The most frequently curated content on the White House Wire, the Trump administration’s attempt to aggregate pro-Trump “real news” from across the right-wing media, doesn’t come from Truth Social, Breitbart, or even Fox News. It comes from YouTube — notably, from the White House’s own channel.

The White House Wire was launched at the end of April on the official WH.gov page, around the time that the Trump comms team began ramping up its war on the mainstream journalists and outlets who covered them critically. At that time, they’d revoked the Associated Press’ credentials after the outlet refused to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America.” Two months after its launch, Jim Nielsen, a web developer and founding engineer at the data analytics company Quadratic, ran an analysis on the links that the Trump administration has been selecting to shape their narrative. (Or, as Nielsen put it, “what kind of links they’re considering as ‘real news’”.)

Surprisingly, YouTube was the top linkout, followed by Fox News, The Post Millennial, and Fox Business. Also on the list: social media sites such as X.com (in 6th place) and Trump’s own Truth Social (8th place), and one mainstream outlet (Reuters in 7th place.)

According to an Axios story written during the launch, the Wire was intended to emulate The Drudge Report, both in layout and in purpose: a regularly-updated page of links to a curated selection of media content, along with headlines that were edited in a way that shaped a pro-Trump narrative. “It’s a place for supporters of the president’s agenda to get the real news all in one place in a shareable and readable format,” a White House official told Axios at the time, calling it a “one-stop shop for news” and a potential hub for MAGA influencer content.

Notably, for all the talk about having influencers as major players on the platform, nearly all of the YouTube link outs on the site go directly to the White House’s content. Some of them are livestreams, some of them are taped official remarks, while others are short, slickly edited videos about whatever is on the President’s agenda — perhaps a sign that no matter what influencers might say to praise them, there’s no better message than the one that’s shaped directly by the White House itself.

And even the links that go outside the MAGA media ecosystem have some Trumpian editorializing in the headlines, too. For instance, a New York Post headline on Thursday characterized the passage of the Big Beautiful Bill Act as a “bruising struggle”, reflecting the intraparty revolts and GOP defections throughout the process. On the White House Wire, the link to the Post’s story glossed over it and declared in all caps: “THE ONE, BIG BEAUTIFUL BILL HEADS TO TRUMP’S DESK”. (The White House did not immediately return a request for comment.)

Ever since his 2021 removal from Twitter and Facebook, Trump and his political apparatus have invested heavily in building out their own media infrastructure – from the websites, to the code, to the servers themselves – in order to retain complete control over their messaging without the threat of deplatforming. Truth Social, for instance, is wholly owned by Trump, meaning no other investor or shareholder can remove him for posting controversial content – one of the reasons he declined to return to Twitter after Elon Musk bought the company and rebranded it as X.

Trumpworld has also tried to reduce their reliance on right-wing media outlets over the years, which have not been as reliably loyal as they’d prefer. Fox News, for instance, became the subject of Trump’s hatred after they were the first to declare that he’d lost Arizona in the 2020 presidential election; Breitbart nearly became blacklisted after it was revealed that its chairman Steve Bannon was leaking to reporters during his stint in the White House. Cribbing the Drudge Report’s format is simply part of their pattern: Matt Drudge, the site’s primary curator and a major power player in right-wing media, became a vehement anti-Trumper and frequently uses the Drudge Report to criticise the president.