At around 2:45 p.m. ET Thursday, a short while after outlets President Donald Trump tried to ban from the White House regained access, his administration’s “Trump TV” stream had under 600 viewers.
Trump TV was launched by the administration launched this Monday following Trump’s decision to ban CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House last week. So far, the stream has included past footage of Trump, and its purpose is to provide a “livestream of the Administration’s greatest hits, unfiltered,” according to an X post from Deputy Assistant to the President Kaelen Dorr.
Trump’s move disrupted the white house press pool, a tradition going back to the tenure of President Franklin D. Roosevelt that includes TV, print, radio and phot journalists, CNN explained. CNN had been scheduled to act as the television pool during Trump’s trip to the annual United Nations General Assembly this week, but it was removed and no station was selected to replace it.
CNN, MS NOW and Politico filed a lawsuit over Trump’s decision to ban the outlets from the pool. Other TV networks suspended the TV portion of the pool until CNN was allowed to participate in the pool again, per The New York Times.
“The result, on Thursday, was a bizarre spectacle: a president hosting China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, for a pomp-filled summit at the White House, with Chinese state television on-hand but no American network airing any live footage,” the Times said.
Judge Timothy J. Kelly of the U.S. District Court in Washington had actually ordered the White House to “immediately return, reinstate, and restore” the press credentials held by journalists from CNN, MS NOW and Politico at around 1 a.m. ET Thursday. However, journalists from the outlets were still barred from entering the White House later that morning, the Times reported.
In response, lawyers for the outlets requested an immediate hearing and the judge ordered the Trump administration to respond by 12:30 p.m. By noon CNN correspondent Betsy Klein said she was allowed back into the White House after trying at least three times since that morning, the Times said.
“Lawyers for the Trump administration said in a filing with the federal judge that the White House operations team had been instructed to restore reporters’ access at 7:10 a.m. on Thursday, and that confiscated press passes were made available for reporters to pick up at 9:55 a.m.,” its report noted, adding that: “It was not clear why the reporters continued to have trouble passing through the security checkpoint after that.”
Trump isn’t the first president who has tried to bar outlets – CNN said that former President Barack Obama’s administration “briefly tried to exclude Fox News from a round of interviews with Kenneth Feinberg, then-administrator of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, that was offered to the other four
Regarding the Trump administration’s move, Kelly (a Trump appointee, as the president himself noted in a Monday Truth Social post) said the White House did not give reporters appropriate due process before revoking their access. He also said the move ran against previous court decisions.
As for Trump TV, Axios said Wednesday that the stream “resembles a round-the-clock presidential highlight reel more than a news network.”
“The initial programming included Trump’s July 3 Mount Rushmore speech before shifting into footage of his 2025 inauguration, per multiple reports,” Axios said. It added that “The Daily Beast reports 8,500 viewers were watching the stream during its first hour,” and that “around 1,200 people were watching Tuesday afternoon as the channel aired a Trump health care announcement from August.”
The White House did post some footage of Trump’s meeting with Xi. One video of Trump taking the Chinese president on a tour of Marine One showed the men talking but did not include audible sound.
