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9 26 SALON
He isn’t a government official, but his questions shape government action. A curious and symbolic figure in President Donald Trump’s second administration, Real America’s Voice Chief White House Correspondent Brian Glenn has grown essential to the calculated campaign to redefine what press freedom means in America. Loyalty is rewarded, dissent is punished and the line between reporter and political operative is obliterated.
Under this administration, freedom of the press is a conditional privilege. If you praise the president, you’re welcome. If you challenge him, you should expect retaliation. The White House feeds its preferred outlets — Real America’s Voice, Right Side Broadcasting, Fox News and a handful of right-wing influencers — while starving mainstream reporters of access and painting them as subversive threats. The president has encouraged lawsuits against journalists and media outlets for doing their jobs, and threatened to revoke the broadcast licenses of networks he dislikes. Across the Potomac at the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has quietly rewritten guidelines on press access. In a matter of months, we’ve witnessed a quiet conversion of the American press corps into something more akin to state media. Access is granted on the condition of favorability — and no member of the press is more favored than Glenn.
Glenn masquerades as a White House correspondent while serving as a glorified PR agent for the administration and his partner, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene…Many of Glenn’s questions for Trump are softballs. They parrot MAGA talking points and inject policy proposals straight from Greene’s desk into the official press pool.
:{:{Perhaps best known for berating Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for not wearing a suit to an explosive Oval Office meeting with Trump on Feb. 28, Glenn masquerades as a White House correspondent while serving as a glorified PR agent for the administration and his partner, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga. (Some have called the duo “MAGA America’s favorite couple.”) Many of Glenn’s questions for Trump are softballs. They parrot MAGA talking points and inject policy proposals straight from Greene’s desk into the official press pool.}:
When Glenn asked the president whether he would eliminate capital gains taxes on home sales — one of Greene’s pet policy proposals — it wasn’t an inquiry; it was a plant. The president joked about Glenn being Greene’s boyfriend and moved on. But the question did its job. The congresswoman’s bill made it into the headlines, and it reinforced the unspoken understanding that Glenn is not there to interrogate: He’s there to assist. He is propaganda wrapped in a press pass. }:
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Before entering conservative political media, Glenn was a host for a regional morning program in Texas. He eventually pitched himself to the bosses at Right Side Broadcasting Network (RSBN), a conservative media outlet launched in 2016 to livestream Trump rallies. Six years later, he jumped to Real America’s Voice and became an integral node in a communication ecosystem that reinforces MAGA messaging.
Glenn has used questions to prompt immediate executive action, such as the removal of the White House Peace Vigil tarp — a round-the-clock protest for global disarmament that stood in Lafayette Square since 1981. Glenn asked Trump during a recent press appearance about a “blue tent” in front of the White House, saying it was “an eyesore.” Trump barked in response, “Take it down. Take it down today. Right now.” The vigil’s tent and signage were removed by National Park Service officers last week. Trump, perhaps in a moment of confusion, later blasted Glenn as fake news.
Similarly, following the death of right-wing star Charlie Kirk, Glenn pushed Trump to focus his ire on the transgender community and ban the Progress Pride flag. “Then they’ll sue, and they’ll get freedom of speech stuff,” Trump correctly pointed out after Glenn asked about a flag ban. “Well, there’s also groups called Transtifa,” Glenn replied. “So perhaps if you can label them a domestic terrorist group, in all reality, you could take that flag down, because it would represent the Transtifa.”
And Glenn was the reporter who recently suggested to Trump that protesters who interrupted his staged photo-op in Washington, D.C., could be prosecuted under Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations statutes. “You said earlier this week that the women who yelled at you, who were protesting…should be in jail,” Maggie Haberman of the New York Times recently asked Trump. “Do you actually think that that is an offense that deserves jail time?”
The president turned to Glenn to back him up. “Do you agree with that?”
“I think they’re a nasty organization,” Glenn responded.
Haberman continued pressing Trump. “But you think they deserve jail?”
The president replied, “Go ahead.”
When Glenn asked Trump about banning Pride flags or dismantling protest encampments, the administration acted — quickly. But when seasoned journalists question policy on Ukraine, voting rights or reproductive health, they’re usually shut down, ignored or attacked. This isn’t how a free press functions. Dismantling a 40-year anti-nuclear protest in Lafayette Square after a single question from a friendly reporter? That’s suppression. Entertaining the idea of banning Pride flags based on one loaded media prompt? That’s soft authoritarianism. Refusing access to reporters who cover government abuses, while elevating influencers who openly promote administration propaganda? That’s state capture.
And it’s all how autocracies operate.
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By Sophia Tesfaye
Sophia Tesfaye is a senior writer (and former senior politics editor) for Salon. She resides in Washington, D.C.
