The Rumble White House

We should pay attention to the media empire in Donald Trump's back pocket

Eight years ago, David McNab uploaded a video to his YouTube channel: “Syrian Children Experience Snow.”

At the time, thousands of Syrian refugees, fleeing a brutal civil war in their home country, were relocating from refugee camps to Canada. Safely in the great white north, many were seeing snow for the first time. Feel-good videos like McNab’s, of giggling children safely away from an active warzone, were in high demand: It quickly went viral, racking up hundreds of thousands of views.

An amateur videographer, McNab regularly uploaded videos of wildlife and the natural world. But this was definitely more of a hobby than a job — his viral videos would earn him $20 at a time from YouTube, at most. Worse yet, they would regularly be stolen and re-uploaded without credit.

That’s when he got an interesting proposal from a fellow Canadian named Chris Pavlovski. A serial tech entrepreneur, Pavlovski had pitched a few different services that hoped to get digital creators paid for their work. But these start-ups, like a link shortener that also served ads, didn’t exactly succeed. He approached McNab to pitch his latest venture, a video hosting platform which tried to protect creators’ intellectual property while getting them paid. He called it Rumble. McNab became an early adopter of the platform.

McNab uploaded his first video to the platform in 2016: “War Hero Who's Never Been To The Zoo Meets Lions For First Time.” When McNab’s videos went viral on Rumble, he started to get paid real money: He was getting paid more than $1,000 per month, he told the Financial Post.

"Think of us as YouTube, except with an AI layer that licenses and distributes content intelligently,” Pavlovski told the Post. Back then, he claimed to have about 100 million active users. (Although this number was almost certainly inflated or, possibly, invented.)

Pavlovski’s noble goal, to host and promote viral videos while fairly compensating creators, imbued the company’s mission for years. Visiting the Rumble homepage back then, you would be greeted with a collection of videos that can only be described as America’s Funniest Home Video-esque. (Indeed, AFV did run an account on Rumble.)

Then, over the course of just three years, Rumble underwent a dramatic shift.

If you were to hunt for heart-warming videos of refugees on Rumble today, you’ll find some very different content than the ones McNab shot. Videos bear titles like “Are Muslim Immigrants Destroying Europe?” and “GRAPHIC: Syrian 'Refugee' Stabs Children In France.”

From humble beginnings, Pavloski’s video-sharing site has risen to become the go-to platform for right-wing, conspiratorial, and pro-Trump content. That, in and of itself, would be enough to cement Rumble as a powerplayer during a second Trump administration.

But more than just being a fan of the president-elect, Rumble owes an enormous debt to the Trump ticket and his network of deep-pocket supporters. And Trump, in turn, is relying on Rumble to host the very foundations of its media machine.

It has been a century since America has seen such an incestuous relationship between power and media. We’ve certainly never seen it on this scale. The conflicts of interest and risks to democracy are enormous, and it should make us properly freaked out.

This week, on a very special Bug-eyed and Shameless, how a band of Canadian entrepreneurs are running Donald Trump’s propaganda network from a spacious office in Florida.

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“Rumble is creating the rails to a new infrastructure that will not be bullied by cancel culture.”

Pavlovski made that cri de coeur in late 2021, in announcing that Rumble would be going public and listing itself on the Nasdaq.

It was a stunning rise for the company, founded in 2013 in Toronto by Pavloski and some fellow Canadians. For years, they had continued pursuing the idea that being a more creator-friendly would be enough to rival Google’s virtual video monopoly. And it simply wasn’t working.

It wasn’t until the pandemic that Rumble really took off — thanks, ironically, to Google.

Amid rising paranoia and misinformation, YouTube began aggressively removing accounts caught sharing bad health advice and promulgating conspiracy theories about the virus. Orphaned, those creators began looking for a new home.

