Former President Donald Trump plans to be interviewed by billionaire supporter Elon Musk online Monday night in the latest example of a political figure bypassing major media outlets to control the questioning.
Their chat is set to start at 8 p.m. ET and will be streamed live on Trump's largely dormant account on X, the social media website formerly known as Twitter that Musk bought for $44 million in October 2022.
It will be Trump's second sit-down with a non-journalist this month, following his Aug. 5 appearance on the Kick website with Adin Ross, a 23-year-old video game streamer who's repeatedly interviewed Holocaust-denying white nationalist Nick Fuentes, a 2022 dinner guest at Trump's Florida estate.
Trump also recently played a round of golf with two-time U.S. Open winner Bryson DeChambeau, with a video recap posted on YouTube generating nearly 11 million views.
Trump's online interviews follow his contentious appearance at last month's National Association of Black Journalists conference, where he sparred with Rachel Scott of ABC News and accused her of being "very rude."
They also come after he upended traditional political communication through his frequent use of Twitter during his winning 2016 campaign and subsequent four years in the White House.
Trump was banned from Twitter over his tweets following the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol but Musk personally reinstated his account a month after buying the site.
Trump, however, has all but abandoned X in favor of his own Truth Social website.
Trump's Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, has come under fire from Republicans for giving no interviews and answering only five questions from reporters since launching her campaign on July 21 after President Joe Biden dropped his reelection bid.
Biden shattered the record for holding off on a solo presidential news conference by waiting 64 days after he took office in 2021, according to data compiled by the American Presidency Project of the University of California at Santa Barbara.
Since then, Biden has averaged 10.6 news conferences annually as of July 20, less than half the 22 Trump averaged and the fewest since President Ronald Reagan's record low of 5.8 during 1981-1989.
Biden has also averaged 123 informal exchanges with reporters, compared to Trump's record-high average of 178.
Last year, New York City Mayor Eric Adams made headlines by giving his press secretary a promotion to become the city's first deputy mayor for communications, along with a $40,000 raise to $252,000 a year.
At the time, Adams said the new post was needed because traditional media outlets weren't adequately acknowledging how he was "doing a damn good job."
"The antiquated method of communicating with your constituency, of just through the daily tabloids, is just not acceptable anymore," the mayor said. "We have to communicate directly to our consumers."
During this year's Iowa State Fair, Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds held a series of one-on-one interviews with GOP presidential candidates after Republicans started skipping the Des Moines Register's annual "soapbox" event there.
Reynolds told Fox News at the time that her "Fair-Side Chats" would "offer the candidates an incredible opportunity to share their message directly with Iowans" and "go beyond just the issues of a presidential campaign and allow fairgoers to see who the candidates really are."
During the 2016 presidential race, Hillary Clinton's campaign tried to counter publication of the book "Clinton Cash" by producing a "fact-checking" video, posting a highly critical memo on the Medium website and using social media to portray author Peter Schweitzer as a political partisan.
"It's almost media 3.0," Boston University advertising professor and political consultant Tobe Berkovitz told NPR at the time. "If 1.0 was dealing with the press and 2.0 was trying to circumvent the press and going to friendly sites, 3.0 is, 'Why even bother with that? Just invent your own.'"
