First, Donald Trump launched a social media and news app modelled after the big tech companies that banned him. And now his namesake son is following in his father’s footsteps as he plans to launch a news aggregator site that, Axios reported, he hopes will upset the companies who have, in his opinion, been unkind to the family name.
"MxM News", as it will be called, is going to be run by former Trump staffers and the former president’s eldest son and intends to “disrupt” the mobile news space with the ultimate goal being to have an outsized impact over apps like Google and Apple News.
This space had previously been claimed by the Drudge Report, a conservative-leaning news aggregator that used to be one of the biggest news traffic distributors in the country but its influence has since waned with the number of unique visitors declining by 57 percent from 2018 to 2021, Axios reported. The site’s founder, Matt Drudge, made a name for himself by breaking news on former president Bill Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
MxM News, a shorthand for “Minute by Minute News”, is provided free to users and, as Donald Trump Jr explained, will act as a combatant against anti-conservative bias in the news aggregator world.
“As I travel around the country, the complaint I hear more than almost anything else is that people don’t know what media outlets, journalists or stories they can actually trust,” Mr Trump Jr said, according to Axios.
And while the tagline of the app currently reads, “mainstream news without mainstream bias”, founders Mr Trump and the former president’s spokesperson Taylor Budowich say that the app should offer broad enough appeal so as to compete with the Apple and Google news aggregators.
Still, the pair concede that initial subscribers to the app will likely have a political persuasion that falls “right of centre”.
Mr Trump’s announcement arrives after a turnstile of former Trump staffers, and the president himself, have decided to pursue alternative riches in the big tech sphere.
Truth Social, the former president’s social media app, had its soft launch last month. And in the last year, former staffers, Jason Miller and John McEntee, launched the social app Gettr and the conservative dating app The Right Stuff, respectively.