You can find her on Twitter at @SophiaTesfaye.
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Meet the Man MAGA America Wakes Up To
Between hosting Right Side Broadcasting Network and dating Marjorie Taylor Greene, Brian Glenn is the next big MAGA media star.
Brian Glenn stands for a portrait in Harlem.
Brian Glenn is fast becoming one of Donald Trump’s favorite reporters, likely racking up more one-on-one interviews with Trump in the last year than any other journalist. | Photos by Jamie Kelter Davis for POLITICO
By Adam Wren
04/24/2024
NEW YORK CITY — Brian Glenn was about to go live. Amid the hundreds of reporters crowded outside a Manhattan courthouse on the first morning of Donald Trump’s criminal trial last week, Glenn, the director of programming for Right Side Broadcasting Network, would be delivering the news from the circus straight to hundreds of thousands of faithful MAGA viewers.
Glenn looked like a typical television newscaster, but a bright blue and white pin he wore on the lapel of his suit set him apart from others in the press corral: It featured a big, bold “47” — a nod to Trump’s possible return to the presidency, which was gifted to him by the Trump campaign. Surrounded by Trump fans, Glenn cut the figure of a former homecoming king navigating the crowd at the big game. People wearing red caps kept coming up asking to be interviewed, a request he repeatedly obliged. In between, he pulled out his iPhone and flashed me photos from when he had shown up at this same spot to cover Trump’s arraignment last April.
Pointing to one image, he singled out his girlfriend, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. (He calls himself the other half of “MAGA America’s favorite couple.”) He recounted how his crew had to cut their coverage short that day after Greene was mobbed by press and onlookers. “I probably physically bulldozed a dozen people getting her out of there,” Glenn said.
Marjorie Taylor Greene speaks at a protest.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene speaks at a protest held in Collect Pond Park across the street from the Manhattan District Attorney’s office in New York on April 4, 2023. | Stefan Jeremiah/AP
As Glenn spoke, he stopped mid-sentence, a voice breaking through his AirPods. “30 seconds?” I heard him say. He quickly returned to his mark and began to broadcast to an audience of what would soon blossom into more than 200,000 RSBN viewers spread across YouTube and Rumble, the right-coded video service. “This is Biden’s witch hunt,” Glenn told his viewers. “This is what this is. This is Biden’s trial. This is his ability, or effort right now, to take President Trump off the campaign trail.”
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Right Side Broadcasting Network dates back to 2016, when stay-at-home dad Joe Seales launched the online channel in order to live stream Trump rallies. Eight years later, RSBN has grown into a full outlet that employs roughly a dozen people and features a website full of stories. RSBN is like NFL RedZone for Trump rallies, covering them hours before any speakers approach the dais. Now, as Trump’s general election campaign kicks into high gear, it has also cemented itself as the pro-Trump media outlet of record for the MAGA base. The network boasts 1.64 million subscribers on YouTube (a larger subscribership than One America News Network) and another half a million on Rumble.
Glenn is the star who Seales has largely handed control over to. He is the Trump rally gameday host who plumbs the depths of MAGA America in the crowds wherever Trump goes. Glenn is fast becoming one of Trump’s favorite reporters, likely racking up more one-on-one interviews with Trump in the last year than any other journalist. During gaggles, Trump often singles him out for positive-slanted questions after entertaining a series of hardballs from other reporters. Christina Bobb, one of Trump’s revolving cast of attorneys, is a regular guest alongside Glenn on RSBN’s coverage of the trials.
Brian Glenn, second from right, interviews MAGA supporters.
Glenn (second from right) interviews MAGA supporters near the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse while jury selection is underway for Donald Trump’s criminal trial on April 16.
If you’ve seen a viral video of a Trump supporter at one of his rallies circulating on social media, there’s a good chance it came from Glenn’s crew. Earlier this month, when Trump traveled to an Atlanta Chick-fil-A restaurant, it was Glenn and Right Side that captured video of Trump explaining his new state-focused abortion policy. Prominent reporters like the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Greg Bluestein grabbed the clip and posted it to X. And when Trump made an off-the-record stop at a New York bodega where a man was stabbed to death following the second day of his trial, Glenn was there along with other reporters.
“He always goes to Brian — he’ll find him in any gaggle,” said Ron Filipkowski, the Florida defense attorney and anti-Trump online influencer who has logged hundreds of hours watching RSBN, which he calls “C-SPAN for MAGA.” “No one gets to interview Trump anymore. Brian has done the most Trump interviews of anyone over the last four years.”
RSBN has developed a reputation for going nearly everywhere that Trump ends up. Thanks to that flood-the-zone mentality of documenting Trump’s every move, it’s likely your favorite mainstream media reporter’s go-to method for keeping tabs on Trump on days that they’re off the campaign trail.
