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Not A 'War': Trump And MAGA Exploit Kirk's Murder To Suppress Opposition

Not A 'War': Trump And MAGA Exploit Kirk's Murder To Suppress Opposition

Charlie Kirk, a powerful right-wing activist, popular podcaster, and close friend and ally to President Donald Trump, was shot and killed while speaking at a college in Utah on Wednesday. Politicians of both parties and commentators across the spectrum, including myself, have responded with condemnations of the act as both the tragic murder of a young husband and father and an act of political violence that must be anathema if we hope to preserve our country as a liberal democracy.

Rational people on all sides of the political spectrum abhor political violence and want to ratchet down the temperature, but this requires an honest assessment of what is happening: There have been far too many cases of political violence in recent years, and the targets are not limited by party, ideology, or creed.

Yet within the right-wing media bubble, long before there was even a suspect in custody, commentators cited Kirk’s killing as proof the left is at war with them. Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) on Thursday called out right-wing pundits who took Kirk’s death “as an opportunity to say we're at war so that they could get some of our conservative followers lathered up over this.” He added: “It seems like a cheap, disgusting, awful way to pretend like you're a leader of a conservative movement.”

Tillis cited two commentators in particular, but such rhetoric has been a staple throughout the right-wing media ecosystem since news broke that Kirk had been shot. It is what right-wing audiences are hearing right now — and what they have been hearing, to one extent or another, for quite some time.

“They are at war with us!” Fox News star Jesse Watters said on The Five, his network’s most-watched show, shortly after Kirk’s passing was announced.

“Whether we want to accept it or not, they are at war with us,” he continued. “And what are we gonna do about it? How much political violence are we going to tolerate? And that’s the question we’re just gonna have to ask ourselves.”

“THIS IS WAR,” posted Libs of TikTok. “Civil war,” was Andrew Tate’s take. “This is war,” commented Ian Miles Cheong. “This is a war, this is a war, this is a war,” Alex Jones said on his livestream. According to Steve Bannon, “We are at war in this country.” “We’re not supposed to say this,” posted Shaun Maguire. “But the truth is we’re at War.”

Many on the right were Kirk’s friends and are mourning his death. Some of them may fear for their own safety. But the narrative they have constructed relies on ignoring the recent spate of attacks targeting Democrats, the gruesome contemporaneous response to those attacks from some of the most influential voices on the right, and the chorus of Democratic officials who have condemned Kirk’s assassination.

There is no war, no righteous, violent struggle between a “left” and a “right.” A man was killed. His killer deserves to be brought to justice. Turning that into a “war” can only make the situation worse.

Terrorists have targeted political leaders of both parties

It is not true, as Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. both claimed in right-wing media interviews since Kirk’s slaying, that violence is “only going one way,” or, as right-wing radio host Dana Loesch put it on Watters’ prime-time show, that “it's not the right killing the left, it's the left killing the right.

”It seems both pointless and morally inappropriate to try to weigh attacks against one another to determine who has it “worse,” but it’s impossible to have a conversation if we can’t agree that political violence goes both ways.

The ideology of people who attack political figures doesn’t always map neatly onto a political party, in no small part because the assailant typically suffers from some form of mental illness. But Democrats have certainly been the targets of political violence in recent memory: In October 2022, a man broke into the home of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi seeking to kidnap her, and brutally assaulted her husband, Paul. In June, an assassin allegedly murdered a Democratic state legislator and her husband and wounded a second and his wife in Minnesota. Last month’s lethal attack on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention by someone who authorities say “wanted to send a message against COVID-19 vaccines” should also be placed in this category.

It’s worth revisiting how right-wing media covered those domestic terror attacks, as it speaks to how its audience likely interprets them in an increasingly fragmented media landscape in which people can pick and choose news sources that confirm their biases.

After a man broke into the Pelosi residence and attacked Paul Pelosi with a hammer, MAGA influencers claimed based on effectively no evidence that the attacker, who turned out to be a deranged individual steeped in right-wing fever swamp conspiracy theories, had actually been let into the speaker’s house by her husband for the purposes of sex and subsequently attacked him as part of a lovers’ quarrel.

Donald Trump Jr. posted a photo of a pair of briefs and a hammer on a bed with the caption: “Got my Paul Pelosi Halloween costume ready.”

For months afterwards, Fox hosts including Watters alluded to such wild claims on their nationally broadcast programs, undeterred by body camera footage from the scene of the attack or basic human dignity.

Prominent MAGA social media influencers likewise responded to the Minnesota shootings by spinning up a false profile of the killer — in reality a Trump supporter who railed against abortion and the LGBTQ community — as a far-left supporter of Gov. Tim Walz. Laura Loomer and Mike Cernovich even suggested Walz might have orchestrated the attacks as political hits.

Fox’s right-wing propagandists, meanwhile, all but buried that story. There were no soul-searching reflections about political violence targeting the left on the programs of Watters, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, or Greg Gutfeld — instead, discussion on those shows the week after the attacks was limited to correspondent reports and headline reads. The week after the CDC shooting, those programs didn’t cover it at all.

Looking further back, the leading lights of the right-wing media aggressively sought to minimize and sanitize the Trump mob’s assault on the U.S. Capitol in 2021, and they alternatively blamed “incivility” from the left for a Trumpist sending mail bombs to a host of left-wing and Democratic targets and suggested those attacks were a “false flag.” And that’s to say nothing of other attacks apparently fueled by right-wing extremism that targeted Jewish, Latino, and Black Americans in Charleston, South Carolina; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Buffalo, New York; and El Paso, Texas.If you downplay right-wing violence against left-wing targets, it’s much easier to convince your viewers that the violence is all going in the other direction.

MAGA wants “the Left” to be “crushed with the power of the state”

While the repeated declarations that they are at “war” with a murderous left are obviously corrosive, there have not been widespread direct calls for retaliatory violence from prominent right-wing media figures. But many are urging President Donald Trump, his administration, and congressional Republicans to respond with widespread political repression of the left and the Democratic Party.

“We can honor him [Kirk] and honor his memory and make it a living thing that we use this to take down the apparatus that's well-funded that is at the core of this anti-Americanism,” Steve Bannon said on his streaming show Friday. “It has to be a all-of-government approach. ... Let's go kick down some doors and perp walk some folks today.”

Laura Loomer, a conspiracy theorist and streamer who has Trump’s ear and regularly gets federal officials fired for insufficient demonstrated fealty to the president, declared Wednesday, “It’s time for the Trump administration to shut down, defund, & prosecute every single Leftist organization.” She later added: “All of the Leftist groups that pay for these radical protests need to be prosecuted. … More people will be murdered if the Left isn’t crushed with the power of the state.”

MAGA influencer Mike Cernovich demanded “congressional hearings now” on Wednesday, which he said should include “every billionaire funding far left wing extremism,” naming George Soros, Bill Gates, and Reid Hoffman. He also called for “massive RICO investigations now” to scrutinize “every dollar” and tagged Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel.

Former GOP Senate candidate Blake Masters echoed Cernovich, adding, “Either we destroy the NGO/donor patronage network that enables and foments” violence, “or it will destroy us.”

Sean Davis, co-founder of The Federalist, posted Wednesday that “the Democrat party is a domestic terrorist organization” and “terrorist Democrats will not stop. … And until they are stopped—until every single nutjob inciting this madness and cheering it on is held accountable and removed from civil society—it will not stop.” His outlet published a piece which declared that Democrats “need to be treated like the domestic terrorists they are.”

