What Howard Stern interviews with Donald Trump are archived and where can they be accessed?
Executive summary
A multi-decade set of Howard Stern interviews with Donald Trump—totaling roughly 15 hours and spanning dozens of conversations—has been collected and made available through several unofficial archives and news organizations, but access has been uneven: transcripts and indexed collections appeared on sites like Factba.se and specialized fan projects, some audio items are preserved on Internet Archive and in media reporting, and commercial rights-holders (notably SiriusXM) have opposed third‑party reposting, producing takedowns and limiting what Stern himself will rebroadcast [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6].
1. What exists: the scope of Stern–Trump material and centralized indexes
Researchers have quantified the corpus: Donald Trump’s spoken time on Stern’s program has been measured at about 15 hours, 8 minutes and 52 seconds, with more than 104,000 words attributed to Trump across interviews—figures compiled and reported by Roll Call and used by data projects that created searchable topic pages [1] [7]. Factba.se and related aggregators built searchable archives and transcripts which were widely cited when the collection surfaced in 2017 [2]. Fan-driven sites such as “Trump on Stern,” created by Chris Herbert and Barry Rubin, also catalogued nearly every appearance they could find and invited contributions to fill gaps [8].
2. Where audio and transcripts were posted publicly
Portions of Stern–Trump audio and at least some episode uploads have been placed on public repositories: The Daily Beast’s July 16, 2008 Stern–Trump interview was archived on the Internet Archive, for example, and CNN’s AC360 program that discussed Stern’s interviews with Trump is likewise available via Internet Archive holdings [3] [9]. Showbiz411 and other outlets pointed readers to Factba.se’s searchable collection when the aggregated resource was released, underscoring that both audio and transcripts were made available online through these intermediary sites [2].
3. Legal pushback and removal: why access is uneven
Those aggregated archives were not universally permanent. Multiple reports document that an unofficial archive containing decades of Stern interviews with Trump was taken offline after a DMCA takedown, and Techdirt reported SiriusXM used copyright claims to suppress reposting of material that Factba.se and others had posted [4] [5]. Coverage framed the conflict as a clash between archival/public-interest impulses and the program owner’s commercial/copyright control, with debate over fair use for a public‑figure interview archive [5].
4. Howard Stern’s own stance and what remains off-limits
Howard Stern has publicly said he will not rebroadcast his past Trump interviews on his own platforms, noting that many of the recordings were originally aired and that he does not intend to dig into the archive to replay material in light of contemporary political context [6]. That statement, reported by AP, makes clear that even if third-party caches exist, the original broadcaster is not proactively making past Trump interviews part of current programming [6].
5. Practical guidance: where to look and what to expect
For researchers seeking Stern–Trump material, the best starting points are the cataloging projects and media archives: Factba.se’s topic pages and the “Trump on Stern” fan archive list interviews and links [2] [8], Roll Call’s analysis provides a map of the corpus and its length [1], and discrete audio files or TV features have been preserved on Internet Archive [3] [9]. Be prepared for gaps: some aggregated audio was removed after copyright claims, and Stern’s and SiriusXM’s positions mean the flagship broadcaster is unlikely to reissue a comprehensive official archive [4] [5] [6].
6. Interpretation and competing agendas behind the archives
Archival promoters framed the collection as a public‑interest resource illuminating a major public figure’s outsize media record, while rights-holders emphasized commercial and copyright control—an inherent tension between historical transparency and intellectual property enforcement reported across outlets covering the takedowns [2] [5] [4]. Media reports, fan projects, and commercial news aggregators each carry implicit agendas—scholarship and public scrutiny on one hand, traffic and monetization on the other—so users should read transcripts and audio with awareness of those contexts and the patchwork nature of available material [2] [8] [5].