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'Rigged!' Trump And MAGA Furious Over Pratt's Defeat In Los Angeles Primary

President Donald Trump and his movement of MAGA Republicans are venting their rage online after Republican reality TV star Spencer Pratt lost to two Democrats, Mayor Karen Bass and Councilmember Nithya Raman, in the Los Angeles mayoral race.

Because Trump has accused all of the politicians he opposes of cheating, tracing all the way back to the 2016 Republican Iowa caucus, he naturally has accused Bass and Raman of cheating Pratt. MAGA Republicans online are taking notice.

"I'm at the rare intersection of: - Was rooting for Pratt - Thought he was good for the LA political conversation - Dislike California's election administration laws and policies - But understand how the process works,” posted an X user named Stephen Richer.

Similarly Republican pollster Frank Luntz observed "reality TV star Spencer Pratt says he ‘will be done with trying to live in LA’ if he doesn't win the mayoral election. Yesterday, he was surpassed in the Los Angeles mayoral primary for the second run-off spot in November."

Another Republican wrote going by Dr. Terry Simpson on X wrote that "I'm a Republican. Los Angeles is roughly 50% Democratic and about 10% Republican. Any candidate who wants to lead this city must win support well beyond the Republican base. Spencer Pratt didn't lose because voters didn't understand he was independent. He lost.”

Other Republicans reacted with the outrage that Trump is trying to stir up, even though there is no evidence that anything illicit is occurring in the California election.

"A 43,000-vote swing just handed Nithya Raman the edge over Spencer Pratt in LA,” an X user who goes by jay plemons posted. “The exact size of the city's homeless population. Ballot harvesting from shelters, universal mail ballots, and late drops made it happen. Coincidence?"

Similarly X user Mark Mendlovitz wrote, "The large variance of Pratt and Raman but not Bass should be setting off screaming alarm bells."

Even House Speaker Mike Johnson suggested there might be fraud in California, despite the fact that he also acknowledged there is no proof. Instead he cited the absence of evidence as being in itself suspicious.

“I'm not saying it's rigged,” Johnson told CNN’s Manu Raju on Monday. “I'm saying it stinks to high heaven. And everybody knows that. Let's remove the appearance of impropriety. Let's have, what a concept, let's have votes on an election the day of the election. That's what many states are able to do. I think California is playing around with this.”

After Raju asked Johnson if he had proof the election was improper, he admitted that “I don't — some of these efforts are so diabolical and so far upstream that it is impossible to prove. But I think everybody knows instinctively something is wrong here. And that's a concern. We need people to believe in the integrity of our election system.”

Trump, who attempted a coup after he lost the 2020 presidential election to then-Vice President Joe Biden, is reportedly falsely accusing the California election of being stolen as a preparation for denying the results of the 2026 midterms, which are also expected to swing against him.

“By baselessly framing Ms. Raman’s rise as a Democratic scam, Mr. Trump extended his long-running project to erode public faith in elections — and gave an unusually clear preview of how he could greet any disappointing results for his party in November, when control of Congress is at stake,” wrote The New York Times' Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman on Monday. “He has been anything but subtle about his desire to limit the ability of Democrats to vote by mail, implying, with no evidence, that simply choosing that widely used means of casting a ballot is inherently suspect.”

Swan and Haberman added, “Addressing a gathering of Republican lawmakers in March, he said the way to hold their majority was to pass a strict voter identification law cracking down on mail ballots. ‘It’ll guarantee the midterms,’ he told them, warning that failure would bring ‘big trouble.’”

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

Fox Anchor Said Network Must Report Trump Family Grift (And Did For Five Minutes)

Fox News’ Special Report has devoted only about five minutes of airtime to stories about alleged influence peddling by President Donald Trump’s family members in the 13 months since its anchor, Bret Baier, told an interviewer that the press “100%” had an obligation to report such stories with the same vigor with which they had pursued Republican allegations about the business interests of former President Joe Biden's son Hunter.

When Politico’s Dasha Burns asked Baier last year about reports on the international business dealings of Trump’s eldest sons, Don Jr. and Eric, the Fox chief political anchor laid down a marker that covering such stories was vital.

“If you're going to play it one way, you've got to play it another way, and you’ve got to cover all of those things,” he explained during the interview, which was published on May 9, 2025. Baier cited what he termed “real questions” about the “access” of the Trump sons and that of President Trump’s daughter Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner.