Filipkowski and Glenn have formed an unlikely friendship online over direct messages that have spanned years, something I did not expect when I reached out to Filipkowski, a prominent X personality who made his name by spending almost every waking moment dunking on Trump and the MAGA movement.
“I actually have found them to be the most valuable resource over the last four years to understanding MAGA — more than any other source,” Filipkowski told me. “I’ve probably posted 50 or 100 Brian Glenn interview clips of Trump, probably even 200. I find those clips incredibly valuable, because you’re getting it unvarnished. That’s when [Trump] lets his guard down a little, when he’s got a friendly face.”
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Brian Glenn interviews MAGA supporters near the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse.
Glenn interviews MAGA supporters near the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse on April 16. RSBN has developed a reputation for going nearly everywhere that Trump ends up.
What Filipkowski and many reporters most appreciate about Glenn’s coverage is a simple open-ended question he asks MAGA stans: What is it that you love most about Donald Trump?
“If you say ‘I’m from the New York Times,’ his fans at rallies say ‘you’re fake news’ and don’t talk to you,” Dave Weigel, a Semafor politics reporter who relies on the site, told me. “That’s obviously less interesting than somebody saying, ‘We love you guys. Let me explain to you all my views in an interesting way,’ which is what Right Side Broadcasting does.”
RSBN has “replaced mainstream media in the needs of your average Trump supporter: Why would you turn on Fox where they’re going to cut away when you can watch this website, and they’ve also got more access,” Weigel said.
Brian Glenn interviews MAGA supporters.
Glenn interviews MAGA supporters near the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse on April 16. He asks MAGA stans a simple open-ended question: What is it that you love most about Donald Trump?
“Fox is not neatly echoing what the base is saying or feeling anymore,” Glenn told me. “We just kind of filled that space. They abandoned that space.”
Over the last few weeks, in addition to Trump’s recent Pennsylvania rally and the opening days of the New York trial, RSBN has covered a Greene town hall in her home district and Trump’s visit to Atlanta, where they filmed him from the tarmac to the Chick-Fil-A. “It’s gonna be a busy couple of days here at Right Side,” Glenn told viewers as he waited for Trump’s plane to land in Georgia, “but that’s what we do. That’s what we signed up for.” Glenn narrates all of Trump’s movements at official and off-the-record stops. At rallies, he buries himself in the crowd for hours ahead of time. “They’re covering each Trump rally as if they were E! at the red carpet at the Oscars,” Weigel says.
“It’s normal people giving normal people the news,” RSBN founder Seales told POLITICO Magazine in 2017 of his vision for the network.
In our interviews, Glenn presented himself as exactly that, and he has the man-on-the-street interview cred to prove it. He got his start in local broadcast news, including a stint as a features reporter at the Dallas ABC affiliate WFAA-TV, where he became known for his “out-and-about” coverage, according to the former long standing TV critic Ed Bark at the Dallas Morning News. It was the kind of fodder that primed him for interviewing the hoi polloi at Trump rallies, where he has broadcasted for up to 7.5 hours straight at a time.
Brian Glenn speaks to Donald Trump supporters in Harlem.
Glenn speaks to Trump supporters in Harlem after the former president visited a local bodega in New York on April 16.
In one report from 2014 for WFAA-TV, Glenn covered the opening day of the Texas state fair and the Wild West Pet Palooza exhibit, a western-themed live animal show. “I cannot imagine what these dogs would do for a corny dog,” Glenn said of some of the exhibit’s shelter dogs who run around him as he reports. “I know what I would do for a corny dog, and coming up at 12:30, I may sing and dance for a corny dog.”
In July of 2015, WFAA parted ways with Glenn, though, saying his tone didn’t match the needs of the audience. “My mission has always been to entertain our viewers. Period,” he told Bark at the time. “They receive enough bad news throughout the morning. Why not give them a reason to smile or laugh while informing them on all the community events?”
In his private life, Glenn found himself becoming more politically minded, largely, he says, on account of Barack Obama’s presidency. He told me his employer once forced him to take a social media post down about Obama “doing something unconstitutional” on health care, though he could not recall the specifics. “That’s when I really started paying attention to what was happening in our country,” he told me, “and really what was happening in the Republican Party.”
Later that year, he landed at Salem Media Group in Dallas doing drive-time talk radio focused on business issues while also working for television conglomerate Nexstar Media. He said he was ultimately fired by Nexstar for posting images of a Trump rally on social media, and also criticizing Covid-era lockdowns.