“The last time the radical Left orchestrated a wave of violence and terror, J. Edgar Hoover shut it all down within a few years,” Manhattan Institute senior fellow Christopher Rufo said. “It is time, within the confines of the law, to infiltrate, disrupt, arrest, and incarcerate all of those who are responsible for this chaos.”

YouTuber Benny Johnson claimed that “the modern Democrat party is a terrorist organization” and that the left-wing movement must be “ripped root and stem from our American republic and thrown into the fire where it belongs.”

Some are even suggesting that because the threat to the right is so clear, if Republican leaders don’t respond with such steps, the result will be some on the right taking matters into their own hands.

Davis posted on Thursday that if congressional Republicans don’t take “proper action” to protect “a population being hunted for sport,” then the result would be “improper reaction,” which he described as “a response that cannot be contained once it is out.”

Likewise, Cernovich wrote: “I’m choosing my words mindfully, don’t twist them. This is a prediction, not a preference. If Congressional GOP and Trump don’t act swiftly and ferociously, there will be retaliatory actions due to lawful means not being used. This is always what happens. RICO these fucks now!”

Trump appears to be responding to these demands for political retribution.

The elephant in the room

It is impossible to have a rational conversation about topics like lowering the political temperature and pushing back against the spread of political violence when the president of the United States is interested in those issues only as a cudgel against his political opponents.

On Wednesday evening, the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal urged Trump, himself the victim of two assassination attempts, to take advantage of “an opportunity for leadership” by seeking to lower the tenor of political rhetoric.Any other president would not need to hear such advice — but Trump’s previous responses to attacks on Democratic targets demonstrate his lack of interest in bringing the country together. He mocked the brutal assault against Pelosi, said following the Minnesota shooting that it would be a “waste of time” to call Gov. Tim Walz because he is “so whacked out,” and completely ignored the CDC attack.

In an Oval Office address a few hours after Kirk was killed, Trump characteristically ignored the Journal’s counsel. He offered a testament to Kirk’s life and promised that the shooter, who at that point had not been publicly identified or taken into custody, would be brought to justice.

But he also attributed blame far beyond the person who took Kirk’s life, saying that the “rhetoric” of “the radical left” was “directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today.” He went on to promise that his administration would go after the individuals and organizations he said “contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence,” adding that “radical-left political violence has hurt too many innocent people and taken too many lives.”

Trump did not name the targets of the action he promised to carry out. But a “straightforward reading of his rhetoric,” as The Atlantic’s Jonathan Chait noted, is that “the president of the United States is treating the political opposition as accessories to murder and threatening to use the full power of the government to attack it.”

On Friday, Fox & Friends co-host Ainsley Earhardt pointed to “radicals” on both the right and left and asked the president, “How do we fix this country? How do we come back together?”

Trump’s response made clear that he is uninterested in doing so. He excused “radicals on the right” as people who “don’t want to see crime,” saying, “They don't want these people coming in, we don't want you burning our shopping centers, we don’t want you shooting our people in the middle of the street.”

“The radicals on the left are the problem, and they are vicious and they are horrible and they are politically savvy,” he added, before running through a litany of grievances with his critics.That message is echoing across MAGA media, a powerful information apparatus with a rare and unmediated grasp on its audience. It will fuel more vitriol, making it harder, not easier, to have honest conversations and reduce the threat of political violence in this country.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters

Trump Has Intimidated MAGA Outlets As Epstein Scandal Boils Over

Trump Has Intimidated MAGA Outlets As Epstein Scandal Boils Over

President Donald Trump has succeeded in getting his media supporters to stop talking about his old friend Jeffrey Epstein, the deceased sex offender and financier. Prominent MAGA media figures ignored a wave of Epstein news on Tuesday, signaling that Trump’s pressure campaign has paid off with their silence — even as (or, perhaps, because) his own corrupt involvement in the story has grown.

The initial resistance but eventual submission of Fox stars, Newsmax hosts, and MAGA influencers demonstrates that the Trumpist right’s only defining principle is that the president is good and his position at any time is the correct one — everything else can be tossed over the side at his command.

MAGA media figures lashed out at the Trump administration in July after the FBI and Justice Department released a memo which debunked foundational claims of the right’s Epstein narrative. Trump, who has a host of connections to Epstein, responded to that criticism by demanding his allies move on from the story and offering up new common enemies for them to focus on instead.

Meanwhile, Trump’s DOJ made a series of shady moves related to the case. First, the DOJ attorney who successfully prosecuted Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell in 2022 was fired. Then the department’s No. 2, former Trump personal lawyer Todd Blanche, interviewed Maxwell in prison with clemency from her old friend the president all but dangling over the conversation. The Trump administration subsequently transferred Maxwell to a minimum-security prison camp and released transcript and audio from the interview, in which the convicted sex trafficker asserted that she never saw Trump “in any inappropriate setting.”

Nothing to see here!

On Tuesday, members of Congress returned to Washington following the summer recess and brought with them a passel of Epstein news:

  • The House Oversight Committee met behind closed doors with six women who say they were sexually trafficked by Epstein.
  • Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) filed a discharge petition to force a vote on his bill with Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) requiring the release of files related to Epstein that have not been publicly released.
  • House Oversight Chairman James Comer (R-KY), in an apparent effort to forestall momentum around the bill, put 34,000 pages of Epstein files online — but as reporters and committee Democrats quickly noted, the documents included redactions and the overwhelming majority had already been released.
  • Massie accused Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) of orchestrating a cover-up of the Epstein story.

The influx of Epstein news, combined with a press conference on Wednesday featuring 10 of the disgraced financier’s victims, led Politico’s Playbook to declare this “the story Trump can’t kill.”

But while mainstream news outlets are providing plenty of coverage of the Epstein case, many Republican voters are likely not hearing about any of it. The propagandists they listen to prioritize remaining in Trump’s good graces over everything else, and they are largely following his command to sweep Epstein and his victims under the rug.

Fox host Laura Ingraham signaled she planned to cover the Epstein story, teasing the Oversight Committee’s document release at the top of her Tuesday broadcast. “We'll bring you any breaking details as they come,” she said.

But Ingraham never returned to the story. And her prime-time colleagues Jesse Watters, Sean Hannity, and Greg Gutfeld did not mention Epstein that night. On Wednesday, while CNN, MSNBC, and a host of other networks carried the press conference with Epstein’s victims live, Fox instead aired a few minutes of remarks from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) before cutting away. The Trump administration even helped the network counterprogram, providing an appointee for Fox to interview.

Fox isn’t the only MAGA outlet giving the Epstein story short shrift.

Newsmax’s prime-time hosts — including Greg Kelly, whose show took a bizarre pro-Maxwell turn last month — also did not mention Epstein on Tuesday.

And several MAGA commentators who initially criticized the Trump administration’s handling of the Epstein story after the release of the DOJ/FBI memo did not mention Epstein on Tuesday on their X accounts, including Tim Pool, Laura Loomer, Charlie Kirk, and Jack Posobiec.

Trump told them to stop caring about Epstein and his victims, and after some initial resistance, they’ve done it. Instead, the MAGA right’s most prominent figures are focusing on stories the president wants covered in the way he wants them discussed. They are spending their energy greasing the skids for Trump’s federal invasion of Chicago and praising the military strike he ordered on a vessel the administration claims was carrying Venezuelan gang members and drugs.

Perhaps the stories Epstein’s victims tell at Wednesday’s press conference will force these people to find their consciences. But for now, it appears any effort to inform Republican voters about developments in the Epstein story will run up against the reality that their preferred news providers have dropped the story at Trump’s insistence.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Chicago is “a war zone”

Trump-Fox Feedback Loop Is Prelude To Troops Occupying Chicago

Chicago has likely seen fewer shootings this year than in any other in nearly six decades, and was not even among the top 20 U.S. cities by homicide rate in 2024. But according to President Donald Trump, the city is “THE MURDER CAPITAL OF THE WORLD!”

