Donald Trump

Former President Trump is set to join Sean Hannity for a town hall event on Fox News next month, the network announced on Thursday. The event is set to be taped in Iowa on June 1 and air at 9 p.m. ET the same day, according to a release. Hannity will reportedly take questions from the audience.

President Trump got more aggressive — and more dismissive of moderator Kaitlan Collins — as last week’s CNN town hall continued. Now we know one reason why: Backstage during the first commercial break, Trump adviser Jason Miller — as if psyching up a boxer in his corner or egging on a bully — showed Trump moments-old tweets from Democrats blasting CNN and saying Trump was winning. Trump, who had been getting miffed at Collins’ persistent questioning, went out all pumped up for the second block.

Trump, returning to the network after years of acrimony, also refused to say whether he wants Ukraine to win the war against Russian aggression and said the U.S. “might as well” default on its debt obligation, despite the potentially devastating economic consequences. The live, televised event — held in early-voting New Hampshire — underscored the challenges of fact-checking Trump in real time. The former president was cheered on and applauded by an audience of Republican and unaffiliated voters who plan to vote in the GOP primary, as moderator Kaitlan Collins sometimes struggled to correct the record as Trump steamrolled with untrue statements. “You are a nasty person,” he snapped at one point.

Wednesday’s town hall has already proved divisive — and it could be an unsettling preview for the TV news industry as it prepares to cover a presidential contest that is likely to feature Mr. Trump.

Both sides of the political divide expressed suspicion when the CNN forum at New Hampshire’s St. Anselm College was announced last week. Some Democrats question whether the former president should be given the airtime, while Republicans wonder if a network Trump has long disparaged can be fair. Once it begins, moderator Kaitlan Collins of CNN must give audience members the chance to ask questions while determining when to step in with her own. She’ll weigh how to correct misinformation in a potentially hostile environment: Invited town hall participants are those who expect to vote in a Republican primary.

A New York judge on Wednesday dismissed former President Trump’s lawsuit against The New York Times and several of its reporters over a 2018 article on the former president’s “dubious tax schemes.” Justice Robert Reed dismissed the claims against the Times and its reporters Susanne Craig, David Barstow and Russ Buettner and ordered Trump to pay all attorneys’ fees and other costs associated with the lawsuit.

When former President Trump attends a CNN town hall event in New Hampshire next week, it will be his first time sitting down with a major network other than Fox News since he dramatically stormed off the set of a 60 Minutes interview in late October 2020. Trump’s first CNN appearance in years comes as the former president and his team are hoping to rebuild his relationships with mainstream outlets after demonizing them for years. While Trump still has a complicated relationship with Fox News, one of the biggest brands in television, the agreement to do a town hall event with CNN is a significant moment that offers potential rewards to both parties.

The network announced that Trump would take questions from Republicans and undeclared voters at the May 10 event, with CNN This Morning anchor Kaitlan Collins moderating. It will take place at St. Anselm College.

In the lawsuit, filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Washington, the media companies demanded that the Justice Department’s Office for U.S. Attorneys and the FBI “promptly” provide copies of the footage from Jan. 6, which they characterized as “the most significant assault on the Capitol since the War of 1812.”

The former anchor of CNN’s “Reliable Sources” is gearing up for “Network of Lies: The Epic Saga of Fox News, Donald Trump, and the Battle for American Democracy,” a look at the Fox Corp. cable outlet’s trajectory following the 2020 election and through the much-scrutinized defamation trial brought against it by Dominion Voting Systems. That court proceeding is slated to open Monday.

For once, Donald Trump doesn’t want cameras in the room. And less than 24 hours before the former president is set to be arraigned on criminal charges, a Manhattan judge mostly agreed.
New York Supreme Court Judge Juan Merchan issued ruling late Monday denying media requests for TV cameras in his courtroom Tuesday afternoon. However, he will allow five pool photographers “to take still photos for several minutes” before the proceedings officially begin.

Despite recent criticism, the network’s star personalities joined other leading conservatives in denouncing the indictment as politically motivated and a possible cause for unrest.

The network used to be a safe space for the former president. But Brian Kilmeade, Jason Chaffetz and others had tough words for his appearance on Hannity, his first Fox interview in months.

The longtime magazine columnist who accused former President Donald Trump of raping her in the 1990s can use the Access Hollywood tape as evidence at trial in her defamation case, a federal judge ruled Friday. The Manhattan judge also rejected Trump’s effort to block the columnist, E. Jean Carroll, from using the testimony of two other women who previously accused him of sexual assault.

The former president has not made a weekday showing on the channel since appearing on Sean Hannity’s show in September.

Ruling keeps secret Trump’s efforts to prevent testimony by top aides and law defining the scope of confidentiality of Oval Office communications.

