I SPENT A DAY WATCHING TRUMP’S TRUTH TV – I’LL NEVER CRITICISE THE BBC AGAIN

Friday morning, USA. American Sunrise is on the Real America’s Voice network, and don’t you dare switch channels because there’s only one story in town today, and that’s the bitch fight between Donald Trump and Elon Musk. There’s no disguising whose side our hosts are on.

“Lots of people flew on Jeffrey Epstein’s jet, but that doesn’t mean they did anything wrong,” defends Steve Gruber, abjectly failing to interrogate whether the free flight says anything about the President’s judgement of character. Instead, he turns on Elon. “He’s got 15 children by seven different women and you’re going to take issue with what plane the President took?” asks an incredulous Gruber. “Nothing tawdry,” he concludes.

Having cleared that up, it’s time for Bible verse of the day. Today’s zinger is Romans 1:20. “Potent, for sure,” muses Dr Genna Loudon, who holds a PhD in Human and Organisational Systems from an online graduate school.

This is Truth+, a television streaming service launched by Donald Trump’s Truth Social media company in October last year, which is soon to be accompanied by a premium subscription service called the Patriot Package. American Sunrise is its morning offering. It is GMB in the Upside Down, where the spectral orange puppet master of Donald Trump looms ominously over everything.

“Legacy media is going extinct, and we want to speed up the process,” proclaims the PR blurb. Truth+ offers a refuge from “woke Hollywood entertainment and slanted news broadcasts”, providing “non-woke TV shows and movies” and “unbiased news channels that provide information, not propaganda”. Which, in depressingly obvious Orwellian double-speak, is exactly what it is. There is no balance, no fact-checking, just one-sided Trumpian hero worship. A personality cult full of strange sycophants playing at journalism while blowing smoke up the supreme leader’s flabby arse. Like a turbocharged GB News with the bigot spigot turned to full, it should be called Truth Minus.

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I’m watching this disorientating and unsettling window into the Maga psyche so you don’t have to.

No sooner has the graphic of Jesus faded from the screen than we cut to Brian Glenn, who’s got a sweaty face and is analysing Trump’s call with Xi Jinping. Cut to a clip of Trump: “It’s very complex stuff. It’s about rare Earth, magnets and some other things,” he fumbles.

Brian, what’s your insightful take on this?

“We are not getting any details on those negotiations,” he tells the viewer.

Just before Brian’s feed is cut, he interrupts to announce that he will be running for president of the White House Correspondents Association and that “on day one” he will fix the vending machines. Let’s hope he does better at achieving this target than Trump did with the Ukraine conflict.

Talking of Ukraine, later in the programme we learn that it is known for having very thick mud.

It’s also Puppy Friday. Dr Genna has brought her dog to work. It looks up at her, panting and confused. I know how it feels. Two hours in, I’m completely perplexed as to why any sane person would bother exposing their eyeballs to this rubbish.

All your favourites are here. Steve Bannon with his War Room, Charlie Kirk, the TikTok-famous mass debater, and a host of other Trumpian acolytes.

After American Sunrise I flick over to NewsMax2 for a documentary, The Persecution of Donald Trump. It lists all the perceived torments the President has suffered. We’ve heard it all before: The 2020 election was stolen. The legal cases were witch hunts.

Indeed, as you start to flick through the shows, all the greatest hits are there; the tropes, lies, conspiracies and Maga motifs. Evangelical Christianity, one-sided reporting of the Gaza conflict, fake news, liberal activists, George Soros, Bill Gates, globalists, vaccines. And when you get fed up with the “news” shows, you can catch up on the documentary Lizard People: Rulers of Space and Time, which includes “evidence” that lizard people came to Earth and are still among us today. I suspect Steve Gruber may be one of them.

Like Voldemort and Macbeth, Joe Biden is rarely mentioned by name, instead he is “The Autopen”.

Over in the War Room, Steve Bannon sits in front of a picture of Jesus and a sign that says: “There are no conspiracies, but there are no coincidences”. He’s offering rolling coverage of the funeral of Bernard Kerik, the former New York Police Commissioner who was in the post at the time of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and who pleaded guilty to charges of tax fraud in 2009 and served three years in prison, before he was pardoned by President Donald Trump in 2020.

Next, it’s The Charlie Kirk Show where, after five minutes of pro-Trump Fox TV news clips, the host admits: “It’s a slow news day. There’s not much to talk about.”

And this is a pattern that becomes more evident. These people – their mouths move but they say nothing. Often, it’s gobbledygook. They are not journalists, they do not have the professionalism, the contacts, the training or the resources to provide proper fact-based news. All you get is filler. Occasionally a guest pops up to parrot a line, but there’s no debate. The presenters are podcasters, sitting in their home studios, guffing out dog whistles to rousing patriot standards and stock footage.

David Hamish, The Pulse: “California is the state of confusion where the law protects illegals and men playing women’s sports.”

Real America with Dan Ball: “Commies in Cali want hard-working Americans to pay more at the pump.”

Donna Fiducia and Don Neuen, Cowboy Logic: “It’s another vaccine they’re trying to stick into cows to limit the methane produced.”

At one point in my viewing fug someone pops up on screen and starts to sell Cowboy Logic-branded drumsticks. Then a member of the Jackson family appears to talk about Michael for an hour, although by that point, I may have been hallucinating.

A discussion about Europe on a show called EuroNews makes me wince. There is a fixation on farming bureaucracy and farmer protests – and in a segment about the Ukraine war, Dan Ball accuses the EU of “pushing Ukraine to attack Russia”, while the US wants to “stop it, we want peace”.

The 13-hour viewing marathon finishes with the darkly portentous Patriot TV, hosted by Pastor Matt Shea, a constitutional attorney and retired decorated army officer and an elected Representative.

“War is imminent,” he proclaims with foreboding, before launching into a diatribe of conspiracy theory. At one point, he rails against media outlets “persecuting” Christians – giving the example of Cody Gakpo, the Liverpool player was censured for displaying an “I Belong To Jesus” T-shirt after scoring against Tottenham in April.

“If he laid out a Muslim prayer rug there probably wouldn’t have been such an objection,” laments Shea. “Why is it always the name of Jesus that sends the French and British into such apoplexy?”

And there we have it – how we get from a random report in a niche US website to Islamophobia and isolationism via the medium of football.

It’s not Jesus that annoys us, Matt. It’s batshit people like you.

This was the Maga echo chamber with the guardrails off, and as such, if nothing else, it provides a fascinating window into the psyche of the movement that has hijacked democracy in the US and is spreading to other democracies in the world like a cancer.

Thankfully the checks and balances we have on the media in the UK, such as Ofcom and IPSO (despite their faults), mean that this kind of bias and disinformation would struggle to make any inroads into the public consciousness here. whereas in Trump’s America, Maga supporters can mainline it straight into their veins, uncut with balance, and with the Commander in Chief playing the part of the pusher.

But let’s not be complacent because there are signs that this sort of society-wide brainwashing is starting to creep in here. It’s becoming a thing in the UK to knock the BBC, or the press – and yes, they have their faults – but be very careful what you wish for because this is the alternative. And frankly, it’s frightening.

I’ve worked in journalism for almost 30 years and, hand on heart, can say that apart from a tiny number of bad actors, the one value that unites all the trained professionals I’ve worked with is a respect for accuracy and the truth which borders on reverence. On Truth+ accuracy, objectivity and the inconvenient truth are not only treated with derision, they are the enemy.

2025-06-24T09:44:54Z