Where is the boundary between an administration’s right to organize a press pool and the prohibition against punishing journalists for the content of their speech?
This episode became almost a textbook example of Trump’s second term: a symbolic question turns into an institutional conflict, language becomes a field of power, and access to the president becomes a tool for discipline.
NPR and PBS: A Blow to Public Broadcasting
Another front is public broadcasting. In May 2025, Trump signed an executive order ending federal subsidies for NPR and PBS, accusing these structures of bias. A broader budgetary blow followed: in 2025, through a package of cuts, billions of dollars in spending were canceled, including approximately 1.1 billion dollars for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds public radio and television.
For the administration, this was presented as a fight against funding "biased media" at the expense of taxpayers. For critics, it was seen as political punishment of public broadcasting for its editorial independence.
The economic side is important here. The national brands of NPR and PBS have various sources of income and do not disappear instantly. But local stations, especially in small towns, rural areas, and news deserts where less commercial advertising reaches, are much more dependent on federal support. Therefore, the strike against the CPB is not merely a blow to elite Washington newsrooms; it is a strike against the infrastructure of local information, educational programs, emergency alerts, and regional broadcasting.
Trump calls this a fight against bias. His opponents call it the dismantling of independent public media. In any case, this is no longer rhetoric. It is budget policy.
The White House as an Indicting Editorial Board
At the end of 2025, the White House launched a special section on its official website dedicated to "media bias," "media offenders," and a "hall of shame." There, the administration publicly collects examples of what it considers false, biased, or distorted coverage.
The very fact of such a resource appearing is significant. Previously, Trump could attack journalists from the podium of a rally or on social media. Now, the anti-media line is institutionalized at the level of state communications. The White House is becoming not only the source of an official position but a kind of indicting editorial board that marks journalists and media outlets as offenders.
This changes the character of the conflict. One politician can argue with the press. But when a state website starts systematically maintaining a list of "guilty" media, another question arises: where does political criticism end and administrative branding begin?
For Trump, this is a tool of transparency and counter-attack. For human rights organizations, it is an alarming symptom of pressure on the press. For his supporters, it is a long-awaited revenge against media outlets that, in their view, had been branding conservatives for decades.
NDAs for Federal Employees: The War Against Leaks
In May 2026, the Trump administration proposed new non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) for federal employees, explaining this as a fight against leaks to the press. This concerns the potential extension of NDAs to a vast array of government workers.
From a formal point of view, the government speaks of protecting confidential information, professional discipline, and national security. From a political point of view, critics see this as an attempt to cut off the oxygen to investigative journalism, restrict unofficial channels of information, and strengthen control over the bureaucratic apparatus.
In the American system, leaks play a specific role. They are often not only a violation of internal discipline but a mechanism of political balance. Through leaks, journalists learn about abuses, conflicts within the administration, controversial decisions, unready operations, classified intelligence assessments, and bureaucratic infighting.
Trump has always hated leaks. To him, they are not a part of democratic oversight, but a weapon of the "deep state." Therefore, the NDAs fit into his broader model: to limit independent channels of information, subordinate the apparatus to a vertical of loyalty, and deprive the media of the raw material for investigations.
Lawsuits as a Political Spectacle of Power
Trump’s legal war against the media has a dual function.
The first is strictly legal: to obtain compensation, retractions, apologies, or settlements.
The second is political: to show his supporters that he is punishing the media that, in his version, have been destroying his reputation with impunity for years.
Even when a lawsuit is weak or dismissed by a court, the political effect can remain. The supporter sees the main point: Trump is not defending himself, but attacking. He does not beg for mercy from the media class; he drags them into court. He uses the system’s own legal tools against it.
In April 2026, a federal judge dismissed Trump’s lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal regarding a piece related to Jeffrey Epstein. In May 2026, Trump filed an updated lawsuit for 10 billion dollars. From a legal point of view, he needs to overcome the high standard of "actual malice" - to prove that the newsroom knew about the falsity of the publication or acted with conscious disregard for the truth. This is a difficult barrier, especially when dealing with a public figure.
But for political theater, the very fact of the lawsuit is already important. It creates a picture: the president versus the media empire, the leader versus the slanderers, the people’s tribune versus the corporate press. The legal result may be delayed, but the political signal is sent immediately.