Trump’s false Tuesday morning declaration after watching overheating commentary from Fox News’ Fox & Friends, which cited shootings over the weekend as evidence Chicago is a “war zone” and its elected leaders are sending the message that they “like the violence."

The president’s favorite TV show is helping to ease the country onto a glide path toward Trump’s authoritarian goal of putting troops on the ground in more U.S. cities.

Shooting and murders in Chicago have plummeted to near-record lows

Crime data analyst Jeff Asher reported Tuesday that while the scale of shootings and murders in Chicago represents a terrible toll inflicted on far too many city residents, “the available evidence suggests that Chicago has seen fewer shootings so far this year than any year since the mid-1960s.”

“The 1,264 people shot in Chicago through August 30 this year signifies far, far too many lives impacted by gun violence, but that figure is down 37 percent through this point last year and down nearly 60 percent from this point in 2021,” he wrote.

"Chicago is on pace for just over 400 murders in 2025 which could be the fewest murders there since 1965,” he continued. “Obviously, there’s a lot of time left in the year, but Chicago will almost certainly have way fewer murders in 2025 than it did in any year between 1966 and the early 2000s.”

Murders and shootings rend the fabric of communities, and the fact that they seem to have fallen to the lowest level in Chicago since the president was in college does not mean that the work of reducing crime is done. The data does, however, provide context for whether the state is facing an emergency that requires federal intervention.

But Trump’s worldview isn’t shaped by the thoughtful analysis of statistics — he cares about what he sees on his television.

Trump is responding to Fox & Friends lie that Chicago is “a war zone”

On Tuesday morning, Fox & Friends’ co-hosts were telling viewers that Chicago is in crisis and denouncing its elected leaders for saying that they oppose Trump surging federal forces into the city against their will.

“VIOLENCE GRIPS CHICAGO AS DEMS REJECT TRUMP’S HELP” was the chyron Fox & Friends aired at the top of the 7 a.m. segment.

“We’ve talked a lot about the crime in Chicago,” Ainsley Earhart said. “Fifty-six were shot over the Labor Day weekend. Eight people died in Chicago as a result of those shootings.” Fox & Friends aired a graphic displaying those figures while she spoke.

Earhardt contrasted those numbers with a video of Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson saying at a rally on Monday, “No federal troops in the city of Chicago.”

“These leaders spend more time targeting the president of the United States than caring about the issues that matter to their community,” Lawrence Jones replied. He claimed that the weekend’s level of violence is “happening almost every other week in Chicago,” adding, “I think it is a war zone there.”

Co-host Griff Jenkins claimed that Johnson’s comments “have got to be offensive to the families and loved ones” of victims, adding that Democrats were “defending, essentially, the criminals by trying to resist federal assistance to bring it under control.”

Jenkins then aired a clip of Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker saying in an interview that “no one in the administration” had reached out to him about federal intervention, which he said suggested they were planning “an invasion with U.S. troops."

“It's not an invasion,” Earhardt responded. “The reason that Donald Trump has to get involved is because the leaders of these blue states can't keep crime off their streets. They can't do anything about it. They are not trying to do anything about it. The message we hear is: We like the violence.”

Again, this is how the president’s favorite program is responding to crime in Chicago at a time when the city is seeing the lowest levels of shootings and murders in decades.

Trump often responds in real time to the shows he is watching from the White House and elsewhere — a phenomenon I’ve described as the Fox-Trump feedback loop — and that’s exactly what he did on Tuesday morning.

Roughly 40 minutes after the Fox & Friends segment, Trump posted to Truth Social:

At least 54 people were shot in Chicago over the weekend, 8 people were killed. The last two weekends were similar. Chicago is the worst and most dangerous city in the World, by far. Pritzker needs help badly, he just doesn’t know it yet. I will solve the crime problem fast, just like I did in DC. Chicago will be safe again, and soon. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!

Trump is trying to justify an authoritarian invasion of Chicago

Trump’s claim that Chicago is the “most dangerous city in the World, by far” is absurd. In fact, the city isn’t even among the top 20 cities with the highest reported homicide rates in the United States, according to an Axios analysis of 2024 FBI crime figures, while “eight of the top 10 cities with the highest murder rates and populations of at least 100,000 were in red states."

But Trump, according to many of his former top aides, is a fascist, and the president has repeatedly displayed his eagerness to put National Guard and even active-duty military on the streets of blue cities in blue states.

He lied about conditions in Los Angeles to justify a deployment there (which a federal judge on Tuesday said violated the law) and lied about crime in Washington, D.C., to do the same thing in the nation’s capital.

With Trump’s propagandists at Fox and elsewhere chomping at the bit for the president to order “full military occupation” of other “problematic cities,” Chicago may be next.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

As CDC Spirals Into Chaos, Fox Spins For Bobby Kennedy

As CDC Spirals Into Chaos, Fox Spins For Bobby Kennedy

The hosts of Fox News’ Fox & Friends are tryng to help Robert F. Kennedy Jr. clean up the mess caused by the purge of top leaders from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, downplaying the agency’s crisis while serving up softball questions to the Department of Health and Human Services secretary in a morning interview last Thursday.

The White House said that it had fired CDC Director Susan Monarez, just a month after her confirmation by the U.S. Senate. The Washington Post reported that Kennedy, who was a notorious antivaccine activist before his appointment at HHS, had demanded Monarez’s resignation after she declined to say that she would “support rescinding certain approvals for coronavirus vaccines.” At least three senior CDC officials announced their resignations following her dismissal, including the agency’s chief medical officer and its top scientists overseeing vaccines and emerging infectious diseases.

Fox bears significant responsibility for Kennedy’s ongoing dismantling of U.S. health agencies and their work. The network’s stars helped mainstream antivaccine sentiment within the GOP, elevated Kennedy during his 2024 presidential campaign as part of a strategy to return President Donald Trump to the White House, and greased the skids for Kennedy’s ascension to the pinnacle of the U.S. health bureaucracy. They even assured their viewers, in the words of Fox & Friends co-host Ainsley Earhardt, that Kennedy was “not going to take away vaccines.”

But rather than treating Kennedy’s CDC purge as an off-ramp, Fox responded by doubling down on its support.

Plenty of reporters surely wanted to speak to Kennedy after he pushed out the CDC director then watched other agency leaders leave. But it was the co-hosts of Fox & Friends that got the opportunity, and it’s obvious why — they were willing to treat the exodus as a minor story. Indeed, Brian Kilmeade’s promo focused on an entirely different topic.

“RFK Jr. is taking on the chronic disease epidemic and how he wants to change medical schools to make America healthy again,” Kilmeade said. “The HHS secretary will deal with that — and all his staff changes — coming your way.”

That was also the tenor of the interview.

Kennedy fielded nearly four minutes of questions about Wednesday’s mass shooting at a Minnesota Catholic school before guest host Emily Compagno finally raised the issue of Monarez’s ouster.

But Compagno did not mention the reason for Monarez’s dismissal or the number of CDC officials who had subsequently resigned, instead asking: “The CDC director was fired after refusing to resign, as her lawyers accuse you, sir, of putting millions of lives at risk, as the CDC vaccine chief slammed in a resignation post. What are your thoughts on that?”

Kennedy responded that “it would be inappropriate for me to comment on a personnel issue” before pivoting to critique the CDC’s praise of vaccines and its need for “strong leadership” that “will be able to execute on President Trump's broad ambitions.”

