ABC News Hands Massive Gift to Trump Family

ABC pulled a critical story on Don Jr. without explanation. I think it’s clear why.

On Wednesday, ABC News published a report on the massive federal contracts worth more than $6 billion that have been awarded to companies backed by the Trump brothers. A day later, it was gone— no editor’s note, official retraction, or explanation. A highly unusual course of events for one of the major mainstream media outlets.

Not that we didn’t already have 16 million reasons to imagine they would do this.

It’s worth noting that one of the big companies featured in the report was a defense tech company called Anduril, in which Don Jr. took a major stake last summer through his venture capital firm. Since then, that company alone has picked up 135 federal contracts valued at about $1.8 billion. On Tuesday, the president announced another $6.6 billion deal with the company. A handful of other companies the Trump brothers have their hands in were also flagged in ABC’s report, which also secured contracts post-Trump investment.

So far, we have no official justification for why the article was pulled. Plenty of noise from Don Jr., though, who’s been going off on Twitter about it and how the story is “false!” (Sure thing.) In the absence of facts, we get to fill in the blanks ourselves.

This isn’t the first time a media company has capitulated to the infantile whims of the Trump White House. At this point, the track record is almost too long to rattle off. In fact, if you look at the archives of this Substack, I’ve documented extensively this exact phenomenon. Hell, this isn’t even the first time Disney has done it. Recall the $16 million settlement they paid to settle a nonsense lawsuit back in 2024.

For the umpeenth time: settling with Trump doesn’t buy you favor. All it does is prove that he owns you. It gives him carte blanche to walk all over you again, and if I had to guess, that’s exactly what happened here.

Media consolidation has handed most of the big networks to billionaires who are either Trump allies or have business before his administration, and usually both. Case in point of the week: the Paramount/Warner Brothers merger win for Trump-buddy David Ellison. But this ABC debacle proves that you don’t even need a friendly owner. You just need a company with business before the administration, broadcast licenses to hold onto, and regulators to please. That’s all it takes.

ABC pulling the story didn’t rewrite history. This information is public, and this story isn’t entirely new. The details of those contracts are very easily searchable at usaspending.gov, if you’d like to see it for yourself. And this story’s been done - by the Washington Post in July, with a tally of the government contracts won up until that point.

Ultimately, the move backfired on everyone. Pulling the story only made it a bigger story. Certainly not what Don Jr. or the White House were going for. And ABC doesn’t look great, either. All of which underscores the need for news that is neither owned nor leveraged by this White House— a commodity vanishingly rare in today’s media environment.