The New Media Reality: Podcasts, Influencers, and Bypassing Old Media
Trump can afford such toughness because legacy media are no longer the mandatory intermediaries between a politician and the audience.
The Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report 2025 documented the continued decline of traditional media and the rising significance of social networks, video, aggregators, podcasts, and influencers. In the U.S., following Trump’s return, there was no classic "Trump bump" for legacy newsrooms. Instead, the use of social platforms for news consumption has grown.
Pew Research showed that about one-fifth of American adults regularly receive news from social media influencers. Moreover, in the right-conservative environment, podcasts and author-led shows have become not a periphery, but central political infrastructure. Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Ben Shapiro, Candace Owens, and other figures have become more than mere commentators. They have become alternative centers of trust.
This fundamentally shifts the balance of power. Previously, a president, even while feuding with the press, was forced to account for the fact that major TV channels and newspapers filtered his image for the country. Trump lives in a different system. He possesses his own media circuit: Truth Social, Fox News, friendly podcasts, YouTube shows, X, conservative influencers, local radio hosts, Telegram channels, online platforms, and an army of digital supporters.
He does not attempt to please old media. He uses their hostility as fuel for his own ecosystem.
Why This Strategy Works
Trump’s toughness against the media works for several reasons.
First, it provides his supporters with emotional compensation. Many of them have believed for years that major newsrooms despise their values, religion, patriotism, attitude toward guns, police, borders, the military, family, and traditional lifestyle. Trump says to the media what they themselves would like to say.
Second, it transforms any attack on Trump into proof of his righteousness. The louder the opponents scream, the more his base is convinced that the system is afraid.
Third, it disciplines the Republican Party. A Republican politician who begins to defend CNN, MSNBC, or The New York Times from Trump risks appearing alien to their own base.
Fourth, it forces the media to constantly talk about Trump. Even when they condemn his attacks, they reinforce his central place in the political spectacle.
Fifth, it creates an effect of strength. Trump does not look like a man who makes excuses before journalists. He looks like a man who challenges journalists to a fight.
The Dangerous Line: Criticism of the Press or Pressure on Free Speech?
At the same time, one cannot pretend that this strategy lacks a dangerous side.
The American press has indeed committed serious errors. It has often been ideologically biased, moralizing, arrogant, and detached from the "heartland." It replaced analysis with moral preaching and occasionally confused journalism with political activism. It is necessary to criticize the media. Without criticism, the press itself turns into a closed caste.
However, it is one thing to criticize journalists, expose errors, demand standards, and litigate specific facts. It is quite another to use state resources, regulators, the budget, access, licenses, corporate fear, and the official White House website for systemic pressure on inconvenient newsrooms.
This is where the main boundary lies. If the government argues with the press, that is politics. If the government begins to punish the press for its editorial position, that is a question of free speech.
Trump simultaneously exposes the real sickness of American media and uses this sickness to strengthen his own power. This is precisely why the conflict cannot be described by a single formula. He is not simply right. And he is not simply authoritarian. He operates in a gray zone where fair criticism of the media class intertwines with the desire to make that class fearful.
The Main Battle: For Power Over Reality
Ultimately, Trump’s war with the media is not a dispute about journalism. It is a struggle for power over reality.
Who explains to Americans what is happening in the country? CNN? The New York Times? Fox News? The White House? Podcasters? Influencers? Algorithms? Trump himself?
Politics in the 21st century is not only about control over the military, the budget, borders, courts, and laws. It is control over interpretation. Whoever labels an event first has often already half-won. Whoever imposes the frame controls the emotion. Whoever defines the culprit directs the anger. Whoever designates the victim gains sympathy.
Media possessed this power for decades. Trump is attempting to take it away.
He wants his supporters to see not a president under the fire of investigations, but a leader being attacked by a corrupt system. Not a politician feuding with the press, but a man exposing a deceitful media empire. Not an object of journalistic oversight, but a judge over the journalists themselves.
This is why his war with the media is so ferocious. It is not a secondary conflict. It is one of the central fronts of Trumpism.
For Trump, American media are not just critics. They are the former owners of political reality. And he wants to become its editor-in-chief.