Throughout the general election — and especially since Donald Trump’s polling figures took a significant dive this fall (though there’s been a recent bump in his favor) — there has been widespread speculation as to the Republican nominee’s future plans. Some have taken the guesswork so far as to suggest that the real estate mogul’s presidential bid was itself an extended guerilla marketing campaign for a new cable news channel. A newly unearthed cache of domain names owned by the Trump Organization has once again raised the possibility that Trump might be planning for a different future.
The Trump Organization owns TrumpTelevision.com, TrumpNetwork.com, and TheTrumpNetwork.com. As Yahoo points out, the latter two addresses were related to a nutritional supplement business that The Donald bought in 2009 and later sold. TrumpTelevision.com has never hosted original content.
The Trump Organization also owns more than 3,000 addresses, including potentially embarrassing ones such as TrumpNetworkPonziScheme.com, IHateTrumpVodka.com, and DonaldTrumpSucks.com.
In recent weeks there have been reports that Jared Kushner, Trump’s son in law who has played a key role in campaign strategy (and who owns the New York Observer‘s parent company), has quietly approached people about launching a television network following the election. Kushner has denied the reports.
Lending credence to the speculation over Trump’s TV plans are the pair of hires he made over the summer: Steve Bannon, the leader of the far-right Breitbart News, and Roger Ailes, the former Fox News boss who was ousted from his role at the network amidst a flurry of sexual harassment allegations.
(Via Yahoo! News & The Daily Herald)