Kilmeade then read from a statement criticizing Kennedy from Monarez’s lawyers and noted two of the other CDC resignations before adding, “Is this something that’s caught you by surprise? What’s your reaction to people that are getting a little worried?”

Kennedy responded: “I think that no, it has not caught us by surprise. Again, I cannot comment on personnel issues, but the agency is in trouble, and we need to fix it, and we are fixing it, and it may be that some people should not be working there anymore.”

And with that, discussion of the CDC losing four top leaders overnight was concluded, as Compagno asked Kennedy an open-ended question that allowed him to segue to “our newest initiative to try to get the medical schools to start teaching nutrition.”

After a few minutes of discussion on that topic, the interview closed with an ominous sign for the future, as the HHS secretary previewed his promised September report on the purported causes of autism.

“We are now developing sufficient evidence to ask for regulatory action on some of those, or at least recommendations,” Kennedy said.

It seems likely that Kennedy will attempt to carry out the anti-vax project to which he’s already dedicated years of his life, using false claims that vaccines cause autism to try to alter the childhood vaccine schedule that reduces pediatric deaths and hospitalizations from infectious diseases.

After last week there are fewer senior leaders at CDC to stand up to Kennedy and his conspiracy theories. And going forward, we can expect Fox to be in his corner.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters

Jeanine Pirro

Fox Propaganda Falters As Grand Jury Rejects Pirro's 'Hoagie Hurler' Charges

U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s former colleagues at Fox News cheered her August 13 announcement that she was charging a D.C. resident who threw a sandwich at a federal law enforcement officer with felony assault. The network’s hosts claimed that thanks to the “new sheriff in town,” the man “will be held accountable in a court of law.”

But two weeks later, Pirro’s office has reportedly been unable to secure an indictment against the man, a glaring failure which highlights the weaknesses inherent in appointing a Fox commentator to oversee D.C.’s prosecutorial system.

On the evening of August 10 — two days after President Donald Trump announced he was deploying federal law enforcement officers in the nation’s capital to “make D.C. safe again” — police allege local resident Sean C. Dunn called a group of federal agents on patrol “fascists” and threw a wrapped “sub-style” sandwich which struck a Customs and Border Protection officer. The incident was captured in a viral video.

Pirro, a longtime Fox host who has served as U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia since Trump appointed her in May, announced in a video posted to social media on August 13 that she had charged the man with “a felony: assault on a police officer.” She added, “We’re going to back the police to the hilt! So there, stick your Subway sandwich somewhere else!”

Dunn’s arrest came less than seven months after the president, in one of his first acts in office, issued clemency “to all of the nearly 1,600 people charged in connection with the” January 6 insurrection, including “violent offenders who went after the police on Jan. 6 with baseball bats, two-by-fours and bear spray and are serving prison terms, in some cases of more than a decade.”

(Dunn had reportedly tried to turn himself in but the White House apparently really wanted to make a hype video it could post of armed and armored U.S. Marshals apprehending him at his apartment.)

Pirro‘s former Fox colleagues were quick to tout her action.

Fox host Sean Hannity promised on his August 14 broadcast that Dunn “will be held accountable in a court of law by the U.S. attorney, our former colleague, our friend, Judge Jeanine Pirro,” adding that “the subway sandwich assault is just the beginning of what will be weeks of temper tantrums from elites.”

The failed indictment of sandwich guy shows the limits of Fox's propaganda www.mediamatters.org

Hannity later claimed that a sandwich “may not sound like a big threat,” but “what a lot of people may not be thinking of, an agent being assaulted like that, they have no idea what is being hurled at them.”

The Five’s Greg Gutfeld likewise touted that the “new hero” of “the left” is “facing a felony assault charge after hurling his hoagie at a federal agent in D.C.” When Democratic co-host Jessica Tarlov noted that Trump “pardoned all these January Sixers who beat the crap out of police,” he responded, “They didn't beat the crap out of police.”

On Outnumbered, Emily Compagno said Dunn “could dish it, but he couldn't take it. So now he's going to take it after the felony assault conviction.” And Rachel Campos-Duffy, guest-hosting Jesse Watters Primetime, claimed, “There's a new sheriff in town and the judge already hit him with something worse than a sandwich: a felony assault charge.”

But Pirro’s strategy played better in a Fox News greenroom than in a D.C. courtroom. The New York Times reported Wednesday that a grand jury had rejected the felony assault charge, which it described as “a remarkable failure by the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington” and “a sharp rebuke by a panel of ordinary citizens against the prosecutors assigned to bring charges against people arrested after President Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops and federal agents to fight crime and patrol the city’s streets.”

“It is extremely unusual for prosecutors to come out of a grand jury without obtaining an indictment because they are in control of the information that grand jurors hear about a case and defendants are not allowed to have their lawyers in the room as evidence is presented,” the Times noted.

But such failures are becoming more common in D.C. under Pirro’s leadership of the U.S. attorney’s office. “Before prosecutors failed to indict Dunn, a grand jury on three separate occasions this month refused to indict a D.C. woman who was accused of assaulting an FBI agent, another extraordinary rejection of the prosecution’s case,” The Washington Post reported.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters


Tulsi Gabbard's 'Russiagate' Conspiracy Crumbles In Fox Interview

Tulsi Gabbard's 'Russiagate' Conspiracy Crumbles In Fox Interview

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s claim that former President Barack Obama directed a “treasonous conspiracy” against President Donald Trump took a hit on Tuesday night when she was asked the most straightforward question possible about her allegations during a Fox News interview. Her response demonstrates how painfully little she’s actually found — and how far over their skis the MAGAverse and Trump administration have gotten in response to her absurd charges.

In mid-July, as Trump sought to defuse a right-wing revolt over his administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case, Gabbard claimed to have uncovered and referred to the Justice Department documents which she said showed that at the end of Obama’s second term, his administration attempted “to subvert the will of the American people and enact what was essentially a years-long coup.” Her ridiculous and revisionist claims were widely touted by Fox stars and other MAGA propagandists eager to help Trump change the story from his former friend, the deceased sex offender Epstein.

Attorney General Pam Bondi has reportedly ordered federal prosecutors to launch a grand jury probe in response to Gabbard’s referral. Responding to that news on Monday night, Fox host Sean Hannity suggested that the probe’s targets could include Obama, former FBI Director James Comey, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former CIA Director John Brennan, and former special counsel Jack Smith. Fox legal analyst Gregg Jarrett replied that “those are appropriate names,” adding that “dozens, I think, could be charged as co-conspirators,” including former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.

But a “telling exchange” on Tuesday night between Gabbard and Fox’s Laura Ingraham, first flagged by CNN’s Aaron Blake, shows that what Gabbard considers the most damning revelations of Obama’s malfeasance were actually reviewed years ago by the GOP-led Senate Select Intelligence Committee, whose membership at the time included current Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

Ingraham asked Gabbard: “Now, director, you said there was irrefutable evidence that Obama was the mastermind of this intelligence manipulation and the perpetuation of the Russia hoax. What is that irrefutable evidence for our viewers tonight?”

Gabbard replied that the documents she had uncovered showed “how President Obama directed that a National Security Council meeting be called to talk about Russia, that the report that came out of that meeting was filled with tasks that were delivered by James Clapper's assistant to John Brennan and to other elements of the intelligence community — John Brennan was the head of the CIA at the time — all saying per the president's direction, per the president's order.”

