John Solomon on CBS News
Trump’s manic social media posting provides a window into his information diet. The president regularly responds in real time to Fox News segments that strike his interest, a phenomenon I’ve described as the Fox-Trump feedback loop. His zealous White House aide Natalie Harp, nicknamed “the human printer” because her role includes providing the president with printouts of articles, also helps him generate posts promoting MAGA online content.
Using a machine-learning model, Media Matters designed a script that researchers deployed to search an archive of Trump’s Truth Social feed since January 20, 2025, and found that the president produced more posts and reposts with links to Solomon’s website than any other single news outlet, totaling at least 367 instances. Fox News accounted for the second-most linked outlet in these posts and reposts, with 257.
Such posts became more frequent in the leadup to and since June, when Solomon announced he was joining the Trump administration as a special government employee.
Trump often simply shares the headline and link to a articles in his posts. But the president has also, in response to that reporting, accused Democrats of “TREASON!!!” over his 2019 impeachment; said that the “thugs” involved in the Justice Department’s investigation of the Trumpian election subversion plot which culminated in the January 6 insurrection “should all be investigated and put in prison”; and claimed of former special counsel Jack Smith, who oversaw that probe: “He is a CRIMINAL AND SHOULD BE IN JAIL. A MAJOR LOWLIFE AND FAILURE. An ugly person, both inside and out! I beat him badly, and love watching him squirm now.”
Solomon once worked for mainstream outlets like The Washington Post and The Associated Press, but carved out a niche over the last decade by generating “phantom scandals” that spread through the right-wing propaganda apparatus. Solomon’s work — and that of Just the News, where he is editor in chief — provides journalistic scaffolding for pro-Trump counternarratives and conspiracy theories.
Just the News does not attract a massive audience — the website is not among the 50 biggest news sites in the United States. But Solomon’s fans include Sean Hannity and Steve Bannon, who regularly host him on their programs, and he “gained President Trump’s favor through his work questioning the federal investigation into possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russians who meddled in the 2016 election,” The New York Times reported in May.
Solomon joined the administration the following month as “chairman of the newly formed and vaguely defined Government Transparency Task Force,” and now plays an unprecedented dual role in the MAGA information system. Solomon manufactures pro-Trump narratives by using his position at the White House to select and release government documents on topics like past investigations into Trump or election security, and briefing reporters at other outlets on those documents often without including key context. He then writes up his own version for Just the News based on that spin and tours other right-wing media outlets to discuss the narrative he manufactured.
Trump’s news diet, as reflected by the articles whose links he shares on Truth Social, overwhelmingly comes from right-wing outlets like Just the News, Fox News, and Newsmax.
Top news sites linked by President Trump on Truth Social during his second term
Reprinted with permission from Media Matters
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