Rumble wasn’t exactly a natural choice. Other platforms, like Odysee and Bitchute, were already well-established as havens for right-wing counter-establishment narratives. But Rumble’s reliable technology and its revenue-sharing model did attract some recognizable names. Amongst these early adopters were the fanatical Trump devotees Diamond and Silk and one-time White House communications director Dan Bongino. Then came Fox alternatives Newsmax and One America News, conspiracy theorist Dinesh D’Souza, and a network of influencers trying desperately to build the case that the 2020 election had been stolen by the deep state.

As a particularly right-wing ethos formed on Rumble, its owners seemed intent on ignoring it. The platform still prioritized cute dog videos and news content from Reuters on its homepage. But it was growing fast enough that the company could finally drop its bewildering claim of “100 million active users” — now they could actually claim to have one million active users per month.

By early 2021, the disconnect between Rumble’s apolitical editorial slant and its increasingly-radicalized userbase began to look absurd. Visiting the Rumble homepage then, you might have been greeted with a featured video entitled “Giant Galapagos tortoise takes a stroll down bike path” next to pleading banner ads advertising Rumble’s ability to monetize your viral content. At the same time, all the most-watched videos on the site were from election denialists, including the explicitly QAnon X-22 Report. (Dispatch #81) Rumble’s editors would keep promoting news videos from Reuters, but its userbase was clearly more interested in Infowars.

Rumble finally dropped the pretence that summer. It began celebrating and featuring its real stars: Russel Brand, hawking vaccine skepticism; Glen Greenwald, bleating about the “poisonous left-liberal mentality”; Ron Paul, declaring “Apartheid Australia: Hell On Earth.” This switch came with more and more language about the scourge of cancel culture and the importance of free speech.

The pivot from being a hub for viral videos to a platform for all manner of hard-right thought and agitprop was clearly a successful one: Their monthly userbase exploded from one million to 44 million. As the boom was ongoing, Pavloski and his team announced they would be picking up and leaving Red Toronto for freedom-loving Florida — Governor Ron DeSantis was effusive about the decision.

The shift was cemented in December, when Pavloski promised to build the new foundations for a woke-free media industry by listing themselves on the Nasdaq. They would do it by getting in on the SPAC craze, founding a new shell company just to merge with it and create a new publicly-traded entity.

Rumble’s entrance into the market was made possible thanks to Cantor-Fitzgerald, a storied financial services company which specializes in online start-ups. “Rumble is the most exciting social media and video distribution platform in the market today,” Howard Lutnick, the company’s CEO and chairman, said in a press release then.

The company began expanding. It acquired Locals.com, a community-based social media platform started by influencer Dave Rubin after content giant Patreon kicked off one of its users for repeatedly using the N-word. (Dispatch #23)

Its exploding popularity came with a boom in advertising revenue. In 2021 the company reported shy of $10 million in revenue. That number quadrupled to almost $40 million the following year, then doubled in 2023. In just the first nine months of 2024, Rumble has already reported $65 million in revenue.

The company remains in the red, losing more than $100 million in the first three quarters of this year, but its public offering has meant the company has become flush with coin. The company has raised somewhere north of $400 million, particularly from some very influential people.

In particular, there’s David Sacks, one of the original ‘Paypal mafia,’ who owns about 2.4 million shares in the company and has a spot on its board of directors. (Rumble acquired CallIn, his podcasting app, in 2023.) And then there’s Peter Thiel, who bought up about $25 million worth of shares in Rumble through Narya Capital, one of his venture firms. That investment made Thiel’s firm the largest shareholder in Rumble, after its management team and Bongino. For that, Narya got a seat on Rumble’s board of directors.

It may have been Thiel’s money, but Narya was founded and run by his protégée: James David Vance. He continued running the venture firm until he opted for the initials J.D. and launched his bid for an open senate seat in Ohio.

Today, thanks to its exuberant rounds of investment, Rumble’s valuation sits around $2 billion.

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Much of the coverage of Rumble paints it as merely a beneficiary of Trump, or perhaps just a platform for the president-elect’s fellow travellers. That fails to appreciate, I think, the degree to which Rumble has become part of the Republican infrastructure.