She continued:

TULSI GABBARD: And very specifically, they were tasked to create an intelligence assessment that detailed how Moscow tried to influence the election. Not “if,” but “how.” And this was the beginning of this manufactured intelligence assessment where they knowingly wrote things in this assessment that were false, and they knew they were false. They knew that they were basing it on discredited intelligence or documents like the Steele dossier that was politically motivated and that they knew was false, and this was how they came up with — with the Russia hoax that was then weaponized and used to try to delegitimize the president, President Trump, and to try to ultimately enact this years-long coup throughout his entire four years of his first administration.

But Gabbard’s discoveries aren’t sinister — they aren’t even new.

The 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment that Obama ordered is the subject of the fourth volume of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s bipartisan Russia investigation, a 158-page document published in April 2020.

That report states that at a December 6, 2016, meeting of the National Security Council, “President Obama instructed Director Clapper to have the Intelligence Community prepare a comprehensive report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.” This was apparently such a banal request that it drew no commentary from the report’s authors.

The committee also reviewed the assessment itself and concluded that, far from some sort of malicious attack on Trump, it was “coherent and well-constructed,” featuring “proper analytic tradecraft,” and its authors experienced “no politically motivated pressure to reach specific conclusions.” From the report:

From a report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, "Russian active Measures and Interference in the 2016 U.S. Election, Volume 4: Review of the Intelligence Community Assessment"

Then-committee Chair Richard Burr (R-NC) issued a statement alongside the report in which he said, “The ICA reflects strong tradecraft, sound analytical reasoning, and proper justification of disagreement in the one analytical line where it occurred,” adding, “The Committee found no reason to dispute the Intelligence Community’s conclusions.”

Gabbard’s position appears to be that asking for and receiving intelligence showing that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election on Trump’s behalf is an attack on Trump by definition — one that Bondi now seeks to criminalize. But the Justice Department and the Senate Select Intelligence Committee under Rubio’s leadership came to the same conclusion.

We’ve seen all this before. Fox — and Hannity in particular — spent years promising viewers that investigations into the Russia probe were about to finally send all their political enemies to prison, only for those efforts to come up short or fall apart.

Unfortunately, Trump’s second-term appointees to top law enforcement and intelligence leadership are people like Gabbard — conspiracy theorists who are in positions of power because they’ve demonstrated to the president, through myriad Fox News appearances, their willingness to put his desires above all else.

So here we are, doing it all over again.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Need To Deflect Public Rage? Take Aim At Obama (And Murdoch!)

Need To Deflect Public Rage? Take Aim At Obama (And Murdoch!)

President Donald Trump is seeking to reunify allies enraged by his administration’s repudiation of MAGA claims about late convicted sex offender and disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein by offering up spurious attacks on common and familiar enemies: the media — in this case Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal — and former President Barack Obama.

Trump brought together an ideologically diverse coalition and a fractured right-wing media ecosystem during his 2024 campaign based largely on their shared hatred for Democrats, liberal institutions like the press, and the left. His administration’s actions have at times sparked criticism from different factions over the handling of issues like the Russia-Ukraine war, tariffs, U.S. strikes on Iran, immigration enforcement, and, most of all, disclosures in the Epstein case.

The president spent last week failing to tamp down discussion of the Epstein story that seemed to be fracturing the MAGA movement. He tried claiming that his political enemies had “written” the “Epstein Files,” argued that the Epstein case is “pretty boring stuff,” and even lashed out at supporters who talk about it as “weaklings” and “stupid people.” But while the propagandists at Fox News were willing to play ball, Trump’s statements backfired elsewhere, leaving many right-wing media figures and the base alike in a state of revolt.

On Thursday, however, The Wall Street Journal reported that a “bawdy” letter bearing Trump’s signature had been included in an album created for Epstein’s 50th birthday (before allegations of his sexual abuse of girls became publicly known). The document, according to the Journal, had been reviewed by Justice Department officials who handled Epstein’s case.

The Journal report could have focused the right’s attention on Trump’s voluminous ties to Epstein. But Trump redirected them at a familiar target: journalists. responded that night by calling the letter “FAKE,” denouncing the paper, and claiming that he would sue. The following day, he followed through with a defamation lawsuit seeking $10 billion in damages from the two authors of the article; the Journal’s publisher, Dow Jones & Co.; parent company News Corp and that company’s CEO; and Murdoch himself.

Trump’s lawsuit is both unprecedented and consistent with Trump’s authoritarian treatment of a free press whose criticism he seeks to curtail through corrupt means. The message it sends is straightforward: If you publish reporting that displeases the president — even if, like Murdoch, your support was crucial to his political ascension — he may try to ruin you, so don’t try it.

While the Journal’s corporate cousins at Fox News mostly avoided the story on Friday, the network’s competitors throughout the fractured marketplace of right-wing media responded by sharpening their knives and attacking the paper. Laura Loomer deemed the Journal story “totally fake,” Charlie Kirk accused the Journal of a “terrible drive-by,” and Benny Johnson claimed that the real “scandal is in who wrote the story,” referencing a baroque conspiracy theory that was circulating on the right at the time.

The same day Trump’s lawyers filed their suit, former Fox contributor and current Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard offered even more grist for the right-wing media mill. In a story served up to Fox as an exclusive, Gabbard claimed to have uncovered documents proving “a treasonous conspiracy in 2016 committed by officials at the highest level of our government” which aimed “to subvert the will of the American people and enact what was essentially a years-long coup.” She suggested that figures including Obama “must be investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” and said she was referring the documents to the Justice Department. Leaving nothing to subtext, Trump subsequently posted to Truth Social an AI video featuring Obama beng arrested and imprisoned.

Those documents, however, demonstrate nothing other than Gabbard’s own ignorance and/or malice. They show that Obama received an intelligence report that Russia had not hacked election systems to change vote totals in the 2016 election — which is consistent with what the Obama administration said publicly at the time — then asked for and subsequently received another intelligence report detailing other actions taken by the Russian government in an effort to influence the election. That effort, according to the intelligence community, the Justice Department, and a Senate committee helmed at the time by current Secretary of State Marco Rubio, included hacking and releasing Democratic emails.

Fox News contributor Andrew McCarthy, in a withering piece at National Review, described Gabbard’s argument as a “frivolous” attempt to further Trump’s “foolish stance” that Russia had not tried to influence the 2016 election via “overwrought and misleading” language and “thundering claptrap.”

But her attacks served to reignite years of conspiracy-mongering about the Russia “witch hunt,” and thus were credibly regurgitated elsewhere on the right, including by Fox’s stars, with some echoing Gabbard’s demagogic language about purported “treason.” Trump, meanwhile, repeatedly posted Fox clips and articles from right-wing media hyping the purported scandal.

Much of MAGA media seems eager to target the Journal and Obama on Trump’s behalf. But it remains to be seen whether those influencers — or their audience — will be willing to allow the Epstein story to fade away altogether.

That said, Trump’s best hope of keeping his supporters happy may very well be increasing the scale and tempo of his authoritarian attacks — and that means there will be more to come in the months ahead.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Eating Their Own: MAGA Media Trash Trump, Bondi Over Epstein Files Fiasco

Eating Their Own: MAGA Media Trash Trump, Bondi Over Epstein Files Fiasco

President Donald Trump appointed conspiracy-obsessed MAGA media favorites to the highest levels of federal law enforcement, and now those figures are coming under fire from the right-wing fever swamp for failing to confirm their bullshit.

Axios reported on Sunday night that the Justice Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation had concluded that there was no evidence convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein “blackmailed powerful figures, kept a ‘client list’ or was murdered.” Those findings repudiated claims that had for years permeated the MAGA influencer ecosystem and been promoted by the stars of Fox News and the broader right-wing media.