He wasn’t out of a job long though, and by Sept. 2020 he’d landed at Right Side. “I sent them a message, and I literally said, ‘You need to hire me. I want to save this country.’”
There’s something Glenn wants me to know before we go any further during one of our interviews.
“Here’s something I really want you to mention — I take it seriously — I feel like I have a responsibility not to spread any of the, you know, the conspiracy theories and all of the things that people sometimes associate with this movement.”
He told me that if he’s ever interviewing somebody, “I want to stop them and be like, ‘OK, that’s, you know, that’s not true.’ I feel like I have to be a voice of reason, because I do understand the criticism that a lot of people have on the other side of the aisle about things that they think we believe in, so I do feel a responsibility to clarify stuff.”
Brian Glenn talks to Kari Lake at an event for Donald Trump.
Glenn talks to Kari Lake at an event for Donald Trump at SNHU Arena in Manchester, New Hampshire, on Jan. 20.
I asked him for an example of one he’s encountered.
“Trump is still in charge, still in charge of the government, still in charge of the White House; that there are multiple Joe Bidens.”
“Just completely bizarre,” he said.
When I talked with Filipkowski, though, he pointed out that Glenn will often only say something back to his subject like, “I don’t want to get sued,” and then move on to someone else, rather than actually rebutting the information. “He might try and stop it halfway through, but it’s still got through,” Filipkowski said. “So, there’s plenty. There’s so many wild, wild, crazy internet conspiracies that they have ended up broadcasting.”
Filipkowski mentioned a group of women whom Glenn interviewed who were espousing a conspiracy involving Trump, John F. Kennedy Jr. and Princess Diana. But what most concerns him about his online friend is not just the people Glenn talks to, but Glenn himself.
“Since he has dated Greene, he has become much more hardcore,” Filipkowski told me. He said that Glenn had become more radicalized on issues like Ukraine aid and House Speaker Mike Johnson’s tenure (he’s against it). “If I ran into Brian in 2014, we probably would have agreed on 90 percent of things,” said Filipkowski, a former Republican. “My thinking is he has probably changed quite a bit like a lot of normal Republicans because of Trump.”
Marjorie Taylor Greene, left, joins Brian Glenn on camera during a campaign rally for Donald Trump.
Greene (left) joins Glenn on camera during a campaign rally for Trump at the Forum River Center on March 9 in Rome, Georgia. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Glenn, of course, told me he does disagree with Filipkowski on that. In our conversations, Glenn denied that he had become more radicalized since dating Greene. (The pair were spotted together in 2022, but Glenn told me it was early last year that they “started really seeing each other on a dating level.”) “He’s from the industry, so he is a great resource. He’s explained a lot, like how things work and yeah, it’s great,” Greene told Semafor last year, confirming their relationship for the first time: “So maybe I’m falling in love with the press.” (Greene’s office did not respond to requests for comment from POLITICO Magazine for this story.)
Glenn told me that the two have never disagreed on matters of politics. “Both of us absolutely live, breathe and sleep America First,” he said. “We focus on every day what she can do on the legislative side and the messaging that I can do with our outlet. And you know, we’re 100 percent behind President Trump and the America First agenda. And like I said, I try to keep everything factual. I don’t buy into all these far-right theories about stuff.”
What Glenn actually believes is pretty transparent throughout his broadcasts and in his interviews with Trump supporters. He told me he thinks Jan. 6 is an “inside job” and that “this whole thing was instigated by antifa.” He also dabbles in 2020 conspiracies, and he told me: “I think there was enough valid election discrepancies to question: Is the outcome legitimate?”
If he knows the MAGA base better than any other reporter, I wondered who he thought would be the 2028 heir to the movement. “Who’s the next man up on the bench to carry the torch?” he pondered for a moment when I posed that question. “I’m gonna say 100 percent that the person I know that their heart is in the right place, their focus is in the right place, and they’re tough enough and strong enough to do it, that’s Marjorie.”
Back in Atlanta two weeks ago, Glenn’s hourslong tarmac reporting shift paid off. Among a din of reporters from mainstream outlets shouting questions on everything from Trump’s abortion policy to his coming trial, Glenn said “Mr. President…”
Hearing a friendly voice, Trump turned Glenn’s way. “Let’s talk about your polling numbers,” he began, as Trump nodded approvingly. Glenn noted that he is “crushing Biden.” Then comes the question: “Thoughts on that?”
Donald Trump speaks outside a convenience store surrounded by people.
Donald Trump visits a Harlem bodega in New York City on April 16. | Jamie Kelter Davis for POLITICO
Trump looked away to the rest of those gathered.
“Did you hear what he said? He just said I’m crushing Biden in the polls. I appreciate that question — thank you, Brian.”
Filed under: Media, Republicans, Donald Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene,
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