President Donald Trump Takes To YouTube And Facebook To Deliver First Weekly Address

Though Twitter may be his preferred platform for firing off early morning rants, it looks like YouTube and Facebook will play a critical role in President Donald Trump’s communications arsenal — at least in terms of video. President Trump delivered yesterday his very first Weekly Address on the White House YouTube channel and Facebook page — continuing a tradition set forth by President Barack Obama.

(Now, all of the YouTube videos from Obama’s tenure have been moved onto a new page titled The Obama White House.)

In President Trump’s first Address, which already has 1.5 million views and is in seventh place on YouTube’s Trending page, he discusses what he has accomplished in his first week in office, including meeting with top manufacturing companies to discuss keeping jobs in America, and signing a flurry of executive orders to repeal Obamacare, withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, begin construction on a Mexican border wall, and more. (In comparison, President Obama’s final Weekly Address, posted two weeks ago, counts just 130,000 views).

And in a first, the Weekly Address was also streamed live on Facebook, where it has accrued roughly 5 million views. “This administration has hit the ground running at a record pace — everybody’s talking about it,” Trump says in the roughly three-minute vlog (below). “We’re doing it with speed and we’re doing it with intelligence.”

This isn’t the first time that President Trump has taken to YouTube to speak directly to the American people. In November, he took to his transition team’s official channel — rather than his campaign page, which no longer looks to be active — to lay out some of his plans for his first 100 days as president.