Such coverage is more than warranted — Trump and his family members oversee a sprawling business empire that has grown dramatically since he launched his reelection campaign. It includes immense holdings in cryptocurrency and international real estate deals through business entities now controlled by Eric and Don Jr. Kushner and the president’s sons also hold an array of consulting and venture capital positions that have the aroma of influence peddling. These businesses benefit from Trump’s presidency — some even receiving direct federal contracts — while posing conflicts with U.S. policy.

But Baier was not living up to the standard he set. While Special Report had routinely covered Hunter Biden stories, its handling of the Trump family’s myriad financial conflicts over the first 81 episodes of the second Trump term (the period prior to his May 2025 Politico interview) consisted of only a single underwhelming segment about its cryptocurrency holdings, as Media Matters noted at the time.

And now, after Baier’s program has spent another 13 months all but ignoring the damning reporting from other outlets about these shady business dealings, we can say conclusively that he has not followed through on his promise to “cover all of those things.”

Here’s what little Special Report has said about the many Trump family business dealings

The five-minute sum of Special Report’s coverage of the conflicts of interest created by the Trump family’s business dealings in the 13 months since Baier’s remarks came over just four editions of the program that aired in November and early December of last year.In late October, Trump pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the founder and former CEO of the crypto exchange Binance, expunging Zhao’s 2023 conviction on charges related to Binance’s facilitation of money laundering for criminals and terrorists. The pardon — which set the stage for Binance’s return to the U.S. — came after Binance took steps following the 2024 election to bolster World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s then-newly formed crypto company. On November 4, 2025, Fox White House correspondent Jacqui Heinrich addressed the pardon and briefly referenced “scrutiny over Binance's role in the Trump sons’ crypto venture.”Three nights later, Baier aired an exclusive interview with Zhao, roughly 2 minutes of which revolved around the Trump family’s business interests. The anchor repeatedly asked Zhao whether he had any business ties to the president’s sons and if those connections led to his pardon, only for Zhao to flatly deny any such relationship.

Special Report also briefly mentioned Zhao receiving a Trump pardon after Binance boosted the Trump family’s investment earlier in the November 7, 2025, program, and again on its December 5, 2025, edition.

The only other reference to the Trump family’s business dealings that we found on Special Report since last May came on November 19, 2025. Discussing a bill to ban stock trading by members of Congress, correspondent Rich Edson reported: “Some members want to extend stock trade prohibitions to those in the judiciary and executive branches as Trump family business interests have drawn more attention. The president says he has nothing to do with his family business.”

And that’s it for Special Report’s treatment of alleged Trump family self-dealing, corruption, and conflicts of interest from May 9, 2025, through June 2, 2026. Special Report’s treatment of the World Liberty Financial story notably failed to address a key aspect uncovered by The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal in February: Emirati Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who is literally known as the “spy sheikh,” secretly paid $500 million for a major stake in the Trump family company just four days before Trump’s inauguration, and subsequently received approval from the Trump administration for “access to tightly guarded artificial intelligence chips” that the previous administration had blocked due to “fears that the sensitive technology could be diverted to China.”

“You’d have to add two digits to the sum of Biden abuses of power, foreign entanglements, and corruption alleged in the report to get near what Trump has raked in just from the UAE,” National Review writer and Fox contributor Andrew McCarthy noted in a column on that story. And then there are the myriad stories that Baier completely ignored during that period, a sampling of which are included below:

- The Wall Street Journal reported in October that “BlinkRx, an online prescription drug delivery company that this year installed Trump Jr. as a board member,” was set to host an event featuring the president’s son, “the country’s top drugmakers,” and “senior Trump administration officials that regulate the pharmaceutical industry” which would “ conclude with a dinner at the Executive Branch, the exclusive new club founded by Trump Jr. and his close friends.”
- After drone company Unusual Machines put Trump Jr. on an advisory board and gave him “shares worth millions,” the firm announced “at least $15.2 million in military-linked orders, including a direct U.S. Army buy,” Forbes reported in October.
- The Associated Press reported after President Trump launched the war with Iran that military drone company Powerus — which counts Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. as investors — was seeking Pentagon contracts and pitching its interceptors to Gulf countries “while they are under attack by Iran and dependent on the U.S. military led by their father.”
- Kushner has been moonlighting as a top U.S. negotiator before and during the Iran war — but there are questions about whose interests he is serving since his day job is running the private equity firm Affinity Partners, which “took a $2 billion investment from a Saudi fund led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.”
- In April, the robotics company Foundation Future Industries won a $24 million Pentagon contract; Eric Trump is the firm’s “chief strategy adviser.”
- The Trump Organization, which is led by Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, has embarked on international real estate deals in the Gulf states of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Oman in partnership with a developer who has ties to the Saudi government.
- A joint venture between the Trump Organization and a local consortium is building a Trump Tower in Tbilisi, Georgia, “on land currently part-owned by the son of the US-sanctioned leader of the country,” The Guardian reported in May.
- ProPublica reported last week that North Carolina startup Vulcan Elements received a $620 million loan from the Pentagon — at the insistence of the White House — three months after the venture capital firm where Trump Jr. is a partner took a stake in it.

