President Donald Trump is perhaps the most influential person in the world right now, given how he can even make a leading American channel change its name. The MAGA cable channel, Real America’s Voice, was forced to rebrand after it came to light that the U.S. President would “confuse” it with Voice of America, which often paraded against Trump.
Gina Loudon, the host of Real America’s Voice, told the Senior Advisor for the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), Kari Lake, why the TV network rebranded in 2020. On Wednesday, Loudon revealed, “Fun little fact, that I’m not sure I’ve ever even told you, is that when I first started working for Real America’s Voice, it was just called America’s Voice.”
She continued, “And I asked President Trump if I could come to the White House and talk to him about it.”
“We were rebranding at that point from America’s Voice to Real America’s Voice because I kept hearing President Trump kind of confuses Voice of America with America’s Voice, and obviously those things were not related at all.”
Loudon further told the former Fox News anchor, Donald Trump mixed up the right-wing network, America’s Voice, with a government-funded radio network. She revealed that the other outlet in question was, Voice of America (VOA), which in the host’s own word produced content that was “destructive to this nation.”
She said, “It was confusing at the beginning, and thus we rebranded to Real America’s Voice. And President Trump definitely knows the difference at this point, but it was confusing.”
The Republican leader has his own issues with VOA. In March, he signed an executive order against the network, referring to it as “The Voice of Radical America.” His administration claimed that the move was taken in order to “ensure that taxpayers are no longer on the hook for radical propaganda.”
U.S. President Donald Trump urged Congress to “kill” Voice of America, marking his second attempt since returning to office.
Trump also criticized major news outlets at a NATO summit, calling CNN, MSNBC, and The New York Times “scum”. pic.twitter.com/g0SSxg0I0f
— 鳳凰資訊 PhoenixTV News (@PhoenixTV_News) June 26, 2025
The White House also cited an article by VOA to justify Donald Trump‘s order. The article titled “What Is ‘White Privilege’ and Whom Does It Help” was published in light of the Black Lives Matter Movement, reflecting on how white people also suffer but not as a direct result of their skin color.
The Trump administration claimed that the government-funded network had “been infiltrated by anti-American, pro-Islamic state interests” and that its message “had been compromised in a manner that was biased toward the Islamic state factions in Iran.”
Since the President’s order went into effect in March, at least 85 percent of the VOA staffers, meaning at least 1,400 employees were put on leave, many of which sued the Trump administration, claiming the massive layoffs were unlawful.