The Trump-appointed leaders of both the FBI and DOJ had previously stoked the same conspiracy theories their agencies rejected. “As social media influencers and activists, Kash Patel (now the FBI's director) and Dan Bongino (now deputy director) were among those in MAGA world who questioned the official version of how Epstein died,” Axios noted. Moreover, Attorney General Pam Bondi had claimed in a February interview on Fox News that the purported “client list” was “sitting on my desk right now to review.”

While the Epstein saga is a bit of a sideshow in the grand scheme of things, what it highlights about the underlying dynamics of the MAGA movement is deeply unsettling. It demonstrates that the Trump administration is in hock to some of the most deranged conspiracy theorists imaginable, treating them as among its closest allies and devoting substantial resources to their care and feeding.

The White House brought 15 MAGA influencers in to meet with Bondi in February, sending them home with glossy binders labeled “The Epstein Files: Phase 1.” When those binders did not satisfy the MAGA faithful, the attorney general reportedly tasked “hundreds of FBI employees” with reviewing Epstein investigation documents for release. In May, Patel and Bongino were sent to Fox to make the case, with the fervor of the converted, that Epstein had actually killed himself. And now the FBI and DOJ have produced a memo detailing their findings and released footage taken from outside Epstein’s cell in the hours surrounding his suicide.

The final result left Trump’s most zealous online allies with two options: They could finally acknowledge that they had been peddling nonsense for years — or they could insinuate that the Trump administration itself is part of the cover-up.

MAGA’s Epstein conspiracy theorists lash out at Bondi — and even Trump

In the hours after Axios’ story broke, several prominent MAGA influencers took the latter path, hammering the administration for failing to confirm their Epstein hypotheses.

“This new DOJ memo admits there are countless victims of Epstein on video but no client list or evidence of other rapists they can charge. Oh it claims Epstein wasn’t using videos as blackmail,” Robby Starbuck sneered on X. “NO ONE believes this for very good reason.”

Starbuck put the blame squarely on the attorney general.

“Bondi just made it all worse with this memo,” he wrote. “What a terrible, terrible idea it was to write this memo. It’s also incredibly insulting to our intelligence.”

Noting her prior claim on Fox that she was in possession of Epstein’s “client list,” he commented, “Was she lying then or is she lying now?”

Laura Loomer also blamed Bondi.

“Blondi lied,” she posted on X, using the nickname she typically utilizes for the attorney general. “She was always lying.”

Others were less specific about who was responsible for the cover-up.

“We were all told more was coming,” Jack Posobiec lamented. “That answers were out there and would be provided. Incredible how utterly mismanaged this Epstein mess has been. And it didn’t have to be.”

Tim Pool suggested that the administration was protecting “the adult child rapists who were blackmailed” and floated the possibility that they were protecting “shareholder value” from “the economic fallout if say, hypothetically, Bill Gates was revealed to have been flying around with Epstein and then we got videos of him abusing underage girls.”

And Mike Cernovich suggested that the buck stopped with the president.

“No one is believing the Epstein coverup, @realDonaldTrump,” he wrote. “This will be part of your legacy. There’s still time to change it!”

The right-wing media ecosystem is built to manufacture and distribute conspiracy theories to an audience trained to believe them. Under the incentive structure this ecosystem creates, it makes sense that the Trump campaign relied on conspiracy theorists to bolster its position, that Patel and Bongino boosted their standing within that ecosystem by echoing such claims, and that Bondi kept claiming an Epstein reckoning was imminent.

But eventually, the Trump administration trapped itself. Bondi, Patel, and Bongino were unable to produce the information that the MAGA faithful demanded, and they seem unable to convince them the information does not exist. It is the nature of conspiracy theorists to insist that anything which appears to rebut their claims actually confirms it. And now they’re turning on their erstwhile allies.

The truth about Epstein and Trump

One ironic aspect of the Epstein saga is that while MAGA influencers were apparently certain that the Trump administration was going to implicate a wave of prominent individuals in Epstein’s sex crimes and, perhaps, his death, there are few figures as prominent with ties as close to Epstein as Trump himself.

Consider:

  • Trump was quoted in a 2002 profile describing Epstein as a longtime friend and “terrific guy” about whom “it is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”
  • Trump was among the politicians and celebrities who hitched rides on Epstein’s private plane in the 1990s.
  • In 2019, shortly before Epstein’s arrest on sex charges, longtime Trump adviser Steve Bannon prepped Epstein for a potential interview.
  • Trump chose for labor secretary in his first term Alex Acosta, who as a U.S. attorney oversaw a sweetheart plea deal for Epstein that a judge later ruled illegal.
  • Alan Dershowitz, the Trump supporter who served on the president’s second Senate impeachment trial team, was one of the defense lawyers who helped Epstein secure that plea deal.
  • Epstein’s 2019 suicide occurred while he was in the custody of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, an agency overseen at the time by the Trump-appointed attorney general, William Barr.
  • After longtime Epstein associate Ghislane Maxwell was arrested on sex trafficking charges in 2020, Trump told reporters: “I’ve met her numerous times over the years, especially since I lived in Palm Beach, and I guess they lived in Palm Beach. But I wish her well, whatever it is.”
  • Trump waffled about whether he would “declassify the Epstein files” during a Fox interview — but the network edited out that portion of his answer.
  • Trump appointed as attorney general Bondi, who was “Florida's attorney general 2011-2109 -- a period of time when Jeffrey Epstein's plane records became public, victims' lawsuits were filed and a lot of new evidence against Epstein surfaced –” but she did not take action.

None of this is actually proof that Epstein was killed to cover up the fact that he had possessed evidence that he had sex-trafficked underage girls for Trump. He killed himself, and the idea of a “client list” was, as the reporter who exposed Epstein put it, “a figment of the internet's imagination -- and a means to just slander people.”

But if, say, a similar set of facts linked former President Joe Biden and his associates to Epstein, you can bet that MAGA’s conspiracy corps would treat them as clear evidence. And so it will be interesting to see, as they scrounge for an explanation for the Bondi/Patel/Bongino about-face, if any of them eventually land there.

Why the right’s conspiracy theory engine matters

The Epstein saga is ultimately a minor drama. It is embarrassing for the right that so many of its leading lights pushed the conspiracy theories for so long, and it’s unnerving that some of those conspiracy theorists now occupy the highest levels of government, but on its own terms, the stakes for the public are relatively low.

But this treatment of the Epstein saga is not an anomaly — the right responds in this same fashion to every news event. Its ecosystem is constantly pumping out new conspiracy theories intended to prove the perfidity of the left, its audience is trapped in a bubble in which it is constantly bombarded by such claims, and the consequences can be real and dire.

Following MAGA media’s fervid promotion in September 2024 of the racist, baseless lie that Haitians were stealing and eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, local institutions received bomb threats and residents kept their children home from school out of fear for their safety.

Officials at all levels of government seeking to respond to a devastating hurricane in North Carolina the next month were forced to spend precious time debunking that ecosystem’s deranged lies because those were the sources some victims counted on for their information.

When the Epstein conspiracy theories are firmly in the rearview, everyone involved in propagating them will retain their influence over a Trump administration that is more concerned with placating them than in acting in the public interest. And that is truly dangerous.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Fox Hacks Push Trump Budget Hard (While Hiding What's Really In It)

Fox Hacks Push Trump Budget Hard (While Hiding What's Really In It)

Fox News’ propagandists aren’t terribly interested in the contents of the Republican tax and spending bill the Senate will vote on on Monday, or on the devastating impacts it might have on their viewers. But they know that President Donald Trump wants it to pass, and so they’re greasing the skids with their viewers to help it over the finish line.

