Donald Trump delivered a speech at the National Religious Broadcasters convention Thursday night in Nashville that touched on all his greatest hits. The Democrats are “evil,” the U.S. is now a “Communist state,” and Hungary’s authoritarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orban, is a “strong man” and “a friend of mine.” But there was one new element tailor-made for his audience of Christian broadcasters: Trump pledged to save AM radio.
“I will protect the content that is pro-God. We’re going to protect pro-God… context and content,” Trump said, appearing to initially misstate the words in his teleprompter in typical fashion.
“To that end, at the request of the NRB, I will do my part to protect AM radio in our cars. We like to listen to AM radio because you know what we’re listening to. Millions of Americans value listening to Christian broadcasters and you’re under siege,” Trump continued.
Roughly 20 million people listen to religious radio each week, which can mostly be found on the AM band. And it’s a big problem for the future of Christian radio if car manufacturers completely stop providing AM functionality in their cars. Volkswagen and Tesla no longer offer AM radio in their latest models and while Ford had planned to drop AM, the company reversed course last year after an outcry.
The AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act, which would require the U.S. Department of Transportation to institute a rule requiring carmakers to put AM radios in their vehicles, was proposed last year but has not yet come up for a vote. The bill has bipartisan support, an unusual thing in such a starkly divided Congress.
Rep. Josh Gottheimer, a Democrat from New Jersey, has tried to position the existence of AM radio as a public safety issue, noting that AM stations helped deliver crucial information in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Gottheimer has also been trying to shame Tesla and the company’s CEO Elon Musk into putting AM radios into cars.
“I would think that if Elon Musk has enough money to buy Twitter and send rockets to space, he can afford to include AM radio in his Teslas. Instead, Elon Musk and Tesla and other car manufacturers are putting public safety and emergency response at risk,” Gottheimer said in a press release on his website.
Sen. Ted Cruz, a Republican from Texas, has tried similar arguments about public safety, though he hasn’t attacked Musk, who many on the right view as an ideological ally.
“AM radio signals cover a much larger geographical area than FM radio signals or cell towers and continue to function during hurricanes, tornadoes, or other severe weather events when other communications networks can be unreliable and stop working,” Cruz said in a press release from 2023.
And it’s clear that guys like Cruz, a strong supporter of Trump, will help to work with any potential Trump administration of the future to pass legislation making sure AM survives.
But Trump is notoriously fickle and it’ll be interesting to see if he ever brings up the AM issue in any speech of the future. Curiously, Trump peppered his speech Thursday night with many causal uses of curse words that would likely be a shock to most conservative Christian audiences. But Trump gets a pass, of course, as a man who delivered many wins for his base, including the overturning of Roe v. Wade, which had been the law of the land for 50 years.
Trump’s speech, which is available in its entirety on YouTube, would be notable in any other political era for how extreme it sounded. But after four years of a Trump presidency, and another four years of Trump falsely claiming he won the 2020 election, it’s not really news when the former president uses dangerous rhetoric to talk about his political opponents.
Trump insisted in his speech Thursday that the greatest threat to the United States wasn’t any external threat like Russia or China but fellow Americans, whom he called “sick” people. And, believe it or not, there’s a good chance Trump could win the 2024 presidential election this November. In fact, a recent poll from Morning Consult has Trump up, with 45% of respondents choosing the likely Republican nominee. President Biden was chosen by just 41%.
Whoever wins in November, it seems safe to say AM radio will be a political football for years to come. It’s a safety issue for many politicians. And it’s an existential crisis for Christian broadcasters who have used AM as a platform for decades.
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