Trump says ABC, NBC licenses should be revoked over refusal to air speech on election integrity

Source: Washington Post

President Donald Trump lit into ABC and NBC for refusing to interrupt regularly scheduled programming to air his speech Thursday night on election integrity.

Trump, who has for years feuded with the country’s most prominent media companies, claimed without evidence that ABC and NBC declined to cover the speech because they were complicit in a larger fraud.

“They and others in the media are part of a plot,” Trump said. “They want to continue this fraud for whatever reason. They want to keep it going. They want to protect the radical left.”

ABC and NBC did not specify why they declined to air the speech, but networks are often loath to grant time to presidents for overtly political purposes. Fellow broadcast network Fox took the speech live while CBS preempted programming for a special report, in which it aired part of the speech and explained Trump’s long history of falsehoods on the topic of election security.

Trump asserted that ABC and NBC should lose their government-issued broadcast licenses, something that he’s repeatedly suggested and something that his Federal Communications Commission chairman, Brendan Carr, has taken unprecedented steps to do, particularly with ABC, in recent months.

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2026/07/16/trump-says-abc-nbc-licenses-should-be-revoked-over-refusal-air-speech-election-integrity/

President Trump lit into ABC and NBC for refusing to air his Thursday night speech on election integrity, asserting that the networks should lose their government-issued broadcast licenses.

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost.com) 2026-07-17T14:15:06.991832182Z