On the morning of Tuesday, May 12, 2026, President Donald J. Trump called into Sid Rosenberg's Sid & Friends in the Morning on TalkRadio 77 WABC New York. The conversation ranged across the war with Iran, the standoff with China, the New York mayoral race, and the future of American manufacturing. Somewhere in the middle of all of it, the President made a point that almost every major outlet either buried or skipped.
He told Rosenberg — and through Rosenberg, the country — that he wanted to stop the automakers from removing AM radio from American vehicles. He said he had stopped them once already in his first term. He said he was going to stop them again. He sounded genuinely puzzled that this was even a fight.
The Hill ran an op-ed three days later titled "Congress should back Trump's push to keep AM radio in cars." The Communications Daily trade publication confirmed the President's intent the same day. The New York Post, Breitbart, Human Events, and the religious broadcasting press picked it up. The legacy press treated it as a quirk — a man who likes old technology defending old technology.
That framing is wrong. President Trump's push to preserve AM radio in vehicles is not nostalgia. It is one of the most strategically coherent positions he has taken since returning to office, and it sits at the exact intersection of every fight he has been having for a decade: the fight against platform censorship, the fight against the surveillance economy, the fight against the regulatory capture of consumer industries by a handful of trade groups, and the fight to preserve the cultural and informational infrastructure that put him in the White House twice.
It is also, and this is the part nobody wants to say out loud, a fight he is presently positioned to lose — not because Congress will refuse him, but because the bill itself, the AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act of 2025 (H.R. 979 / S. 315), is structured as a transition agreement, not a preservation statute. It expires after eight years. The President is fighting for a bill that is a negotiated industry compromise dressed in public-safety rhetoric, and he is fighting for it because in 2026 it is the only available vehicle.
This is the story of why the President is in this fight, why he is right to be in it, and why the citizens listening to him need to understand what the bill actually does — and what it does not.
Part IWhat the President Has Actually Said
The public record on President Trump's position spans four distinct moments across three years. They are worth walking through in order, because the press has flattened them into a single line.
February 22, 2024 — Nashville, NRB convention
Trump addressed the National Religious Broadcasters convention. Christian broadcasters had been organizing against the automakers' removal of AM since 2023. Trump told them directly that he would do his part to protect AM radio in cars, framing it explicitly as a defense of pro-God content on the airwaves. He told the room that Christian broadcasting was under siege. The pledge was specific and on the record.
January 8, 2026 — Hugh Hewitt interview
Trump endorsed the AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act by name. He said he liked AM radio in every car, that he was in favor of it, and that his administration was going to be doing something on it. Hewitt's audience is itself an AM audience. The endorsement was both a policy signal and a coalition message.
May 12, 2026 — WABC call with Rosenberg
The President expressed something close to disbelief that the removal was happening, asked why the automakers were doing it, called it ridiculous, and committed to stopping it. He also noted — and this is the historical detail that has gone completely unreported — that he had personally delayed automakers from stripping AM out of vehicles during his first term, from 2017 through 2021. He framed the current fight as the same fight, picked up again.
That first-term claim is verifiable. Through 2017–2021, the major automaker removal wave had not yet hit. Ford did not announce its AM removal until 2022. BMW, Mazda, Polestar, Rivian, Volkswagen, Volvo, and Tesla pushed their removals through 2022 and 2023. What Trump appears to be referring to is the pre-emptive industry pressure he applied through his FCC and through informal channels — pressure that was real, that delayed publicly announced removals during his term, and that evaporated the moment a new administration took office and the EV mandate posture changed.
The first-term context matters because it establishes that this is not a 2026 talking point. This is a position the President has held, acted on, and re-engaged for nearly a decade.
Part IIThe People Around Him Are Already In The Fight
Three figures in the President's orbit have been engaged on AM radio longer and more publicly than the President himself. Their positions tell you the administration's posture is institutional, not personal.
Vice President J.D. Vance
Before he was Vice President, Senator Vance was a cosponsor of the AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act. He signed onto the legislation while serving in the Senate. He remains a public supporter. When a sitting Vice President was a Senate cosponsor of a bill the administration now wants passed, the political signal is unambiguous. The Vice President is not just aligned — he was on the bill before he was on the ticket.
