Livestreams and video playbacks: Democrats go all in on an unfiltered Trump

There was a time when Democratic groups howled over Donald Trump getting too much airtime, with some even blaming the media for his 2016 victory.

Eight years later, with the White House hanging in the balance and Trump’s poll numbers holding strong, many Democrats have now done a full 180 and want more Trump in the media, not less.

Some are all for the former president’s return to posting all-caps rants on X. Others rapidly share clips of his speeches or interviews on social media. President Joe Biden’s campaign social media accounts have posted a series of reminders from Trump’s White House years.

And one group — American Bridge 21st Century, Democrats’ flagship opposition research super PAC — believes the best ammunition against Trump could be the candidate himself, raw and unfiltered. It’s encouraging all voters to tune in to livestreams of Trump’s rallies in their entirety.

“We want any and everybody to watch a Trump rally,” said Brandon Weathersby, a spokesperson for the group. “When you think about 2016, the conventional wisdom was, ‘Don’t give him airtime, don’t platform him, don’t give him breath.’ But this is 2024 and we want everyone to see the threat he poses.”

It is all a substantial shift from 2016, when Democrats and progressive influencers (and even some Republicans) frequently scolded news networks for the amount of airtime they gave Trump, in some cases to the point where networks aired video of empty lecterns with the chyron “awaiting Trump speech.”

After Trump left the White House and was banned from social media platforms around the time of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, the volume dropped.

Now, some Democrats miss the reality that hits home when Trump has a constant presence in the nation’s