President Donald Trump on Thursday called for ABC and NBC to lose their broadcast licenses for not airing his primetime address to Americans.
Earlier in the week, the president announced his intention to deliver a primetime speech late Thursday concerning massive foreign interference in the 2020 presidential election.
News soon broke afterward that ABC News and NBC News, among other networks, would likely be snubbing the speech by not airing it on their primary platforms. The prediction turned out to be true.
“Two of the three major U.S. television networks and CNN did not broadcast a prime-time address on Thursday by President Donald Trump on their primary platforms,” Reuters reported following the speech, referencing ABC News and NBC News.
This infuriated the president:
President Trump called for ABC and NBC to lose their broadcast licenses for not airing his primetime speech. pic.twitter.com/SXeIlC8FZo
— New York Post (@nypost) July 17, 2026
“In a rare move, NBC and ABC fake news have both said that they would not cover this speech,” the president said during the speech itself. “They knew what it was about because of the fact that they don’t like the topic because they know how corrupt our system is and they don’t want to reveal it. They and others in the media are part of a plot.
“They want to continue this fraud for whatever reason. They want to keep it going. They want to protect the radical left. But they can’t have a great country, and that’s true. You can’t have a great country without free and fair elections. Fraud like this should mean a revocation of their licenses,” he added.
“They use our public multibillion-dollar-in-value airways for absolutely no money. They pay nothing. All we want is honesty in our elections and honesty in reporting. They pay nothing for multibillion-dollar assets,” the president concluded.
Some critics on social media echoed the president’s complaints.
“ABC and NBC refusal to air tonight’s speech by President Trump is appalling,” one critic opined. “They are controlling the narrative and circumventing the ability of the American people to make their own decisions based on the information presented. That is the definition of a dictatorship and it is not Presidential Trump but rather these rouge news outlets who that are the dictators. Shame on you!”
Meanwhile, the networks that did run the speech used every opportunity in the book to spuriously “fact-check” the president’s remarks. Even CBS News, which has become more moderate under the leadership of Bari Weiss, fell into this camp:
President Trump in his primetime address on election integrity claimed “hundreds of thousands of non-citizens and dead people are listed and active on the voter rolls.”
FACT CHECK RATING: Exaggerated.
While election experts indicate that votes cast on behalf of “dead people”… pic.twitter.com/x71dEAnJaB
— CBS News (@CBSNews) July 17, 2026
“Honestly, much of what the president has said on this topic is false,” CNN anchor Tony Dokoupil said before the speech had even started, according to Deadline.
Fellow network contributor Major Garrett then suggested that the president might interfere in the upcoming midterm elections.
“You have to ask yourself, what does that rhetoric about? Is that rhetoric about setting the stage for federal intervention in the midterms?” he said. “I mean, we’ve had primary elections all this year. We’re going to have more in August.”
“Those primary elections have been conducted under this system that the president said is catastrophically vulnerable. Yet he and all Republicans and Democrats have accepted the election,” he added.
Later during CBS’ broadcast, David Becker of the Center for Election Innovation & Research sought to downplay a report from the president that China had acquired 220 million U.S. voter records in 2020.
“It sounds bad when you hear about it, right? But the reality is, voter files in the United States are public,” he said.
As for ABC and NBC, though they didn’t directly air the speech, some Sinclair Broadcast Group-owned network affiliates preempted their decision by airing the speech through their own news service, The National News Desk.
🚨LIVE NOW🚨 President Donald Trump addresses the nation, discussing election integrity and the security of elections in the United States.
TUNE IN: https://t.co/a57rsKKhei pic.twitter.com/Yz5MLlmH6V
— The National Desk (@TND) July 17, 2026
Writers and editors can be contacted at [email protected] with feedback, tips, or corrections.
V. Saxena is a staff writer with a decade of experience as a professional writer, and a lifetime of experience as an avid news junkie. He holds a degree in computer technology from Purdue University. Saxena also contributes to BizPac Review.
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