FCC Chairman Brendan Carr
President Trump's chosen FCC chair has publicly endorsed the bill. Carr has spoken specifically about Hurricane Helene victims in western North Carolina who depended on AM stations like WWNC in Asheville to receive lifesaving information after cellular and internet service collapsed. The FCC, the agency with the most direct historical authority over receiver mandates, has put its weight behind the legislation through its Trump-appointed chairman.
Senator Ashley Moody
Now serving as the junior Senator from Florida after Governor DeSantis appointed her to replace Marco Rubio, Senator Moody is the same Ashley Moody who, as Florida Attorney General, led both major state AG letter campaigns in defense of AM radio. The first, in May 2023, was a sixteen-state coalition writing directly to the Electric Drive Transportation Association and the Zero Emission Transportation Association. The second, in October 2024, was an eleven-state coalition writing to congressional leadership after Hurricane Helene. Moody now sits in the chamber that has to pass the bill. She has been a primary architect of the political pressure that built it.
These three figures — Vance, Carr, Moody — represent the administration's communications, regulatory, and legislative flanks. All three are in the fight. All three were in the fight before the President's most recent public push.
Part IIIThe Coalition Inside The Coalition
To understand why the President is pushing this so hard, you have to understand who actually listens to AM radio in America. The press treats AM as a demographic relic. The political coalitions that depend on it tell a different story.
Talk radio is the artery
The conservative talk radio ecosystem — Rush Limbaugh's legacy network, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, Hugh Hewitt, Clay Travis and Buck Sexton, Glenn Beck, Dana Loesch, Ben Shapiro's terrestrial syndication, the Salem Radio Network's full lineup — lives substantially on AM. Salem Communications alone reaches tens of millions of weekly listeners. iHeartMedia's talk properties are heavily AM-anchored. When a driver in Ohio or Texas or rural Florida turns on the radio to hear unfiltered commentary that does not exist on platform television or streaming services, they are tuning AM.
Removing AM from the dashboard does not eliminate those shows from existence. It eliminates them from the place where most of their audience actually consumes them — the car. Mark Levin has framed the automaker removal effort as an assault on conservative speech directly. He is correct on the structural facts. Whether or not the automakers intend it, the practical effect of removing AM from vehicles is the suppression of an entire genre of political content that has been a primary organizing infrastructure of the modern conservative movement since the 1980s. The President knows this. His political consciousness was shaped by it. His 2016 campaign was built on it. His base still listens to it.
Christian broadcasting depends on AM
The National Religious Broadcasters represents the Christian media industry. Salem Communications, the Educational Media Foundation, Bott Radio Network, Family Radio, the various denominational broadcasting operations — all of them depend on a substantial AM footprint, particularly in small and mid-sized markets where FM dial space is saturated and AM is where teaching, preaching, and family programming actually live. NRB President Troy Miller has explicitly supported the bill. The constituency is real, organized, and politically aligned with the President.
Rural and agricultural America
The American Farm Bureau Federation backs the bill. The National Association of Farm Broadcasting attended the only substantive House subcommittee hearing on the legislation. In farm country, AM is not nostalgia. It is the actual infrastructure through which weather warnings, commodity prices, planting and harvest advisories, livestock auction reports, and county-level emergency communications travel.
The President's electoral base — agricultural America, the towns under 50,000 people, the counties where one AM station may be the only local news source operating — runs on this signal. Removing AM from new vehicles in those regions is not a consumer-preference change. It is the severing of an information lifeline.
Civil rights and minority-language broadcasting
The National Urban League has endorsed the bill. Spanish-language AM stations, Korean-language AM in Los Angeles and New York, Vietnamese-language AM in Houston, Haitian Creole AM in South Florida, Indigenous-language AM on tribal lands — all of these carry programming that does not exist on FM, does not exist on streaming, and does not exist anywhere else in the dashboard. They serve communities documented as disproportionately reliant on radio for news. The President's coalition has expanded into these communities. The bill protects their broadcasters along with everyone else's.
Public safety
The International Association of Fire Chiefs, the Major Cities Chiefs Association, seven former FEMA administrators spanning Clinton through Trump, eleven state attorneys general — the public safety apparatus is unified behind the bill on emergency-alerting grounds. This is the constituency that gave the President political cover to push hard. The case study they keep citing — Asheville, North Carolina, September and October 2024, after Hurricane Helene knocked out cell and internet service for days while WWNC AM stayed on the air carrying emergency information — is not a hypothetical. It happened. It was reported. It is the single cleanest real-world demonstration of why this band still matters.