The context of Baier ignoring the Trump family’s corruption

Special Report’s paltry coverage of the Trump family’s business dealings is infinitesimal when compared to the program’s handling of Hunter Biden’s business interests before and during the Biden administration.

When Baier laid down his marker last May, we noted that after the New York Post broke the story regarding former President Joe Biden's son's laptop in October 2020, Special Report covered Hunter Biden's alleged influence peddling in at least 32 segments over 19 days that combined for more than an hour and a half of airtime. Other Media Matters research revealed that Hunter Biden’s name was mentioned on Special Report at least 679 times from January 2023 through April 2024.

Baier’s work reflects the broader shift at his network, which furiously demagogued the right’s thin claims of Biden corruption but has ignored or excused the allegations surrounding Trump, even as the latter often feature orders of magnitude more money and much more direct nexuses to the White House.

Indeed, some Fox personalities are even cashing in with the Trumps — star host Laura Ingraham is on a corporate board alongside Trump Jr. for a company whose CEO co-founded the venture capital firm where Trump Jr. is a partner, while contributor Brett Velicovich co-founded a drone company that counts the Trump sons as investors.

Baier has reaped substantial benefits from his lackadaisical coverage of what we should probably term the Trump crime family. The president regularly harangues and threatens journalists from more credible news outlets — but the treatment he gives Baier is closer to that reserved for Baier’s propagandistic evening-show hosts.

The Fox anchor has been Trump’s guest on the golf course and received highly sought invitations to White House galas like November’s lavish banquet honoring Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and the April state dinner for King Charles III of Britain and his wife Camilla, the queen consort.

Baier has also received a steady stream of interviews with top Trump administration officials, and just last month, he sat down with Trump himself during the president’s state visit to China.

Accompanying the president on that trip was his son Eric Trump (who is married to Baier’s colleague, Fox host and walking media ethics disaster Lara Trump). The New York Times noted that Eric’s presence “could blur the lines between government business and private enterprise” and “evoked parallels to Hunter Biden’s decision to join his father, then Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., on a trip to China in 2013.” But the president’s son tagging along on the China visit went unmentioned during Baier’s interview and ensuing Special Report coverage of the trip.

Methodology

Media Matters searched transcripts in the Nexis database for all original episodes of Special Report with Bret Baier for any of the terms “Don,” “Don Jr.,” “Don Junior,” “Donald Jr.,” “Donald Junior,” “Eric,” “Jared,” “Kushner,” “Ivanka,” “Melania,” “Lara,” “son,” “sons,” or “family” within five words of either of the terms “Trump” or “president” from May 9, 2025, when Special Report host Bret Baier told Politico that the media should “100%” go just as hard after President Donald Trump's sons' business dealings as it had Hunter Biden's, through June 2, 2026.We timed segments, which we defined as instances when any allegations of influence peddling or financial conflicts against any of Trump's family (excluding the president himself) were the stated topic of discussion or when we found significant discussion of such allegations. We defined significant discussion as instances when two or more speakers in a multitopic segment discussed such allegations with one another.We also timed mentions, which we defined as instances when a single speaker in a segment on another topic mentioned any such corruption allegations without another speaker engaging with the comment, and teasers, which we defined as instances when the anchor or host promoted a segment about such allegations scheduled to air later in the broadcast.We rounded all reported times to the nearest minute.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters

Trump's Stooge: Tainted Federal Prosecutor Stirs California Election Conspiracies

There he goes again. As Democrats predicted before the first votes were in, President Donald Trump is, as is his way, challenging the results of the elections in California. With absolutely no evidence of wrongdoing, he took to Truth Social twice on Wednesday.

"The Dumocrats are at it again! They are trying to STEAL THE GOVERNOR OF CALIFORNIA PRIMARY, AND THE MAYOR OF LOS ANGELES, PRIMARY, AWAY FROM TWO GREAT REPUBLICAN CANDIDATES. Here we go with the very late and massive numbers of MAIL IN BALLOTS," Trump posted

"There's BIG cheating by the Dumocrats in California. Votes are all tied up. May not be in for weeks. Under investigation by the U.S. Attorney's Office in Los Angeles. Why the vote counting DELAY???"

