Subscriber-in-Chief: Donald Trump's News Outlets He Pays For
Records show the campaign spent thousands for the 'NYT', 'WSJ', 'WaPo' and more — despite pummeling them as 'corrupt,' 'unhinged,' 'pathetic' and 'dying'
Dave Levinthal is an investigative journalist based in Washington, D.C. who previously led Raw Story's newsroom as editor-in-chief and served as deputy editor of Business Insider, overseeing political investigations and enterprise journalism. He also worked as an editor or reporter at the Center for Public Integrity, Politico and OpenSecrets.
When Donald Trump’s presidential campaign opened a field office June 23 in Columbia County, Georgia, the local Augusta Press assigned reporter Skyler Andrews to cover the occasion at the behest of local Republicans.
But after Andrews arrived, organizers promptly kicked him out — because of overriding orders from the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee, the Augusta Press said it later learned.
While MAGA brass may have banned journalists from the seemingly routine event, they were quietly interested in what the Augusta Press was writing about them.
Federal records indicate the Trump campaign plunked down $7.99 for an Augusta Press digital subscription on June 24, perhaps to read a scathing editorial in which the newspaper declared the Trump campaign’s actions “despicable” and anti-free press.
“We were pretty aggressive with them about the press being uninvited,” recalls Augusta Press editor-in-chief Debbie Redden van Tuyll, who wasn’t aware until I called that Trump’s campaign had subscribed to her newspaper. “In a sense, it doesn’t surprise me that they paid to read, given this interaction.”
The Augusta Press is hardly alone in counting Team Trump among its customers.
Trump’s surrogates purchased subscriptions to more than 65 news outlets during the 2024 election cycle through his presidential campaign and affiliated political committees — about twice as many as Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ affiliated committees purchased, my analysis for The Ankler of Federal Election Commission records indicates.
In all, Trump’s news spending cost his committees more than $31,000, according to FEC records through late 2024.
That’s not counting Trump committees’ paid subscriptions to several streaming and social media services that include news or news commentary programming. Among them: Hulu, Peacock, YouTube TV, Spotify, SiriusXM, Twitter, Disney (presumably for Disney+) and the Tucker Carlson Network.
Federal records also indicate the Republican National Committee spent $160,000 on a subscription to stock photo service Shutterstock and $14,400 on a subscription to TV Eyes, which provides television news clips and transcripts.
While news subscription expenditures represent a tiny fraction of Trump political committees’ Election 2024 spending, the outlay underscores the president-elect’s long-standing obsession with what journalists are writing about him — no matter how many times he dismisses them as “fake news” or derides them as an “enemy of the people.”
Or threatens to sue them, for that matter.
‘Corrupt,’ ‘Lame,’ ‘Radical’ News Sources — Sign Trump Up!
“You don’t know how to attack them if you don’t know what they’re saying,” says Rod Hicks, director of ethics and diversity for the Society of Professional Journalists. “Him paying for news helps prove why I don’t believe Donald Trump believes the news is fake.”
Trump’s press office and representatives for the Republican National Committee did not respond to requests for comment.
Trump committees unsurprisingly subscribed to several conservative media outlets, including the Washington Times, Newsmax, Daily Wire, Epoch Times, American Conservative, American Spectator, National Review and Townhall Media.
But conservative outlets weren’t Trump’s norm.
Instead, Trump committees most often bought subscriptions to mainstream national and regional newspapers and news wires, which he has collectively tarred in recent years as “corrupt,” “lame,” “radical,” “phony,” “crazy,” “deranged,” “unhinged,” “pathetic,” “false,” “sick,” “inaccurate,” “dangerous,” “dying” and “fiction writers,” per a running list maintained by the New York Times.
Of the New York Times, then-President Trump said in 2020 that he “barely” reads it and “we don’t even distribute it in the White House anymore, the same thing with The Washington Post.”
Nevertheless, Trump-connected committees spent more than $7,300 on New York Times subscriptions and about $1,200 on Washington Post subscriptions during the 2024 election cycle, FEC records show.
But there are many more legacy newspapers and magazines, and local news outlets, on the list. Among them:
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