Part IVThe Big Tech Angle The Legacy Press Will Not Touch
Here is the part of the President's position that connects to every other fight he has been having since 2020.
Modern vehicles are not just transportation. They are data collection platforms on wheels. The Mozilla Foundation's 2023 Privacy Not Included automotive report rated cars the worst consumer product category for privacy that Mozilla had ever reviewed across any sector. WIRED magazine tested the ten most popular cars sold in America and documented the data architecture: modern vehicles generate up to twenty-five gigabytes of data per hour while in operation.
What is being collected? Location data, second-by-second. Driving behavior — acceleration, braking, cornering, lane changes. Voice recordings from in-cabin microphones. Contacts and call logs synced from paired smartphones. Listening history — what station, when, how long, what you switched away from. Biometric data from steering-wheel sensors. Cabin temperature preferences. Seat position. Mirror position. In some makes, the eye-gaze tracking that powers driver-attention monitoring systems.
This data does not stay in the vehicle. It uplinks to manufacturer cloud platforms on schedules the consumer never sees and cannot disable. From there it flows into a commercial ecosystem that includes:
- Insurance underwriting markets, where driving-behavior data is sold to or shared with usage-based insurance carriers like Progressive's Snapshot, Allstate's Drivewise, State Farm's Drive Safe & Save, and behavior-priced insurers like Root.
- Advertising and marketing data brokers, who use location and listening patterns to build behavioral profiles for ad targeting.
- Connected-platform ecosystems — Apple CarPlay, Android Auto, Google Automotive Services, Amazon Alexa Auto — that integrate the dashboard into the larger surveillance economy of the smartphone-and-cloud platform stack.
- Government and law enforcement, increasingly through commercial data broker channels that bypass traditional warrant requirements.
The automakers are not removing AM because consumers stopped listening. Ford's own internal telemetry that justified the original removal — "less than five percent of customers listened to AM" — is itself a damning artifact. The automaker knew which station every driver had tuned, for how long, on what days, at what times. That telemetry existed before AM was removed. Ford did not need the AM band to surveil its drivers. It needed the slot in the dashboard for the next generation of connected-platform integration that generates revenue per driver-hour.
This is what President Trump means, in the colloquial Trump idiom, when he says the carmakers are doing something "ridiculous." From thirty thousand feet, removing AM looks like a cost-cutting decision. From the President's vantage point — the same vantage point that has driven his fights against social media platform censorship, Big Tech data harvesting, and the regulatory weaponization of private intermediaries against political speech — it is precisely the same pattern, applied to the dashboard. A free, public-interest, unbound channel is being replaced by a closed, monetized, identity-bound, surveillance-instrumented platform. The economic motive is one half. The information-control consequence is the other half. The President's position is that he has seen this movie before.
Corey Lewandowski, the President's 2016 campaign manager, has stated the equation directly. The carmakers do not care about consumers. They would rather force consumers onto infotainment devices that collect and sell third-party data than protect American lives during emergencies. That sentence — from a political operative not a privacy advocate — is the cleanest political distillation of why this fits Trump's coalition logic.
Part VThe Biden-Era EV Inheritance
There is a regulatory backstory that the President's allies have raised in committee testimony and the press has largely declined to engage.
The automakers driving AM removal are disproportionately the manufacturers most heavily invested in electric vehicle production. Tesla. BMW (EV lines). Mazda (EV lines). Polestar. Rivian. Volkswagen. Volvo. Ford originally (reversed). The technical justification offered to the public is that electric drivetrains generate broadband radio-frequency interference that degrades AM reception, and that shielding the receiver against that interference costs money.
The shielding fix exists. The Center for Automotive Research estimated the total industry compliance cost at $3.8 billion across the lifespan of the rule. CBO estimated several million dollars per year industry-wide. Both numbers are real. Both numbers are also dwarfed by the projected revenue from the connected-platform subscription economy that the dashboard slot enables.
The political point the President's allies are making — and that the legacy press refuses to translate — is this: the previous administration's EV mandates accelerated a fleet transition to vehicles whose engineering economics happened to align with stripping out a public-interest broadcast band. The two policies were not formally connected. The market effect was. The federal subsidies that pushed EV adoption became, in practical effect, subsidies for the buildout of the data-harvesting dashboard architecture, because the EV makers were leading the removal wave.