There are, as I mentioned, Thiel and Sacks. Longtime Trump loyalists, they have proved themselves more clever than the average Trump mega-donor. (Dispatch #112) While other rich Republicans have poured their money into television ads and spam-y text messages, Thiel and Sacks have always been on the hunt for things, companies, and people who can be long-term instruments for the cause. In injecting, between them, tens of millions of dollars to Rumble, and pumping up its market valuation, they’re helping the company crowd in further investment, finance new broadcast partnerships, acquire new technology, and grow its userbase. In particular, they helped do that precisely at a time when establishment figures and organizations were distancing themselves from MAGA and when Trump’s comeback seemed remarkably unlikely.

Ditto for Steve Bannon, the one-time advisor who — both before and after his stint in jail — hosts the War Room podcast, and who opted to make Rumble his preferred home for the show. He’s turned the podcast into an avenue to set Trump’s agenda and to cultivate new media darlings for the Trump ecosystem.

Take Scott Bessent, a hedge fund manager and protégée to investor George Soros — traits normally radioactive for someone on the American far-right. A long-time Trump supporter, he had never been much of a public persona. That is, until he began appearing on Bannon’s War Room earlier this year. Almost immediately, he became a fixture of Donald Trump Jr’s show, Charlie Kirk’s program, and a slew of other channels. Same for Doug Collins, former congressman for Georgia and a fellow Rumble streamer, his star blew up soon after he first appeared as a guest on the War Room.

The list of influential pro-Trump influencers on Rumble is remarkably long. There’s Bongino (3.45 million followers), of course. Dave Rubin (607,000), Steven Crowder (1.7 million), X-22 Report (760,000), Charlie Kirk (1.5 million), Andrew Tate (2.2 million), Donald Trump Jr (1.5 million), Russell Brand (2 million), The Gateway Pundit (182,000), Newsmax (1.2 million), Real America’s Voice (76,000), Congressman Jim Jordan (289,000), Robert F. Kennedy Jr (260,000), and a ton of others. Even though Infowars was technically liquidated by a Texas court — and bought up by The Onion — you can still catch it streaming 24/7 via Rumble.

Unlike YouTube, Rumble has directly tapped influential pro-Trump figures to produce content for the platform. Matt Gaetz, even while he sat in Congress, recorded his Firebrand podcast from Rumble’s studios in Florida and, later, from "the brand new Rumble Studios in Washington, D.C." He used the show to trumpet his own work in Congress, defend himself from the persistent sex trafficking allegations, and to boost the standing of his far-right cabal within the Republican caucus. Tulsi Gabbard, meanwhile, inked a six-figure deal to become exclusive to the platform.

In other cases, the ecosystem on Rumble created mini-celebrities: Kash Patel, a bit national security player in the twilight of the Trump administration, became ubiquitous on a huge number of Rumble livestreams and podcasts. Those ranged from explicitly QAnon shows, like the X-22 Report and the And We Know show, to Bannon’s program, to his own show for the conspiratorial Epoch Times — cross-posted to Rumble, Patel picked up 22,000 followers there.

So many of these figures were tapped to play key roles in the Trump administration. Bessent is slated to be Treasury Secretary; Collins is tapped to head up Veteran’s Affairs; Gabbard is in line to be Director of National Intelligence; RFK Jr will probably lead Health and Human Services; Patel is up to be director of the FBI; whilst Gaetz was, briefly, poised to become Attorney General. Lutnick, who organized Rumble’s SPAC deal, is set to become Secretary of Commerce.

The pipeline from Rumble to cabinet is stark, albeit probably not causal. This is more a reflection of how Rumble has become a critical piece of the MAGA machinery. As if that weren’t enough, Rumble and the Republican Party have become enmeshed in even more explicit ways.

Rumble was, for example, tapped as the exclusive streaming partner of the Republicans’ (admittedly useless) primary debates earlier this year. And some members of Congress have started using Rumble as their default video host for their congressional websites: When Congressman Barry Loudermilk released new footage of the January 6 insurrection, he did it exclusively on Rumble.

