And she isn’t trying to be a journalist at all.
And she isn’t trying to be a journalist at all.
T he best coverage of SpaceX’s sixth flight test of Starship came from an unlikely source. It wasn’t a reputable reporter at a prestigious publication. It wasn’t an expert with a long list of impressive degrees who could explain the advanced technology. It was a young girl still in high school: Kai Trump, the 17-year-old granddaughter of our president-elect.
While plenty of Trump family members have become celebrities, Kai has flown under the radar. She appeared briefly at the 2024 Republican National Convention and delivered a nice speech about her grandfather, whom she clearly loves and admires. Now, just as Donald has grown a devoted fan base, Kai is slowly growing a following on her YouTube channel. Like plenty of other teenage girls, she posts videos about her daily activities and hobbies — but in her content, some of the most powerful people in the world can be detected in the background.
Perhaps unintentionally, Kai’s video blogging has provided us with memorable journalism. In her video titled “Watching a Rocket Launch at SpaceX with Elon Musk!” Kai gives us a peek of the Trump Force One — and I’m definitely not jealous that she got to sit in the front of the plane. Once she arrives at the site to watch the rocket launch, we get the inside scoop.
The event attendees ask Elon simple questions, the kinds of practical but curious questions normal people have. We watch Elon himself explain details about the rocket to Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and others. “We’ll see if some of the changes we made to the heat shield are better,” Elon says, adding that “the last launch, you could actually see where it was getting really hot ’cuz we would lose some heat shields, so it was like kind of glowing.” Not only do we learn about the rocket, but we get a glimpse of personality: “I asked Grandpa, ‘Would you go in it?’” Kai relays. “And he goes ‘no.’” (Donald is in the blurry background, wearing his signature red hat.)
Kai provided more behind-the-scenes exclusives in her Election Night coverage at the gilded palace known as Mar-a-Lago. You’d expect to see snippets of chaos on the stressful evening, complete with campaign interns running around and an espresso fountain to keep everyone awake until the end. But everyone seems calm and composed — although Kai eats a rice-crispy treat and admits to “stress eating.” With her warm and outgoing personality, Kai makes us feel as though we’re alongside everyone and nervously watching the televisions as the votes are tallied. Before taking a big family photo, Donald tells a photographer, “We have to get Elon with his boy, that gorgeous, perfect boy.” (I guess Elon is just part of the family now.) We see Barron tower above the rest of the family — he’s the sole participant in the big photo to maintain a stoic stare, and he is silent during the vlog. But a recently viral video clip from Election Night shows that Barron has lost that Slovenian accent from childhood.
Why is Kai’s blogging valuable? After all, she isn’t providing us with incisive analyses of controversial policies. Well, politicians are often mysterious and untrustworthy; we see them as manipulative elites largely motivated by self-interest. But Kai’s homemade videos humanize the Trump family, which has been relentlessly demonized by the legacy media for more than eight years. In Kai’s blogs, the Trumps seem shockingly normal and relatable — traits that rarely, if ever, shine through in professional interviews, campaign speeches, or onstage debates because we always suspect that the polished candidates are lying to maintain a particular image and appeal. Nothing unusual emerges about the Trump family in Kai’s YouTube snippets, even though their lives are certainly unordinary. Rather, they come across as down-to-earth neighbors who would invite you to their annual barbecue. Kai might have inadvertently developed the most effective PR strategy for the (in)famous family.
Plenty of people have noted the shifting media landscape: Publications that were previously respected are struggling to maintain an ounce of credibility, independent writers are gaining audiences through nontraditional platforms such as Substack and X, and people receive their news through unconventional sources including podcasts and social media. Kai’s video-blogging is another dimension of the changing information ecosystem. Never before have we had this particular type of intimate, authentic documentation of the presidential family; future historians will pull from diaries, letters, and YouTube videos. We’ll never get the entire story, but Kai’s material has given us a fuller picture.