Donald Trump Jr. is planning to launch a mobile news app with former staffers from his father’s administration that hopes to compete with Apple and Google’s news aggregators, Axios reported Tuesday.
But the venture also has another, if unstated, aim: to fill the void left by the waning conservative darling Drudge Report, whose traffic – and influence – shrank since taking an apparently anti-Trump stance in recent years. Founder Matt Drudge did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday.
With the tag “mainstream news without the mainstream bias,” MxM will be free to users at first, with a team of fewer than 10 staffers curating stories “from a variety of publishers across the ideological spectrum,” per a spokesperson. Axios reported that MxM (short for “Minute by Minute”) started with a small, friends-and-family funding round, but will explore a Series A raise after building its readership.
Also involved are former Trump spokesperson and app co-founder Taylor Budowich; and Cliff Sims, former White House aide and Deputy Director of National Intelligence, who is CEO of Telegraph Creative, which designed the app.
Its creators acknowledge that early adoption will be from right-of-center readers, it wants to position itself more broadly as an alternative to Apple and Google’s news offerings.
“We created the MxM News app to help people cut through that clutter and get trustworthy news and information about topics that matter and impact their lives,” Trump Jr. said in a statement to Axios. “We view it as an important public service and also believe it will be a great business.”
Jr. is following in the footsteps of his father, who soft-launched the social media platform Truth Social earlier this year.