An exchange between two of the co-hosts of Fox & Friends — the morning show beloved by the president — exemplifies how the network, and the broader MAGAspere, has treated the legislation, which agglomerates much of Trump’s domestic agenda in a single bill.

“It’s not perfect, but it does need to pass if we want this tax cut,” Ainsley Earhart told viewers.

She then offered up some pablum about the bill’s contents: “It’s the largest tax cut in history. And also no tax on tips or overtime, which is great for the working class, and that’s what Donald Trump ran on. … It funds border security and deportations, it funds our military, it begins to reform Medicaid.”

That sort of surface-level support for the legislation is commonplace on Fox and its counterparts — the president’s propagandists tend to back whatever version of the bill is under discussion without much consideration for its impacts.

MAGA media revolves around Trump and his desires, but its personalities tend to be more invested in waging the culture war than in the nitty-gritty of policymaking. Views on economic issues like tariffs or national security ones like the U.S. military strikes on Iran can shift rapidly to align with whatever it is the president supports at any moment. Fox hosts like Earhardt likewise tend to be supportive of the bill but haven’t dwelled on it.

Why is there so much urgency to pass this bill right now? Earhardt doesn’t say. But the reason is that Trump has imposed a deadline for the final legislation to pass both houses of Congress and come to his desk by July 4 as “a wonderful Celebration for our Country.” Congressional Republicans could be working to improve a bill that Earhardt acknowledges is imperfect, but the party and its propagandists are prioritizing Trump’s desire to get a win on schedule.

By passing the bill quickly, Republicans hope to minimize the grueling political damage caused by enacting legislation that is wildly unpopular — and likely to become more so as the public finds out what is in it.

Fox’s job is to ensure that viewers remain placid about the impact of the bill before it passes. The messaging dilemma for Trump supporters like Earhardt is that bumper-sticker claims of the bill being “great for the working class” and working to “reform Medicaid” won’t hold up to scrutiny. Here’s who benefits from the bill’s tax cuts, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities:

And here’s how The Associated Press sums up the latest score of the Senate bill from the Congressional Budget Office, including its impact on Medicaid:

The CBO estimates the Senate bill would increase the deficit by nearly $3.3 trillion from 2025 to 2034, a nearly $1 trillion increase over the House-passed bill, which CBO has projected would add $2.4 to the debt over a decade.

The analysis also found that 11.8 million more Americans would become uninsured by 2034 if the bill became law, an increase over the scoring for the House-passed version of the bill, which predicts 10.9 million more people would be without health coverage.

So the Senate bill blows an even bigger hole in the deficit than the House version does, and its cuts to Medicaid would knock more people off the health insurance rolls, all while providing tax cuts weighted toward the wealthiest Americans.

Earhardt’s co-host Brian Kilmeade offered a hand wave of a response to these deep flaws in his reply. In the program’s sole reference to the Senate bill’s CBO score, he followed the GOP strategy of attacking the agency.

“Democrats are holding on to the CBO — their report says it adds $3.3 trillion to the debt over the next 10 years,” Kilmeade said. “But they look at growth at 1.7%. … Under the bill, what they want to do, growth is going to be a lot higher than that. And you gotta think if interest rates go down, that’s why … Republicans say, through dynamic scoring, they’re going to have a more accurate account. They say, once again, the CBO will be wrong."

This amounts to an admission that all he has as a rebuttal to the CBO’s devastating score is “nuh-uh.” In reality, it is the Republican growth estimate that is out of step with the consensus.

The brand of tap-dancing seen on Fox & Friends can get the hosts through the show without criticizing Trump’s priority — and perhaps help the bill to final passage. But people will notice if they suddenly lose health insurance, or their local hospital closes. They will notice if the funds they use to feed their kids disappear, or their electricity bills soar.

And if the bill passes, the goal of MAGA media will pivot from telling viewers that the legislation needed to pass to hiding its role in those crushing impacts.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Johnson Privately Confirms Deep Medicaid Cuts He Denied On Fox News

Johnson Privately Confirms Deep Medicaid Cuts He Denied On Fox News

Twenty-four hours after House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) used Fox News’ platform to claim Democrats are lying when they say that the GOP’s One Big Beautiful Bill cuts Medicaid, Politico reported that he is privately warning House Republicans will lose their majority if the Senate version’s Medicaid cuts are enacted.

Fox & Friends co-host Ainsley Earhardt asked Johnson during a Tuesday interview to explain the differences between the House and Senate versions of the legislation on “Medicaid and the SALT deductions and other areas,” and to respond to Democrats “that are pushing this narrative that's not true that Republicans are cutting Medicare and Medicaid.”

Johnson responded that the Democratic claims are “nonsense” because “we are not cutting Medicaid” but instead “strengthening the program for the people that desperately need it and deserve it” by instituting work requirements. He said Democratic ads saying otherwise had been “taken down.” He did not address the part of the question about how the House and Senate Medicaid provisions differ — though he did go on to warn Senate Republicans they would be “playing with fire” if they touch the House bill’s boost to the cap of the State And Local Tax deduction.

But when Johnson talks to Republican power players instead of Fox viewers, he is saying something very different, Politico reported on Wednesday:

Speaker Mike Johnson is warning in private that Senate Republicans could cost House Republicans their majority next year if they try to push through the deep Medicaid cuts in the current Senate version, according to three people granted anonymity to describe the matter.

That comes as Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) cautions GOP senators that those same cutbacks could become a political albatross for Republicans just as the Affordable Care Act was for Democrats.

“[Barack] Obama said … ‘if you like your health care you can keep it, if you like your doctor we can keep it,’ and yet we had several million people lose their health care,” the in-cycle senator told reporters Tuesday. “Here we’re saying [with] Medicaid, we’re going to hold people harmless, but we’re estimating” millions of people could lose coverage.

While the Senate’s proposed cuts are even steeper, the House bill, contrary to what Earhardt and Johnson suggested to Fox’s audience, also includes devastating Medicaid cuts. It would drive nearly 8 million people off the Medicaid rolls over the next decade, the Congressional Budget Office found. Analysts say those cuts, along with other health cuts in the bill, would result in more than 11,000 medically preventable deaths annually and could force rural hospitals to close.

These Medicaid cuts are hideously unpopular, but Fox figures are helping Johnson keep his speakership by downplaying their impact to viewers — when they talk about them at all. Indeed, Fox & Friends did not address the Medicaid cuts on Wednesday, including after Politico’s report contradicted Johnson’s claims to their viewers.

Meanwhile, though Johnson told Earnhardt that Democratic claims about the GOP’s Medicaid cuts were so obviously false that ads on them have been taken down, an ad denouncing Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE) for having “voted for the biggest Medicaid cut in history” has run more than 100 times on TV stations in his district this week, according to a Media Matters review of the Kinetiq database.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Trump's Fox News Obsession Driving US Toward War With Iran

Trump's Fox News Obsession Driving US Toward War With Iran

President Donald Trump appears to be careening toward a U.S. military strike on Iran as current and former Fox News figures — from posts on the network’s airwaves, elsewhere in the right-wing media ecosystem, and within his administration — fight to influence his decision.

For years, Trump's obsession with the Fox universe has driven policy decisions, administration staffing, and countless stream-of-consciousness social media posts. Now, the network will have an outsized role in determining America's potential involvement in a spiraling regional military conflict.

