Michael Wolff Suggests Trump Team Floated a Don Jr. Outdoors Show as a Way for Warners to Curry Favor With White House (2025)

In a Monday story for New York magazine, Michael Wolff said Warner Bros. Discovery “confirmed” to him an unusual suggestion they received from within “the Trump orbit”: If the company wants to curry favor with the administration, maybe give Donald Trump Jr. “a hunting and fishing show” on Discovery Channel. The purported Trump insider pointed to a recent (and very lucrative) Amazon deal for a documentary on First Lady Melania Trump as an “example” of how to “advantageously interact with the White House.”

The implications were laid out in the penultimate paragraph of a lengthy Wolff profile on Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav.

“WBD confirmed that a company representative recently reached out the Trump orbit seeking advice about how the company might advantageously interact with the White House and improve its Trump-age odor,” Wolff wrote. “The reported message was to look at the example of Amazon and Jeff Bezos paying Melania Trump $40 million to participate in a documentary about herself. Don Jr. might like a hunting and fishing show on the Discovery Channel, they were told.”

When The Hollywood Reporter reached the White House via email, we received this in response: “Michael Wolff is a lying sack of shit and has been proven to be a fraud. He routinely fabricates stories originating from his sick and warped imagination, only possible because he has a severe and debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome that has rotted his peanut-sized brain.” Steven Cheung

Cheung is White House Communications Director. It should be noted that the same exact statement has been shared repeatedly with members of the media who bring Michael Wolff’s name up to the administration.

THR reached out to Warner Bros. Discovery for this story, but we did not receive a response.

Zaslav is a Democrat, but if he wants to pull off any more mergers even remotely resembling the 2021 blockbuster combination of his Discovery, Inc. and AT&T’s WarnerMedia, he will need an OK from Trump’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). WBD has taken steps toward spinning off its cable-channels business from its streaming platforms (mostly Max) and studios. NBCUniversal is further down the road on doing basically the same thing with the temporarily named SpinCo.; there has been some speculation that the unwanted NBCU cable channels headed to SpinCo. and the Discovery portfolio of networks could potentially combine.

The creation of Warner Bros. Discovery brought CNN under Zaslav’s purview, causing friction between he and Trump, who won the presidency in 2016 and 2024, but lost in 2020. Zaslav has called CNN a “crown jewel” of the mega-company he now oversees, but the cable news network has consistently been Trump’s no. 1 nemesis (of many nemeses) in the media.