Trump knows exactly why the delay. It's because the state relies heavily on mail-in ballots, which must be postmarked by election day but may not arrive until days after. And then they are hand-counted, with signatures verified and corrected if necessary. It's part of making sure that as many people participate as possible, and that every vote is counted. Another word for it is democracy.

You'd think that if Democrats were stealing the Governor's and Mayor's race, they'd be doing a more effective job of it; in fact, Trump's favored candidates are doing better than expected. But there is a method to Trump's madness: the popular theory, backed up by some practical evidence, that late-deciding mail-in ballots tend to break Democratic and progressive.

Four years ago, Rick Caruso, the popular developer, held a comfortable lead over Karen Bass on the morning after the election, only to see their positions reversed by the late ballots. Does that mean that Spencer Pratt and Steve Hilton, the TV hosts turned politicians, will lose their spots in the run-off? Probably not. But the feds are ready to prosecute, just in case.

More troubling than Trump's social media rants are the actions actually being taken by his ardent loyalist, who is the "first assistant U.S. Attorney" for the Central District of California — a loophole method of having a non-confirmed and non-confirmable appointee run the office. First Assistant U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli, on Friday morning, said his office "has multiple election fraud investigations underway," in coordination with the FBI in Los Angeles. Essayli's office confirmed that Assistant U.S. Atty. Robert Renner was at a Los Angeles County ballot processing center Friday "to observe the vote counting process."

Essayli's office has earned the reputation, under his "leadership," of losing. He has distinguished himself for his vigor in pursuing the Trump agenda, prosecuting protestors, immigrants and activists, with surprisingly little success. There is an old expression that a good prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich. Essayli and his lieutenants are not, by that standard, very good prosecutors.

The judges of the Central District could select a new U.S. Attorney to fill the vacancy in the Central District, but they haven't moved to do so. One explanation is that they are simply letting Essayli and his team fall on their faces. Meghan Blanco, a former federal prosecutor and veteran defense attorney, suggested to the Los Angeles Times that the federal judges' inaction with Essayli might be a clever act of resistance. "If you're a judge and displeased with what DOJ is doing and the shenanigans they're pulling ... you let the Essayli appointment play out," Blanco said. "No one has seen a U.S. attorney's office lose the way this office is losing now."

Opening investigations to suit the president's partisan whims is the secret to success in the Trump justice system. It is what won Bill Pulte, the housing chief who, based on his willingness to scour the mortgage applications of Trump's enemies, the spot of Director of National Intelligence. It is all that Trump values, and it is a terrible abuse of power. In prior times, presidents could face impeachment for such abuses. In this world, we have come to accept it as business as usual. It should not be.

Susan Estrich is a celebrated feminist legal scholar, the first female president of the Harvard Law Review, and the first woman to run a U.S. presidential campaign. She has written eight books.

Kennedy Center Counsel Orders Removal Of Trump's Name From Iconic Building

President Donald Trump’s name is set to be removed from the facade of the iconic Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, restoring an American treasure to its rightful condition. The office for the center’s general counsel circulated a memo to staffers on Thursday, ordering them to remove Trump’s name after a judge ruled against the administration late last week.

The Kennedy Center was named to honor former President John F. Kennedy after his assassination in 1963. The center was meant to be a living memorial to one of the most fondly remembered American leaders, and was defaced by Trump this past December.

The counsel’s memo explained: “To comply with this order, you must immediately change email signatures, letterhead, and other documents to reflect the name as ‘The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts,’ or ‘Kennedy Center.’ Other changes, such as to templates and forms, signage, brochures, and website pages, must be completed no later than Friday, June 12, 2026.”

Last Friday, the removal of Trump’s name was ordered after a federal judge determined that the decision to add his name was in violation of law. U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper said in his ruling that the center was named as an act of Congress, and that only Congress—not Trump and a board of trustees packed by his cronies—can change the name.

Trump responded with a whining social media post on Friday, stating that his administration would “make all necessary arrangements with Congress to allow a full and complete transfer of this Institution, giving them the responsibility for its Operation, Maintenance, and Management.”

Trump’s attempted takeover of the center was unpopular with the public. In a February YouGov poll, 64 percent of Americans opposed his renaming of the center. Only 16 percent supported it.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos

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