Trump making millions using Joseph Goebbels’ anti-media propaganda
After laying the groundwork during his first term for his war against media for reporting unfavorably on his magnanimousness, Donald Trump has been spending his second term raking in millions of dollars from the free press using anti-media propaganda techniques made famous in Nazi Germany by Joseph Goebbels.
Trump’s never-ending diatribes against the news media are more than a major plank in his MAGA platform; they’ve also been highly lucrative for the family business (via MS Now):
A 2025 financial disclosure filing released [July 2026] by the U.S. Office of Government Ethics revealed that Trump earned $86.5 million from legal settlements with media and tech companies he had sued.
The scale of presidential income is unprecedented, as are the lawsuits that led to the settlements. Many presidents have criticized the news media over coverage they disliked, but until Trump, no sitting president had ever sued a media outlet for defamation — or collected millions of dollars to dismiss such a claim.
Trump has done so repeatedly. He has never won a defamation case in court, despite filing more than 30 such lawsuits against news organizations or journalists since the 1980s. To the contrary, Trump has lost many defamation cases, both as a plaintiff and a defendant. The most notable may be the 2023 finding — which the Supreme Court recently let stand — that he was liable for sexual assault and defaming writer E. Jean Carroll, with a jury awarding her $5 million. Legal experts say that Trump faces nearly insurmountable odds to win a defamation case at trial.
But once Trump won a second term, the implicit threat of presidential punishment loomed. Suddenly, Trump’s ability to extract large payments without going into court increased markedly.
Trump has several defamation lawsuits pending against news organizations and reporters, with damage demands running into the tens of billions. Targets include The New York Times (over articles about his tax returns); The Wall Street Journal (over an article about a birthday card he allegedly sent to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein); and the BBC (over a 2024 documentary about the Capitol riot that allegedly used deceptive editing).
Press experts and free-speech advocates have viewed Trump’s broadsides against the news media with alarm, citing his lawsuits as part of a larger array of administration threats and actions to limit or punish reporters, such as defunding public broadcasting, dismantling the federally funded Voice of America news agency and restricting reporters’ access to the Pentagon. Trump’s appointee at the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, has been a key ally and has threatened late-night TV hosts critical of Trump while launching investigations into the president’s perceived media adversaries. (Emphasis mine)
As the man who once kept a copy of the book, My New Order — a collection of Hitler’s speeches — on his bedside, Trump has proven to be a man who can appreciate the power of propaganda and its ability to control the media and shape public opinion to his advantage.
Since the early days of his 2016 campaign and continuing still today, Trump has relied on one of the successful propaganda tools used by Joseph Goebbels during the rise of Nazi Germany by referring to the news media as “Fake News.” Goebbels called the media Lügenpresse which translated is “lying press.” Trump also incorporates some of the language used by Joseph Goebbels when he began referring to unfavorable media outlets as the “enemy of the American people.” It was during the reign of the Third Reich that Goebbels released his “Ten anti-Jewish Commandments” where he called the Jews “a sworn enemy of the German people” who posed a risk to Adolph Hitler’s vision for Germany.
History has proven that the propaganda principles of Joseph Goebbels were tragically successful. And just as tragically, Trump’s use of these same propaganda principles is having a level of financial success today to the tune of millions of dollars.
Unfortunately, Trump’s success is picture of a growing belief by Republicans and Democrats that government should control so-called fake news and misinformation coming from news and social media outlets (via FIRE.org):
Since 2018, the Pew Research Center has asked thousands of Americans if either the government or technology companies should do more to filter online content, including restricting access to false information — an intervention which Americans have long been wary of.
Well, Pew asked that question again [in 2025], and the results are depressing.
The Pew survey reveals Americans are more likely now than at any time in the past several years to favor restrictions on online content. Two-thirds of Americans would support a private company moderating content online while 55% would support the federal government doing the same, the latter up from 39% in 2018. The Pew survey includes responses from 5,115 adults in the United States and was conducted from June 5 to 11.
Although support for the federal government restricting access to false information online has grown across the board in recent years, a partisan divide on the issue has emerged. In 2018, the difference between Republicans and Democrats on this issue was negligible (37% and 40%, respectively). Today, the percentage of Republicans in favor of the federal government regulating online content remains similar, at 39%, while support has surged to 70% among Democrats.
Similarly, Democratic support for tech companies restricting access to false information has increased over the years, from 60% in 2018 to 81% today. Republican support stayed the same at 48% in both years.
As I make clear in my book The New Axis of Evil: Exposing the Bipartisan War on Liberty, Republicans and Democrats in Washington have been redefining free speech and the free press as “misinformation” or “disinformation” (or in the case of Donald Trump, “fake news”) — which is political doublespeak to describe people using their First Amendment right to criticize government — and then criminalizing it.
MAGA has always supported the idea of sacrificing our God-given, constitutionally protected rights to help Trump, but a Pew Research poll conducted just weeks after Trump was sworn into office showed just how far Republicans were willing to go the second time around. According to the poll, Republicans believed Trump could address America’s problems more effectively if he didn’t have to worry so much about Congress, the courts, and most of the Constitution.
A 59% majority of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents say many of the country’s problems could be addressed more effectively if Trump didn’t need to worry so much about Congress or the courts. Republicans who say they ‘strongly’ identify with the GOP are particularly likely to say the nation’s problems could be more effectively addressed by giving Trump more power: 78% say this.
The partisan divisions were enormous: 90% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents concluded it would be “too risky” to give Trump more power without checks and balances, but according to the Pew data, a majority of GOP voters came to the opposite conclusion. (Emphasis mine)
For those ready to echo Trump’s cries of “fake news” after reading this, PEW conducted an earlier poll on the subject of abandoning the Constitution in favor of granting Trump unlimited power:
The Associated Press reported last spring on a national AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research survey, which found that 57% of Republicans endorsed the idea of Trump “taking action on the country’s important policy issues without waiting for Congress or the courts.”
An NPR/PBS/Marist poll, released around the same time, asked respondents whether they agreed that conditions in the U.S. had deteriorated to the point that “we need a leader who is willing to break some rules to set things right.” Among GOP voters, a 56% majority endorsed the idea.
In the Age of Trump, pushing the Constitution aside has also become official policy for many of the talking heads in so-called conservative media. For example, Steve Deace (Blaze TV) suggested in July 2025 that it might be time to consider voiding parts of the Constitution to help Trump “win.”
The fact that Donald Trump has pocketed millions of dollars using Joseph Goebbels’ anti-media propaganda confirms several indisputable facts: Trump has succeeded in replacing conservatism with Trumpism and nationalism, he is destroying our Constitutional rights, he is edging America ever closer to becoming Nationalist Socialist state, and he’s making millions of dollars in the process.
David Leach is the owner of the Strident Conservative. He holds people of every political stripe accountable for their failure to uphold conservative values, and he promotes those values instead of political parties. He is the author of The New Axis of Evil: Exposing the Bipartisan War on Liberty.
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