Anti-Trump podcast MeidasTouch is rivaling Joe Rogan. Does it have staying power?

Ben Meiselas is pacing in front of his home in the foothills of the Verdugo Mountains in Los Angeles, talking on the phone with one hand, a Starbucks coffee cup in the other.

He wraps his call. He has 588 unread text messages. But he’s thinking about something else: his frenetic YouTube schedule.

“We will have already had a video up at 4 a.m., 5:30 a.m., 7, and 8:30 is coming,” Meiselas said.

As he enters his house, three Maltese terriers scuttle around. Meiselas walks to his office behind glass doors. An elevated laptop sits on a desk, a camera is affixed to a tripod and bright lights stand on either side. This is where he does his daily dissections of President Trump’s actions and words. It’s all off the cuff, a skill he honed during his previous career as a trial lawyer.

“The best opening statements I’ve ever given were not scripted. The best closing arguments were not scripted,” he said.

He knocks out a 14-minute video riffing on the day’s news, mostly Trump-bashing commentary. He sends it to his team to edit. Then he grabs his phone to workshop a title in a group chat with MeidasTouch staffers. He settles on “Trump has DISASTER THURSDAY as WALLS CLOSE IN,” abiding by the all-caps style that has become a signature of videos by MeidasTouch, the prolific progressive media operation he runs with his two brothers.

It’s not lost on Meiselas that Trump, his main target, made the same all-caps text style famous on social media.

“You have to fight fire with fire these days,” said Meislas with a laugh.

‘I think we need the opposite of Joe Rogan’

MeidasTouch stands out in an online streaming world dominated by conservatives and what’s become known as “the manosphere,” a collection of online content creators geared toward male audiences and led by Joe Rogan.

It’s one of the few left-leaning video podcasts topping YouTube’s rankings, and it has even, at times, dethroned Rogan’s coveted No. 1 position on the platform’s podcast charts. That’s prompted some to wonder whether Meiselas will become the Rogan of the left, a question he has tired of but answers anyway.

“People wanted me to be that,” he said. “I think we need the opposite of Joe Rogan.”

Though Meiselas claims he’s less divisive than Rogan, the MeidasTouch approach is not aimed at bridging political differences. It’s unapologetically partisan, like an amped-up MSNBC. But Meiselas rejects the comparison. He says he doesn’t share any DNA with cable news, pointing out that he doesn’t hold debates with the political opposition. That’s by design. People are sick of cable news political roundtables, he says.

“They still think that people want to see the split screen. Here’s the left. Here’s the right. Watch them fight. Let’s go to a commercial break. People don’t want to see that, I think, any more,” Meiselas said.

Millions do still consume cable news every day, yet MeidasTouch is a formidable competitor.

Figures from YouTube Meiselas shared with NPR show that the MeidasTouch YouTube channel draws around 300 million views each month, around the same as Fox News and MSNBC receive on YouTube monthly.

Meiselas and his brothers, Brett (a former video editor for The Ellen DeGeneres Show) and Jordy (who previously worked in marketing), along with about 30 other contributors — including former Trump lawyer turned critic Michael Cohen — pump out videos on YouTube about every 90 minutes and blanket other platforms, including Instagram, TikTok and Substack, with their content.

Other popular progressive media companies including Pod Save America, More Perfect Union and the Young Turks are also capitalizing on the second Trump presidency, but whether it’s the Meiselas brothers’ affable personalities, the sheer volume of content, their knack for working the algorithms, or some undetermined combination, MeidasTouch is the pacesetter of the pack.

Meiselas says viewers enjoy the way he zooms in on the often rambling asides of Trump’s speeches — what Trump has described as his “weave” — which Meiselas says most of the mainstream media ignores.

“They would say, ‘Donald Trump is talking about making things affordable.’ And I’d watch these speeches and be like, ‘Literally did you watch these speeches that I just watched?’ That’s not what he said. Maybe that was thirty seconds. Why’d you do his work for him? You edited the speech to give him the best 30-second soundbite,” he said. “That was the craziest speech I’ve ever seen.”

From political ads to streaming powerhouse

Originally from Long Island, Meiselas, 40, the eldest of the brothers, was in his legal career drawn to high-profile cases that thrust him into the spotlight. He represented former NFL quarterback and racial injustice activist Colin Kaepernick, and he filed a class-action lawsuit for attendees of the ill-planned Fyre Festival.

During Trump’s first term, in the midst of the pandemic, the brothers formed a political action committee and released political ads mocking Trump that went viral online. Eventually, they morphed the political operation into a rapid-response anti-Trump news organization, which is now being supercharged in the president’s second term.

MeidasTouch is raking in millions of dollars in advertising revenue a year — Meiselas wouldn’t say exactly how much — by tapping into an audience of frustrated progressives, some of whom feel abandoned by traditional media.

“The audience is moving in these directions. And a number of mainstream news organizations just are not equipped to appeal to them on the kinds of terms as those people might want,” said Bill Grueskin, a professor at Columbia University School of Journalism and a former editor at The Wall Street Journal.

In Trump’s first term, outlets including The Washington Post and MSNBC received what analysts called a “Trump bump” for confronting the president and his policies. This time around, online streamers are emerging as the biggest winners, Grueskin said.

“There are just multiple sources of outrage every day,” he said. “And outrage is a very powerful driver of subscriptions, of loyalty, of people’s time.”

On top of that, because online streamers are not bound to the journalism industry’s standards of fairness and neutrality, they can explain and comment on the news in edgier and more furious ways than most mainstream outlets, said Edward Wasserman, journalism professor at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.

“I don’t think the media are able to do that. They can provide the ammunition for that kind of attack on Trump, but they can’t really give it a voice the way these podcast people can.”

Meiselas views his role in the news ecosystem in somewhat lofty terms — not just as an updated version of a political shock jock, but as an independent voice informing the public about the happenings in Washington.

He argues audiences will still flock to his media outfit long after Trump leaves office, even if the president is now the central driver of his business.

“I don’t think that the idea of being updated and consuming news and being knowledgeable is ever going to go away. Unfortunately, there’s always going to be threats to democracy, to peoples’ freedoms, to peoples’ rights,” Meiselas said, sounding like the former civil rights lawyer he is. “There’s the day-to-day response of trying to put out fires, but then there’s the generational building. We’re trying to keep this network building.”