Trump’s second-favorite news site will make you go: Huh?

Survey Says is a weekly series rounding up the most important polling trends or data points you need to know about, plus a vibe check on a trend that’s driving politics or culture.

President Donald Trump has shared over 800 news articles on his Truth Social account since retaking the White House. His favorite outlet is Fox News, as you might expect. But his second-favorite is one you probably haven’t heard of: Just The News.

Between Jan. 20, 2025, and this past Tuesday, Trump has shared 185 links to Fox News and 112 links to Just The News, according to a Daily Kos analysis of his Truth Social history. Of the over 50 news outlets we identified him having shared links to, those are the only two for which he’s shared more than 100 links in that time period.

But what exactly is Just The News? 

Much like Fox News, Just The News claims to deliver coverage in “a neutral voice,” but even a cursory read of their homepage reveals the outlet’s right-wing leanings. Founded in 2020, it regularly refers to undocumented immigrants as “illegals,” has dabbled in conspiracies around the 2020 election, and pushes narratives that stoke fears of transgender people. It’s also one of the rare media outlets to have accounts on right-wing sites like Truth Social, Twitter-clone Gettr, and video platform Rumble.

Tellingly, in November, the parent company of Just The News, JTN Network, acquired far-right websites The Post Millennial and Human Events, both of which are linked to conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec, who is best known for promoting the Pizzagate hoax, which falsely claimed that famous Democrats were running a child-sex-trafficking ring out of a Washington-based pizza parlor. In a bit of cross-brand promotion, Just The News launched a podcast called “The Pod Millennial” last month.

Less tellingly, though much more oddly, Just The News also circulates audio versions of “The Liz Truss Show,” hosted by the infamous former United Kingdom prime minister who lasted just 44 days in office. A review from The Guardian dubbed the show “hapless ravings from a cupboard.”

And yet there are lots of right-wing news sites out there, so what has led Trump to Just The News?

Not only does the site largely validate Trump’s skewed worldview, he also seems to have a special fondness for its founder, reporter John Solomon.

Solomon previously worked at mainstream outlets like the Associated Press and Washington Post. However, his work was criticized for being poorly reported, with the Columbia Journalism Review writing in 2007 that Solomon’s work “masquerad[ed] as serious news.” Since then, he has drifted over to right-wing outlets—and right into Trump’s personal orbit.

In 2019, near the end of Trump’s first term, his allies sought to dig up dirt on Democratic rivals, like Joe Biden. Much of this effort sought to tie Biden and other Democrats to alleged corruption in Ukraine, and multiple news outlets reported that this brought Rudy Giuliani, then Trump’s personal lawyer, close to Solomon, who was writing for The Hill at the time. 

As The New Yorker documents, “As Giuliani conspired this past spring with questionable Ukrainian sources, Solomon pumped out a string of eye-catching stories echoing those sources’ claims about the Bidens. This appears to have been no coincidence.”

As a result, Solomon’s name was frequently brought up during closed-door testimony for Trump’s first impeachment inquiry. One witness told Congress that Solomon’s articles on Ukraine were chock-full of “non-truths and non sequiturs,” and another joked that Solomon had gotten nothing right except for maybe “his grammar.” 

Either way, Solomon’s willingness to push a Trump-friendly pseudo-scandal seems to have endeared him to the president. On the last day of his first term, Trump secretly met with Solomon, giving him access to documents related to the FBI’s probe into allegations of whether Russia worked with Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, according to ABC News.

Since then, Solomon has spent much of his time sucking up to Trump. During an October 2024 interview, he pitched Trump this softball: “[Democratic nominee] Kamala Harris has been out on the campaign trail offending Christians. You’ve been out on the trail reaching out to Christians, talking to them. Her notion that people who believe in Jesus don’t belong in her rallies—I’d like to get your reaction to that.”

But Solomon’s subservience to Trump runs even deeper. 

Trump loves few things more than being called “sir,” and he often puts the word in people’s mouths when recounting their praise of him. And Solomon seems to know this. In a 2025 interview with Trump, Solomon and Amanda Head, Just The News’ White House correspondent, called him “sir” 17 times in less than 23 minutes. 

That was by no means an outlier. In a 2024 one-on-one interview, Solomon called Trump “sir” six times in about 10 minutes. 

It’s a level of sucking up not even matched by Fox News. Host Sean Hannity called Trump “sir” just once during the aired version of their January interview. He said it only three times in a 22-minute interview from October. And last November, Fox anchor Bret Baier said nary a “sir” during their nearly 13-minute interview. 

Trump seems to love how much Solomon loves him. 

“The media is the absolute worst, with the exception of you, of course,” Trump told him in October 2024. “We are lucky to have you, and I’m talking about ‘we’ as a country. We’re lucky to have you because you’re really one of the great people. You’re a real journalist, what they used to be when they were great. We don’t have too many of them left, John. We’re lucky to have you, man.”

Any updates?

• Good news for people who love bad news: New polling shows Democrats remain in danger of locking themselves out of California’s governor’s mansion, a risk this column first tackled in December. In the state, candidates from all parties will appear on the same June 2 primary ballot, and the primary’s two top vote-getters advance to November’s general election. The race is swamped with Democrats, while the Republican side is consolidated around two candidates. As a result, Republicans have been leading primary polls, such as a new Emerson College survey. Republican Steve Hilton leads the poll, with 17%, while a second Republican, Chad Bianco, is tied at 14% with Democrat Eric Swalwell. Worse, a new internal poll from Democratic candidate Xavier Becerra shows the two Republicans outright leading the field. If Hilton and Bianco win the top two spots in the primary, the state’s voters won’t have a Democratic gubernatorial candidate on the ballot in the fall, thereby ensuring a Republican succeeds Gov. Gavin Newsom. 

• And now some plain-old good news: The latest YouGov/Economist poll finds Democrats with their largest lead yet on the generic congressional ballot, which asks respondents which party they intend to vote for in the next House election. The poll shows Democrats leading Republicans by 7 points. That’s very close to Democrats’ lead at this time in 2018, when FiveThirtyEight’s polling average showed the party ahead by about 8 points. 

Vibe check

We can’t go back in time and change the result of the 2024 presidential election … but if we could, a new poll finds that Democrat Kamala Harris would defeat Trump in a blowout.

The poll, conducted for NBC News by SurveyMonkey, asked the question: “If you could go back in time to November 2024 and vote again, who would you vote for?” Harris wins 40%, Trump wins 32%, and the remaining 28% either wouldn’t vote or would vote for someone else.

Harris’ 8-point lead in the 2024 redo is far larger than Trump’s roughly 1-point victory in the 2024 popular vote—and for what it’s worth, it’s also much bigger than her 2-point polling lead ahead of the election. In fact, if that lead panned out in an election, it would be the biggest popular-vote win since 1996.

If only voters in 2024 had had any previous experience with how Trump would act as president …