Donald Trump

Donald Trump is facing possible expulsion from SAG-AFTRA. The union’s national board of directors will meet Tuesday morning in a special session regarding disciplinary action against him, which could lead to his expulsion. The former star of The Apprentice — and soon-to-be former president — has been a member of the union and its forerunners, SAG and AFTRA, since 1989. Above, Macauley Culkin with Trump in 1992’s Home Alone 2: Lost in New York.

The country’s best female political reporters go on the record about what it was really like covering Trump’s America.

It’s time to stop fueling President Trump’s lie that the election was rigged, and broadcast needs to play an important role in doing so. The NAB must cut off support to the lie’s congressional enablers, talk radio must sever ties with hosts fueling the lie and TV stations need unequivocal language to characterize it for what it is.

“I do not celebrate or feel pride in our having to ban @realDonaldTrump from Twitter,“ Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey wrote. But he added: ”I believe this was the right decision for Twitter.” Dorsey acknowledged that shows of strength like the Trump ban could set dangerous precedents, even calling them a sign of “failure.” Although not in so many words, Dorsey suggested that Twitter needs to find ways to avoid having to make such decisions in the first place.

Margaret Sullivan: “What’s happened in the journalism sphere is complicated. Tragically, crucial sources of local news have withered, while the toxic media of the radical right thrives. The reality-based national press, though flawed and stuck for too long in outdated conventions, has managed to do its job — with dedication and with bravery, given the dangers created by Trump’s antipathy to what he calls ‘the enemy of the people.’ ”

In response to a question on his last press call, outgoing FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said he has some issues with the permanent bans on President Trump’s Twitter and Facebook accounts, adding that he recognized the country was going through difficult times “and these are difficult questions to confront.”

Snapchat has permanently banned President Trump’s account for his “attempts to spread misinformation, hate speech and incite violence,” a company spokesperson confirmed to TheWrap on Wednesday. “Last week we announced an indefinite suspension of President Trump’s Snapchat account, and have been assessing what long term action is in the best interest of our Snapchat community,” a Snapchat spokesperson said in a statement.

YouTube announced that it will temporarily suspend President Donald Trump’s official account for at least seven days. The video sharing platform now joins a number of internet apps, including Twitter and Snapchat, that have limited the president’s access following his involvement in last Wednesday’s violent attack on the U.S. Capitol, which left at least six people dead.

He may desperately need his own platform now that he’s been exiled from Twitter, but it’s going to cost him more than he’s got.

Though deprived of his big online megaphones, Trump does have alternative options of much smaller reach, led by the far right-friendly Parler — even if Google and Apple both removed it from their app stores.

Twitter on Friday permanently suspended President Donald Trump from the site, meting out its toughest punishment two days after a deadly riot at the U.S. Capitol “due to the risk of further incitement of violence.”

President Donald Trump has prepared a sweeping list of individuals he’s hoping to pardon in the final days of his administration that includes senior White House officials, family members, prominent rappers — and possibly himself, according to people familiar with the matter. Trump is hoping to announce the pardons on Jan. 19 — his final full day in office — and his ideas are currently being vetted by senior advisers and the White House counsel’s office, the people said.

Mark Zuckerberg announced Thursday that outgoing president Donald Trump is “indefinitely” banned from Facebook and Instagram. The indefinite banning comes one day after the Capitol came under siege by a group of the president’s supporters, sending lawmakers into a lockdown and leaving four people dead.

On Wednesday, in an unprecedented step, the two companies temporarily suspended Trump from posting to their platforms after a mob of his supporters stormed the house of Congress. It was the most aggressive action either company has yet taken against Trump, who more than a decade ago embraced the immediacy and scale of Twitter to rally loyalists, castigate enemies and spread false rumors.

Protesters loyal to President Trump stormed the Capitol on Wednesday, halting Congress’s counting of the electoral votes to confirm President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory as the police evacuated lawmakers from the building.

President Donald Trump slammed the news media once again as he rallied supporters at a demonstration outside the White House today, speaking just an hour before Congress is scheduled to begin a showdown over the certification of the 2020 presidential election. “The media is the biggest problem we have,” Trump said in the opening moments of his address to a crowd of tens of thousands in the National Mall at the “Save America” rally.

President Donald Trump has issued an executive order essentially banning a host of Chinese-connected software applications, including Alipay and Wechat, saying the ban targeted apps that “access and capture vast swaths of information from users, including sensitive personally identifiable information and private information,” by accessing smartphones, computers and tablets.