Representative Larry Bucshon of Indiana put it on the record during the House subcommittee proceedings: House Republicans had concerns that the Biden administration's electric vehicle mandates were exacerbating the AM removal problem. This is not a partisan talking point invented after the fact. It is in the committee record. The President is now positioned to reverse both — the EV mandate posture has already been rolled back, and the AM legislation is one floor vote away from being law.
Part VIThe Structural Reality That The President's Supporters Do Not Want To Hear
This is where the citizen journalist obligation parts ways with the political organizer obligation. Citizens who care about why the President is in this fight also need to know what the fight will and will not produce, because the bill the President is championing is not what most of his supporters think it is.
The AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act of 2025, in its current House Energy and Commerce Committee–reported form (H.R. 979, ordered reported September 17, 2025), does six things that need to be named clearly.
One: It sunsets in eight years
The original sunset was ten years. The bill's lead sponsor, Representative Gus Bilirakis of Florida, offered an amendment during the September 17 markup to shorten the sunset from ten years to eight. He told the committee, in his own words, that this represented a compromise across the industry and that eight years was better than zero. Ranking Member Frank Pallone of New Jersey said on the record that he believed Congress would need to revisit the bill before the sunset expired, but that his understanding was the bill would not move to the floor unless it contained the eight-year sunset.
The sunset is not based on consumer-use data. It is not based on vehicle-lifecycle analysis. It is not based on engineering. It is the automakers' veto price. Eight years is the window the industry needs to engineer the analog AM receiver out of next-generation vehicle architectures and have an IPAWS-integrated digital successor ready to substitute in. The bill is a managed glide path, not a permanent floor.
Two: It routes regulatory authority through DOT, not FCC
The historical precedent for mandating receiver hardware in consumer products — the 1962 All-Channel Receiver Act, which forced television manufacturers to include UHF tuners — was administered by the FCC. This bill grants the Department of Transportation brand-new authority over in-vehicle communications hardware that DOT has never had before. The FCC, the FEMA Administrator, and the NTIA are consultative. DOT is operational.
That structural choice plugs AM into the same regulatory pipeline that governs the connected-vehicle Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) architecture — V2V, V2I, V2X, the 5.9 GHz safety band — which is the same pipeline through which the digital successor to broadcast alerting will eventually flow. The DOT routing is the convergence pipeline.
Three: It pre-empts the states
Section 3(d) prohibits any state or political subdivision from prescribing or continuing in effect any law, regulation, or requirement applicable to AM access in passenger vehicles. The states whose attorneys general led the political campaign that built this bill — Florida, Iowa, Texas, and the rest — are now the states whose legislatures cannot independently go further. The federal floor becomes the federal ceiling. No state can mandate a longer protection than eight years. No state can require an additional resilient over-the-air band alongside AM. No state can impose stricter labeling, stricter telemetry-disclosure rules, or stricter consumer-protection requirements on head-unit data collection. The federal preemption is total.
Four: It commissions a GAO study whose participant list is the convergence map
Section 3(f) requires the Comptroller General to consult with DHS, FCC, NTIA, DOT, federal and state emergency-management officials, first responders, technology experts in "resilience and accessibility," radio broadcasters, and motor vehicle manufacturers.
Read who is not on the list: privacy and civil liberties organizations, independent and citizen journalism organizations, election integrity organizations, religious and ethnic broadcaster constituencies (separate from NAB), amateur radio emergency communications operators (ARRL, RACES, ARES), rural advocacy coalitions, disability-rights and accessibility advocates as advocates, defense and grid-resilience experts, and anyone representing the citizen interest in non-attributable, non-networked communications. The stakeholder list is the bilateral broadcaster-automaker negotiation extended into the post-enactment policy phase. The deliverable will reflect that.
Five: It mandates a five-year DOT review
The review covers "possible changes to IPAWS communication technologies that would enable resilient and accessible alerts to drivers and passengers." This is the statutory hook for replacing AM with a digital successor before the eight-year sunset hits. The bill is structurally designed to facilitate transition, not to preserve the analog floor in perpetuity.
Six: It does not address head-unit telemetry
Nothing in the bill restricts what the manufacturer's head unit logs about which station the driver tuned, when, for how long, where the vehicle was located, who was paired by Bluetooth, what voice commands were issued, or what data flowed from the cabin to the manufacturer's cloud platform. The bill protects the band. It does not protect the architecture. The dashboard remains a surveillance platform whether or not AM is present.