But, most explicitly, Rumble now serves as the technological bedrock for Trump Media & Technology Group.

Trump’s company, which runs his Truth Social platform, is an absolute financial disaster. It has virtually no revenue to speak of, and has managed to lose more than $360 million in the first nine months of this year alone. This is made possible only thanks to the hundreds of millions of dollars being pumped into the company by Trump loyalists, partisan investors, and businesses looking to curry favor with the president-elect.

Their plan to turn those financials around? Rumble.

Over 2021 and 2022, Trump Media & Technology Group inked a series of deals with Pavloski to move Truth Social onto Rumble’s cloud hosting and advertising systems. The two companies have become “partners,” as Trump Media’s SEC filings note. Under the deal, Rumble takes about a 30% cut of the advertising revenue, while Trump Media keeps the rest.

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Rumble has become the media platform of import amongst Republicans in Trump’s orbit, a mission-aligned technological giant which literally hosts Trump’s media architecture. It supports its own star system, paying out sizeable amounts of cash to figures who have been otherwise disqualified from even conservative venues like Fox News. What’s more, it fosters an ecosystem of message testing and workshopping, giving outside figures like Steve Bannon a way to directly shape policy and planning.

This, of course, is the height of hypocrisy. For years, conservatives have whined that they have been tormented, silenced, and deplatformed by Big Tech. They have screamed that the big players in Silicon Valley have harbored leftist sympathies, and that platforms ought to be neutral to foster open debate. They cry that platforms like Bluesky are dangerous echo chambers. (Dispatch #118)

And yet here they have created a media machine designed not only to be deferential to authority, but to maximize state power — so long as it is the right kind of power. They have built an apparatus to subsidize the president’s propaganda arm, which serves dual purpose as a loyalist community.

The conflicts of interest here are enormous, and the further subversion of the media’s ability to challenge an illiberal government should make us deeply worried.

So, too, should the fact that Rumble is becoming a hotbed for foreign propaganda.

RT, the Kremlin-owner English-language broadcast network which has been removed from the airwaves across Europe and the U.S, is freely available on Rumble. (128,000 followers) On Rumble, it also maintains its raw news feed (10,000), RT documentary (9,000), RT German (3,000), RT Spanish (3,000), as well as a smattering of other accounts. Also on rumble is Sputnik, another Kremlin-run propaganda network; Eva Bartlett, a Canadian based in Moscow who proudly regurgitates propaganda for Syrian butcher Bashar al-Assad; and PressTV, Iran’s English-language propaganda outlet.

Tenet Media, the talent agency believed to have taken $10 million from RT to produce pro-Kremlin content, also religiously used Rumble. (Dispatch #114)

Which isn’t to say that Rumble is entirely novel in that regard. Youtube may have booted RT and other Russian propagandists, but it continues to host a number of Indian, Venezuelan, and other propaganda outlets. It was also a hub for Tenet Media. But when you consider Rumble not as a neutral platform, but as an extension of the president-elect’s administration — a media, communications, and policy workshop — it takes on some strange new connotations.

We still don’t know how any of this is going to work in a second Trump administration. What role will Truth Social play? How will Rumble integrate into Republican communications? How with Twitter interact with these platforms, as Elon Musk joins the government as a kind of cost-cutting consultant?

The short answer is: We don’t know. But we should be very confident that this partisan and ideologically-motivated media ecosystem, which relies heavily on misinformation and conspiracy theories to grow and mobilize, is about to become very important.

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That’s it for this (yet again, late) dispatch.

I’m readying a steady stream of content for the end of the year, so have no fear: There will be plenty of Bug-eyed and Shameless over the holidays.

In the Star this weekend, I had a piece on Canada’s embarrassing foreign policy.

My pipeline of other content is set to become unblocked shortly, so I’ll have some interesting features to share in the near future.

As always, subscribers are encouraged to spark a conversation in the comments or the chat if anything in here — or anywhere else — piques their interest.

Until next time!