The massive bill includes $1.4 trillion to fund government agencies through September and contains other end-of-session priorities such as an increase in food stamp benefits.

The FCC has run low on time to adopt an order trimming a liability shield for social media companies, leaving the fate of a request from President Donald Trump in doubt. Republican FCC Chairman Ajit Pai let slip a Wednesday deadline for setting a vote on the proposal at the next monthly meeting of the agency, which is scheduled for Jan. 13 and is the last before he leaves the commission a week later.

Donald Trump followed through on a threat to veto a major $740 billion defense bill, in part because it does not repeal a key law that shields social media platforms from liability for the way that they moderate third-party content. Trump’s rejection of the law had been anticipated, as Congress is planning to return next week to take a possible vote to override the veto.

As he begins his final weeks in office, amid a winter surge in coronavirus deaths, President Donald Trump has mentioned to confidants that he’s thinking about resurrecting The Apprentice or The Celebrity Apprentice reality TV show, two people with direct knowledge of the situation, and another person close to the president, tell The Daily Beast.

Margaret Sullivan: The media should not allow Donald Trump “to become a self-styled president in exile, the golf-cart version of Napoleon on Elba. Do not set up a Mar-a-Lago bureau. Don’t have entire reporting beats dedicated to what he and his family members are up to. And for God’s sake, stop writing about his unhinged tweets.”

With his claims rejected by courts and dismissed by state officials, America’s most powerful cable news junkie has expanded his diet beyond Fox News, relying more on networks that are willing to parrot and feed his unfounded claims of an electoral conspiracy. His support, in person and via an increasing number of tweets, has bolstered these networks’ viewership and aided their upstart effort to compete with Fox News.

Margaret Sullivan: “Trump may or may not be sincere in his criticism of the network. You’d have to be in his head to know for sure, and, happily, that’s not in my tool kit. But what’s certain is that Fox helped Trump incalculably during the campaign — and that the network continues to do so now.”

President Trump has waged an aggressive, unending campaign against the mainstream media in his tenure, accelerating an erosion of trust and creating a fertile ground for conspiracy theories to flourish. Even after he leaves the White House next month, his influence on media likely won’t soon wane.

Even if there’s a MAGA exodus from Fox, the cable network’s profits are protected by lucrative cable contracts.

On Twitter Tuesday night, Trump took aim at Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which protects companies that can host trillions of messages from being sued into oblivion by anyone who feels wronged by something someone else has posted — whether their complaint is legitimate or not. He wrote: “If the very dangerous & unfair Section 230 is not completely terminated as part of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), I will be forced to unequivocally VETO the Bill.”

Jennifer Jacobs, a senior political reporter for Bloomberg News, has come to dominate this only-in-2020 beat.

Fox News, CNN and MSNBC saw record ratings under President Trump, who is not yet done reshaping the cable news landscape.

The disinformation system that Trump unleashed will outlast him. Here’s what reality-based journalists must do about it.

In the last few days, two defamation cases filed against media companies by the Trump campaign have been dismissed – one on the merits and one by agreement of the parties.  This includes the suit filed by the campaign against Northland Television, the licensee of a rural Wisconsin television station.  That station was perhaps the smallest TV station to air an ad by a non-candidate group, Priorities USA, that the Trump campaign alleged was misleadingly edited to assert that the President had labeled the coronavirus a “hoax.”

Newsmax CEO Christopher Ruddy on Tuesday sought to quell speculation that it would become a Trump-branded network after President Donald Trump leaves the White House. While telling CNBC he’s friends with Trump, Ruddy said, “I think they’re reading into it a little too much.”

The suit fails because Trump hasn’t shown actual malice on the part of an author who wrote that Trump’s campaign was soliciting Russia’s help in 2020.

President Trump has told friends he wants to start a digital media company to clobber Fox News and undermine the conservative-friendly network, sources tell Axios. “He plans to wreck Fox. No doubt about it,” said a source with detailed knowledge of Trump’s intentions. There’s been lots of speculation about Trump starting a cable channel. But getting carried on cable systems would be expensive and time-consuming. Instead, Trump is considering a digital media channel that would stream online, which would be cheaper and quicker to start. It would charge a monthly fee.

James Poniewozik: For years, we’ve been living inside a story defined by Donald Trump’s reality-TV worldview. America finally changed the channel.