Trump’s Media Company Wants To Build A MAGA Alternative To Netflix

The Twitter alternative launched in February by President Trump’s media company hasn’t exactly set the social media world on fire yet, with the former president not using his upstart Truth Social service much at all so far. Nevertheless, Trump Media and Technology Group already has its sights set on another business target: Original streaming video content, along the lines of Netflix
NFLX
and Disney+.

Trump’s media conglomerate has posted job openings in search of two professionals to help get such an effort off the ground. The roles are for a “content development manager” and “content acquisition professional” for TMTG+, a new streaming service the company is launching.

Job duties for the former include developing “internal concepts for original unscripted content, short form series, episodes and specials” as well as managing “a rotating slate of development projects, including paper development, casting and pilots.” As for the second role, listed responsibilities there include content licensing and acquisition.

That professional will also “negotiate distribution rights” and “participate in all aspects of new business development (deal sourcing, financial analysis and forecasting, term sheet drafting, long-form drafting, contract negotiation, closing, on-going relationship management, etc.)”

Continues the TMTG job ad: “This is an exciting opportunity for someone to put their stamp on a new and exciting SVOD platform.”

It should go without saying that building a media content business from scratch will prove to be an order of magnitude more complex than setting up a property like a social network, or its equivalent. It’s difficult, that is, but not impossible. In fact, there’s already a model of this kind of effort working — at least, working quite well in conservative media right now. It’s just an open question of whether TMTG has what it will take to pull this off.

For an existing example of this model working, though, one can look to The Daily Wire, which has expanded beyond being a largely news- and commentary-focused web property, with a huge social media presence, to now also encompassing books (the site recently launched a book publishing imprint), plus direct-to-consumer products like Jeremy’s Razors, and original, subscriber-exclusive programming.

I caught up with Daily Wire co-CEO Jeremy Boreing a few weeks ago, and he shared with me that the site had, at the time, close to 600,000 subscribers paying for one of three membership tiers. As for SVOD content — which Trump’s media company likewise wants to try its hand at — The Daily Wire’s movies include its first feature-length title Run Hide Fight, described as “slick and compulsively watchable” by The Hollywood Reporter.

A Gina Carano-led western from The Daily Wire, Terror on the Prairie, is coming this summer. And the company released a new trailer for it at an MMA event just a few days ago.

The path his company chose, Boreing told me, is to avoid making polemical films. These aren’t meant to be “message” movies, but rather entertainment for entertainment’s sake, of a sort that could just as easily have ended up at your local multiplex instead of inside The Daily Wire’s walled garden.

What will make such an already-capital intensive and creatively demanding effort on the part of TMTG all the more challenging are the implications of what that first T in the acronym stands for. According to some sources, Trump has veered from not posting much publicly on Truth Social at all to badgering people about “what the (expletive) is going on” with TMTG, the company he’s ostensibly in charge of — and, to the point about its streaming ambitions, he’s also reportedly groused in private about wanting to be more of a force in the streaming world along the lines of the Obamas with their Netflix pact.

At any rate, Trump’s company has filed documentation with the Securities and Exchange Commission (tied to the company’s going public back in the fall) that hinted at its “non-woke” streaming ambitions vis a vis TMTG+. Among other things, that documentation identifies Scott St. John, a former NBC producer whose credits include the Deal or No Deal game show, as a key TMTG+ programming executive.