Former President Donald Trump’s campaign has split with its longtime TV ad maker, Jamestown Associates. One of the firm’s partners has decided to work with a Trump rival in 2024: Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and ambassador to the United Nations who launched her presidential bid on Wednesday. The former president’s campaign, in turn, has decided that it would not renew its relationship with Jamestown, which crafted commercials for Trump during the 2016 and 2020 elections. Trump’s team also used the firm after he left the White House.

Former President Trump is suing journalist Bob Woodward over interview recordings that Trump alleges he didn’t agree could be included in an audiobook. Trump concedes that he consented to Woodward recording their conversations for the purpose of a book, and gave 19 interviews to the veteran journalist in 2019 and 2020, which Woodward included in his 2020 book Rage. But the former president is arguing the agreement doesn’t cover the inclusion of those audio files in The Trump Tapes, an audiobook collection of the recordings published by Simon & Schuster last year.

The company said in a blog post Wednesday it is adding “new guardrails” to ensure there are no “repeat offenders” who violate its rules, even if they are political candidates or world leaders. “The public should be able to hear what their politicians are saying — the good, the bad and the ugly — so that they can make informed choices at the ballot box,” wrote Nick Clegg, Facebook parent Meta’s vice president of global affairs.

Former President Donald Trump, who recently announced plans to run again in 2024, reportedly is urging Meta Platforms to restore his account. “We believe that the ban on President Trump’s account on Facebook has dramatically distorted and inhibited the public discourse,” a representative for Trump said in a letter to Meta, according to NBC News, which first reported on Trump’s request for his account to be reinstated.

An increasingly sour relationship between former President Trump, Fox News and the rest of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire that has been building for months has come to a head in the weeks following the midterm elections. It is a rift that is being watched closely in political and media circles given the power of Fox News and other media entities owned by Murdoch in potentially shaping the race for the GOP presidential nomination in 2024.

Elon Musk reinstated former President Donald Trump’s account on Twitter Saturday, reversing a ban that had kept Trump off the social media site for more than 22 months — since a pro-Trump mob attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, as Congress was poised to certify President Biden’s election victory. Musk made the announcement after holding a poll that asked Twitter users to click “yes” or “no” on whether Trump’s account should be reinstated. The “yes” vote won, with 51.8%.

For a second consecutive day, the recriminations about Republicans’ unexpectedly weak Election Day performance played a prominent role on the pages and over the airwaves of Rupert Murdoch’s media properties.

The right-wing social network faces two federal investigations and an uncertain financial future. But it has still managed to outpace its rivals. Truth Social had 1.7 million unique visitors in September, according to Similar Web, which monitors web traffic.

Former President Donald Trump threatened journalists with prison rape Saturday, suggesting the federal government use violence as a way to combat leaks to the media from journalists.

“You take the writer and/or the publisher of the paper … and you say ‘Who is the leaker? National security,’” Trump explained to audiences during a rally in Robstown, Texas. “And they say ‘We’re not gonna tell you.’ They say ‘That’s OK, you’re going to jail.’ And when this person realizes he’s going to be the bride of another prisoner very shortly, he will say ‘I’d very much like to tell you exactly who that leaker is!’”

Will Wilkerson, one of Trump Media & Technology Group’s first employees, alleges the company violated securities laws and that Trump pressured executives to hand over their shares to his wife. He shared a cache of internal documents with the Washington Post and federal investigators that he says support his claims.

Donald Trump says he plans to file lawsuits against “a large number” of news outlets, just as he has against CNN. In an email to supporters, the former president said those other news outlets — he did not identify them — were guilty of “lies, defamation, and wrongdoing,” including as it pertains to “The Big Lie.”

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., focuses primarily on the term “The Big Lie” about Trump’s false claims of widespread fraud that he says cost him the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden.

For most of his life, Donald Trump has wielded an immense superpower: the ability to bend and twist reality to meet his needs of the moment. But now it seems he’s losing that magic touch, especially with a group of allies that has been with him since the very beginning — the media.

The twice-impeached former president Donald Trump may be banned from using most mainstream social media, but some kindred spirits have found a home on his own “Truth Social” platform: QAnon conspiracy promoters who have also been banned by mainstream social media.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart said that under the law, it is the government’s burden to show why a redacted version should not be released and prosecutors’ arguments Thursday failed to persuade him. He gave them a week to submit a copy of the affidavit proposing the information it wants to keep secret after the FBI seized classified and top secret information during a search at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate last week.

Even if the former president declares he’s a candidate again, the platform says it won’t speed up a decision on whether to reinstate his account.

Trump’s 2020 ‘town hall’ was held inside the memorial, an area where events have long been barred by federal regulations.

Reporters who cover sensitive beats sometimes have a sense when big news is about to break. But not this time. The FBI’s Monday morning search of Mar-a-Lago — a thunderclap in American political history — happened so quietly, so secretly, that it wasn’t caught on camera at all. For the most part reporters didn’t catch wind of the FBI action until after it was over.