Part VIIWhat The President Is Walking Into
The President is championing the only bill on the table. That bill is better than no bill. Eight years of mandated AM availability is genuinely better than the alternative, which is the unconstrained continuation of the removal wave. The President's instinct on the substance — that the carmakers are doing something both economically self-interested and culturally hostile, and that the public interest demands intervention — is correct.
The President's framing is also correct on a deeper level. The infotainment systems are tracking devices. The data is being monetized. The replacement of AM is one piece of a much larger reconfiguration of the vehicle into a node in the surveillance economy. He has named the right enemy.
The risk is that the bill he is championing solves the surface problem — AM stays in the dashboard for eight years — while leaving the underlying problem untouched. After eight years, the rule expires. DOT's enforcement authority expires with it. There is no requirement to replace AM with anything. There is no protection of the receiver-side architecture against future censorship through hardware design. The GAO study and the DOT five-year review are pre-loaded to recommend a digital successor that the same seven industries — automotive, broadcasting consolidators, consumer electronics, wireless, satellite, streaming, insurance — will jointly engineer, monetize, and instrument. The dashboard convergence completes. AM was the legacy infrastructure that had to be cleared out before the convergence could finish.
If the President wants to do more than win the eight-year skirmish, the things that would actually matter — and that he is in a position to pursue through executive action even outside this bill — include:
- An FCC proceeding to mandate AM reception in motor vehicles under the same statutory framework that the 1962 All-Channel Receiver Act used for UHF television. This would establish a permanent receiver-side standard rather than a sunsetted DOT rule.
- A Department of Commerce or FTC proceeding on in-vehicle telemetry as a deceptive trade practice when the data collection is not clearly and conspicuously disclosed at the point of sale, with affirmative opt-out at the dashboard level rather than buried in click-through agreements.
- A National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) proceeding on the resilience requirements for emergency public alerting, with explicit findings on the non-substitutable role of analog broadcast in grid-down and telecom-down scenarios.
- An executive order directing federal agencies (DOT, GSA, DOD) to procure only vehicles equipped with AM reception for federal fleet purposes, establishing a procurement floor that the commercial market would track.
- An NHTSA safety rulemaking on driver-attention and emergency-alerting redundancy that requires multiple over-the-air alerting pathways — not just IPAWS-integrated cellular and satellite — in all new vehicles.
These are not hypothetical. They are within existing executive authority. They do not require Congress. They would not sunset in eight years. They would address the architecture, not just the band.
Part VIIIThe Omission
The op-ed in The Hill that prompted this analysis — Clay Travis writing under the headline that Congress should back Trump's push to keep AM radio in cars — got the politics right and the substance partially right. It correctly identified the data-harvesting infotainment systems as the underlying motive. It correctly named Senator Moody's role. It correctly invoked the seven former FEMA administrators. It correctly noted that Vice President Vance was a former cosponsor.
What it did not say — what no major outlet on the right or the left has been willing to say in print — is that the bill being championed is a negotiated industry compromise with an expiration date written by the automakers. The story the press is not telling is that the eight-year sunset is the price the automotive trade group, the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, demanded for permitting the bill to move at all. The story is that the broadcasters' lobby, the National Association of Broadcasters, agreed to the sunset because the alternative was no bill. The story is that the President's coalition is being asked to celebrate a victory that, by the bill's own terms, ends in 2034 unless re-fought from scratch.
That is the omission. It is not an indictment of the President for being in the fight. It is an indictment of the political environment that has reduced the available legislative remedy to a managed eight-year retreat.
The citizens who care about this — the rural listeners, the religious broadcasters, the talk-radio audience, the Spanish-language and Korean-language and Vietnamese-language and Haitian Creole and tribal-language audiences, the farmers who need weather and prices, the truckers who need road conditions, the families who need a way to hear an emergency alert when the cell tower is offline and the power is out — need to know that the bill on the table does not solve their problem permanently. It buys them eight years. The fight begins again in 2034. And in the meantime, the dashboard around the AM receiver is being rebuilt as a surveillance platform that the bill does not touch.
The President is right to be in this fight. He should win the bill. And then, with the executive authority he already possesses, he should do everything the bill does not.