Opinion: Are you experiencing Trump fatigue or do you want more coverage? | The Excerpt
On a bonus episode (first released on March 17, 2025) of The Excerpt podcast: It’s almost impossible to go through your day without getting some news coverage about what the president is doing. We asked: is it too much? Are you experiencing Trump fatigue? Forum is a new series from Paste BN's Opinion team, dedicated to showcasing views from across the political spectrum on issues that Americans are starkly divided on.
Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
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Michael McCarter:
Hello and welcome to The Excerpt. I'm Michael McCarter, Vice President and Group Editor of the Opinion sections of Gannett, the parent company of Paste BN. This is a bonus episode of The Excerpt, highlighting a new series from Paste BN's Opinion team that we're calling Forum. It's a weekly space dedicated to showcasing views from across the political spectrum on issues that Americans are starkly divided on. Today, you'll hear from a few folks about media coverage of President Donald Trump. It's almost impossible to go through your day without getting some news coverage about what the president is doing. The question we asked readers was this, is it too much? Are you experiencing Trump fatigue?
KC Green:
I am tired of Trump coverage because there's more to life than listening to Donald Trump talk and people talk about him.
Michael McCarter:
KC Green lives in Cornelius, North Carolina. He's 64.
KC Green:
He likes to cherry-pick situations that don't have to do with our daily life. Take for instance, that speech from the other night, he just cherry-picks situations where young women were accosted by illegal aliens. And that happens all the time. I don't have any statistics on it, but he just happened to rail against aliens coming in like they're the only ones who do this when it's probably a very small percentage. He just doesn't think things out. In fact, he's just very impulsive. And if you don't think things out, then there are consequences later on. His name always seems to be in the news and I guess he feeds on that and people who surround him feed on that just in general. When I started to watch the news when I was 12 years old, back in the early '70s, they might have a whole newscast without talking about the president, the national news like your NBC Nightly News or whatever, Walter Cronkite.
But nowadays, it's like maybe a third of a half-hour newscast is devoted to the president. So there's more to life than just the president. There's, I guess, you could call it bias, if you watch CNN and MSNBC, there's bias one way. If you want to call that bias. Or if you watch Fox News or Newsmax, there's a bias another way. So he just needs to be fact-checked more and it needs to be pounded down, as far as covering him, more fact-checking and really pound that into people's psyche because he's misleading a lot of people. And this fact-checking is, I think, just critical. So when I say less coverage of him, less coverage of things he says, and more coverage of fact-checking him, because I think that's more important. People are being misled by his constant lies and I just don't know how people feed into this.
Michael McCarter:
Phillip Thomas is 54 and from Senoia, Georgia.
Phillip Thomas:
I am not tired of Trump coverage. He's doing exactly what he said he was going to do and I have no problem with what he's doing. I'm not 100% behind him on everything, but he's pretty much following along with his plans for what he said he was going to do, and we voted for that. Unlike our last president, and I'm not criticizing him, although there were several mistakes that were made, he's doing something, he's active, there's something going on all the time with Trump, and I like that. Instead of making your headlines be like this many thousands of people were laid off in the federal government. Why don't you tell me how much money he is saving through the DOGE program?
So you could spin things in a more positive light. It seems like everything is anti-Trump. Every story seems to be slanted against him no matter what it's about, in my opinion. He's not a perfect human being, never will be, but at least he's putting America first. We're not spending our money in Ukraine anymore. We've got people in tents in North Carolina still from a hurricane six months ago, five months ago, and yet our taxpayer dollars seem to be going towards Ukraine, anything other than Americans. And yet we put a negative light on it and say that we cut off aid to the entire world. Why weren't we aiding our own people?
Judith Hawk:
It is been constant for the last eight years. As president of course, he has access daily, hourly, minutely to call in the press and announce whatever he wants to do, so he's a master at using the media for his advantage.
Michael McCarter:
That's Judith Hawke. She's 85 and lives in Mesa, Arizona.
Judith Hawk:
It's terribly difficult for all different types of media to present factual information to counteract misinformation that this administration seems to prefer. He's been able to avoid accountability on everything that he does and yet mainstream media, I think, tries to prevent factual information and point out areas where he might be going astray or where he might be breaking the law. But it doesn't seem to cut through to a lot of the people that got him elected. And it's frustrating to media outlets too, I'm sure. So it's a difficult dilemma for everybody that wants to make people aware of what's actually happening. I would like to see less of the things that he's doing that are irrelevant. Some of it seems like it's almost gossipy, things that would be covered in People Magazine rather than mainstream media. It's not necessary that we know everything that he does. A lot of it's just to show off or to make him look better in the eyes of those who believe in him. So I think that there's a point where it's more celebrity coverage than it's administrative coverage.
Janell Mullen:
I am not tired of Trump coverage. Not at all. I love the coverage. 24 hours a day would be great with me.
Michael McCarter:
That's Janell Mullen, who's 63 and lives in Port St. Lucie, Florida.
Janell Mullen:
I just feel that President Trump is misunderstood by American people. But I believe and I know that 77 million people believe in Donald Trump. I believe that he's a businessman and that he's not a politician, that a lot of people in the United States and around the world don't understand how a businessman would like to run things in the United States. And I just like to see his tenacity and what I like is his transparency. It seems to me that it's a lot one-sided. They seem to pick out odd things that he says. Again, because he's a little bit boisterous and he's a businessman, I feel that the media picks out the worst in Donald Trump. Fairness. I would like to see more of this in the coverage of President Trump and less criticism in Donald Trump as he is the American president right now.
Michael McCarter:
That's all we have for today's episode. This is a co-production with the Forum team at Paste BN, where we invite our readers to weigh in writing on a national topic of interest. If your submission is selected for print, we might invite you to add your voice to a future special bonus episode like this one. There's a link to Forum in the show description. Let us know what you think about this episode by sending an email to podcasts@usatoday.com. Thanks for listening. I'm Michael McCarter, Vice President of the Gannett Opinion Group. Taylor Wilson will be back tomorrow morning with another episode of The Excerpt.