Christopher Ruddy

Ruddy is a long-time member of Trump’s clubs, including Mar-a-Lago and Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Fla.

Ruddy appears regularly on networks like CNN, MSNBC and his own Newsmax, to discuss his take on the President’s policies and positions, While generally supportive of Trump, Ruddy says he disagrees with some of the administration immigration and healthcare policies. Ruddy has argued the Republican party should be more open to legal immigration. He also believes Republicans should embrace a policy of expanding Medicaid for uninsured.

After becoming President, in April 2017 the New York Times identified Ruddy as one of the 20 people who were part of Trump’s kitchen cabinet who he calls for advice and support.

On June 12, 2017, Ruddy claimed that Trump met with Robert Mueller to offer him the job of FBI Director just days before it was announced that he would be appointed special counsel for the Russian investigation. Ruddy did not provide any proof of this. He also claimed in the same interview that Trump was considering terminating Mueller's position as special prosecutor.

According to a 2014 profile in Bloomberg Businessweek, Newsmax generates over $100 million revenue annually. CNN reported that Newsmax was the third most-viewed political website in the nation, behind itself and Politico.

In 2014, Newsmax launched a full-fledged television news channel, Newsmax TV. The channel launched on Directv and Dish, and soon added Verizon Fios, giving the new network a reach of over 42 million cable/satellite homes. Ruddy told Bloomberg Businessweek his goal was to offer the nation "a kinder, gentler" version of Fox News, and said his plan was to target the nation's baby boomers with more practical information on health, finance and lifestyle issues. As of 2019, the TV channel is carried on all major cable systems, including Xfinity, Spectrum, AT&T U-verse, Optimum, Suddenlink, Cox and several dozens smaller systems and OTT platforms.

In July 2012, Ruddy was a member of the official delegation that accompanied President Clinton on his five-nation tour of Africa, reviewing Clinton Foundation initiatives in the area of health care, HIV/AIDS programs, education, and poverty alleviation.

A 2011 New York Times story on Newsmax detailed the company's growing influence, especially Republican politics and noted that almost all of the party's presidential candidates had made a "pilgrimage" to the company's south Florida headquarters for a meeting with Ruddy.

In January 2010, Britain's Daily Telegraph ranked Ruddy as one of the "100 Most Influential Conservatives" in the U.S. The paper said: "Chris Ruddy is an increasingly powerful and influential player in the conservative media and beyond."

During a 2010 campaign swing through Florida, President Clinton departed from his schedule to make a visit to Newsmax's offices in West Palm Beach. After a private meeting with Ruddy, Clinton toured Newsmax's offices and met with its staff.

In addition to its news portal, Newsmax.com, the company publishes Newsmax magazine and a host of health and financial newsletters. A March 2009 profile of Ruddy and Newsmax by Forbes described his media company as the "great right hope" of the Republican Party and said after just a decade of operations it had become a "media powerhouse". Political analyst Dick Morris told Forbes that Newsmax had become the "most influential Republican-leaning media outlet" in the nation.

A May 2009 New York Times Sunday magazine profile on the former president, "The Mellowing of William Jefferson Clinton," offered more details of the relationship between Ruddy and Clinton. The Arkansas Times said details about the friendship between Ruddy and Clinton in The New York Times profile was the "most amazing revelation" of their profile of the former president. Ruddy told the Times though he remained a "Reagan conservative", he had re-evaluated the Clinton presidency and suggested he had earned high marks as president for success in ending welfare, keeping government in check, and supporting free trade. Ruddy also noted that the Clinton Foundation was doing remarkable work globally.

In the fall of 2007, Ruddy published a positive interview with former president Clinton on Newsmax.com, followed by a positive cover story in Newsmax magazine. The New York Times said with reference to the event that politics had made "strange bedfellows."

Throughout his career, Ruddy has often staked out positions at variance with the Republican party. For example, Ruddy broke with the Bush Administration on the Iraq War, and was one of the first conservatives to do so. "I came out very strongly against the war in Iraq when it wasn't in vogue, back in 2004," Ruddy told The Palm Beach Post. "I lost some subscribers. But we are close to spending a trillion dollars on the war and there is no exit strategy," he added. "Lots of Republicans and conservatives are not that gung-ho on the war anymore and I think we broke the ice."

According to Ruddy, he first met businessman Donald Trump in 1999, who was speaking to a civic group in West Palm Beach, Florida. Ruddy soon became friends with Trump, and Newsmax became one of the first conservative media to take the billionaire’s presidential ambitions seriously.

Following Ruddy's work at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review in 1998, he started Newsmax with a $25,000 investment. Later, Richard Mellon Scaife, an heir to the Mellon banking fortune who owned the Tribune-Review, became a minority investor in the company. According to a 2010 report quoting Forbes, Ruddy raised a total of $15 million from private investors in the company’s start-up years in the 1990s.

Newsmax Media started in 1998 when, impressed with the way The Drudge Report had become a major player in news, Ruddy decided to start an Internet news company. With financial support from investors, Ruddy founded Newsmax Media. The NewsMax.com website launched on September 16, 1998, with Ruddy serving as columnist and editor-in-chief. In addition to the website, the company publishes a monthly magazine, also called Newsmax. After starting Newsmax, Ruddy was featured in a January 1999 Newsweek cover story as one of twenty "Stars of the New News."

Since 1996, Ruddy has been Media Fellow at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University. Ruddy was a founding board member of the Financial Publishers Association (FIPA), an industry trade group whose goal is "to share knowledge of best business practices to help our members' publications grow and prosper, while empowering readers with unbiased, independent information".

In 1995 he joined the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review as a national correspondent covering the Clinton White House and other stories.

New York Post editor Eric Breindel recommended Ruddy for a job at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review owned by Richard Mellon Scaife. In November 1994, Ruddy was hired to investigate the story full-time by the Tribune-Review. In between Ruddy's departure from the Post and joining the Tribune-Review, he put out a report through the Western Journalism Center criticizing the Fiske investigation as inadequate. With the help of Scaife, the Center took out full-page ads in major newspapers to promote the report (Scaife gave $330,000 to the Center in 1994–95 before ending his support).

Ruddy then moved to the New York Post, which he joined as an investigative reporter late in the summer of 1993. After initially writing about abuse of Social Security disability benefits, he focused on the Whitewater scandal involving then-president Bill Clinton.

Ruddy grew up on Long Island, New York, where his father was a police lieutenant in Nassau County. He graduated from Chaminade High School in Mineola, New York before graduating summa cum laude with a degree in history from St. John's University, New York in 1987. He earned a master's degree in public policy from the London School of Economics and also studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem while in undergrad. Ruddy holds an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from St. John's University.

Christopher Ruddy (born January 28, 1965) is the CEO of Newsmax Media, which publishes Newsmax.com and broadcasts the Newsmax TV network. Media-industry magazine Folio named Ruddy to its "Folio 40," an "annual list of magazine industry influencers". Multichannel News named Ruddy one of its 10 “TV News Titans.”

He was a member of the International Council, chaired by Henry Kissinger, at the CSIS, a bipartisan Washington, D.C., think tank focused on national security and foreign affairs. Ruddy also served as a representative on the U.S. delegation headed by Senators Joseph Lieberman and Lindsey Graham to the NATO 44th Munich Security Conference.