The George W. Bush administration spent months “following a meticulously planned strategy to persuade the public, the Congress and the allies of the need to confront the threat from Saddam Hussein” before finally launching that war in March 2003. That strategy — based on cooked intelligence about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction dishonestly sold to American people — resulted in the deaths of more than 4,000 U.S. service members and more than 200,000 Iraqi civilians as well as a massive financial cost.

Two decades later, Trump seems poised to join Israel's attack on Iran, with the stated goal of preventing that country from acquiring nuclear weapons that the U.S. intelligence community says it is not seeking. The president on Tuesday threatened to assassinate Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, bragged that the U.S. is involved in securing the airspace over that country, and called for “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER,” all while the U.S. military is marshalling forces in the region. And that push has come with little effort to convince the public, which overwhelmingly opposes U.S. military involvement in Iran, of the necessity of such a course.

The Fox propaganda engine is driving this chaotic process. Trump reportedly became more interested in U.S. military action because he saw favorable Fox coverage of Israel’s initial attacks on Iran, while more recent segments have stressed the importance of U.S. involvement. Fox host Mark Levin and his former colleague Tucker Carlson are waging a scorched-earth battle for Trump’s ear, with Levin apparently gaining the advantage. And top administration officials with roles in a potential conflict — including Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth — are in their positions in the first place because Trump approved of their previous work at the network.

It remains unclear what the president will decide to do and how any of it will play out for the country and the world. What seems likely, however, is that the Trump administration will undertake its Iran policy with the same inconsistency that characterized his tariff policy; the same low quality of staff work that got a reporter added to a text chain where top officials shared info about a forthcoming U.S. strike; the same lack of care for the lives of foreigners that has already killed hundreds of thousands of people; and the same disinterest in following the law on display in his deportation plan.

And Trump’s action, regardless of what it is, will receive sycophantic cheers from his propagandists at Fox.

The Fox-Trump feedback loop is powering Iran policy

A June 17 New York Times story detailing how Trump had shifted from trying to restrain an Israeli attack on Iran while overseeing negotiations with its leaders to supporting Israel’s strike and considering U.S. involvement highlights the role of a key player: Fox.

“When he woke on Friday morning, his favorite TV channel, Fox News, was broadcasting wall-to-wall imagery of what it was portraying as Israel’s military genius,” the Times reported. “And Mr. Trump could not resist claiming some credit for himself.”

Under typical circumstances, a U.S. president shifting the nation’s military posture based on a few cable news segments would sound fantastical. But under Trump, major aspects of federal policy regularly turn on what he is hearing from his favored TV personalities. Fox hosts understand their influence and regularly seek to influence Trump’s decisions, both through their programs and in private conversations with the president.

Fox’s hosts thus wield incredible power over Trump’s actions. And in recent days, those figures have been using their platforms to tell the president that U.S. strikes on Iran are both important and likely to succeed with little cost. They know which buttons to push and are banging on them as hard as they can.

“Trump's favorite TV network has staked out the pro-war position – and it isn't making as much room for debate,” CNN’s Brian Stelter reported on June 18. “Guest after guest on Fox has played to Trump's ego — simultaneously praising the president and pushing for US intervention through his television screen.”

Carlson and Levin go to war

Carlson and Levin are waging a scorched-earth campaign against each other, with each presenting their own views as the true America First position as they seek to influence Trump’s decision-making.

Carlson, a proponent of the right’s white nationalist and Holocaust-denying wing who tends to oppose foreign military interventions in favor of attacks on domestic enemies, claims that bombing Iran would “shut down Trump’s three core promises.” Levin, a staunch advocate for deploying U.S. power in the Middle East, argues that American intervention would be consistent with Trump’s policy of “peace through strength.”

Levin currently appears to have the upper hand. Politico reported last week that Levin made his case to Trump directly at a June 4 meeting:

During a private lunch with the president at the White House last Wednesday, conservative talk show host Mark Levin told Trump that Iran was days away from building a nuclear weapon, an argument Trump’s own intelligence team has told the president is not accurate, according to an intelligence official as well as another Trump ally familiar with the matter. Levin urged Trump to allow the Israeli government to strike Iranian nuclear sites, which Trump has told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would torpedo the diplomacy.

Carlson subsequently lashed out at Levin and other Fox figures whom he (accurately) described as “warmongers.” He wrote on June 13:

The real divide isn’t between people who support Israel and people who support Iran or the Palestinians. The real divide is between those who casually encourage violence, and those who seek to prevent it — between warmongers and peacemakers. Who are the warmongers? They would include anyone who’s calling Donald Trump today to demand air strikes and other direct US military involvement in a war with Iran. On that list: Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, Rupert Murdoch, Ike Perlmutter and Miriam Adelson. At some point they will all have to answer for this, but you should know their names now.

Levin replied, calling Carlson “a reckless and deceitful propagandist” who “promote[s] antisemitism and conspiracy nuts” (all obviously true). He added: “It doesn’t occur to you that your supposed sources are disloyal to POTUS. You and they are undermining him and you just declared your break from the President.” In a series of subsequent posts, he denigrated his former colleague as “Chatsworth Qatarlson” and accused him of “rooting for Iran” and “trashing our president.”

Carlson responded in a June 16 appearance on his ally Stephen Bannon’s program in which he claimed that Levin is “terrible on TV” (true) with a screen presence reminiscent of “listening to your ex-wife scream about alimony payments” (sexist but at least directionally correct). He further claimed that Levin’s appearances on Fox demonstrate that what the network is “doing is what they always do, which is just turning up the propaganda hose to full blast and just trying to, you know, knock elderly Fox viewers off their feet and make them submit to where you want them to” (extremely accurate).

Trump, for his part, weighed in on Sunday, June 15, saying of Carlson’s critique of his Iran policy, “I don't know what Tucker Carlson is saying. Let him go get a television network and say it so that people listen.” In a Monday night post, he described Carlson as “kooky” (another accurate characterization), adding, “IRAN CAN NOT HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON!” Levin swiftly highlighted both comments on social media.

Levin took a curtain call on Hannity’s Fox show on Tuesday night, screaming, “You’re either a patriotic American who’s gonna get behind the president of the United States, the commander-in-chief, or you’re not!”

Many key administration roles are filled by former Foxers

Several senior administration officials who will play key roles in advising Trump on whether and how to conduct military strikes and then implement that policy are wildly unqualified people who got their jobs because the president liked their Fox appearances. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth are among the 23 former Fox employees Trump has appointed to his second administration.

Gabbard, a former Fox contributor from the Carlson wing of the MAGA movement who lacks “the typical intelligence experience of past officeholders,” said in congressional testimony earlier this year that it was the conclusion of the intelligence community that “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamanei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003.”

Trump, however, apparently preferred Levin’s lunchtime claim that Iran was actually days away from a bomb, telling reporters on June 17, “I don’t care what she said. I think they were very close to having a weapon.” The president, Politico reported Tuesday, “has increasingly mused about nixing Gabbard’s office completely” and, according to one source, “thinks she ‘doesn’t add anything to any conversation.’”

Trump promoted Hegseth from Fox & Friends Weekend co-host to the leadership of the Pentagon, and based on his past Fox commentary, he is likely a voice in favor of military action. His early leadership of the Defense Department is not encouraging for how such action might go — he has driven off his senior staff, discussed U.S. strikes in private texts that subsequently leaked, and oversaw a costly and ultimately ineffective campaign against Houthi rebels in Yemen.

Other relevant former Foxers include Mike Huckabee, the former network host Trump installed as U.S. ambassador to Israel, and Tammy Bruce, the former Fox contributor currently ensconced as the State Department spokesperson.

No matter what happens, this much is certain: A bunch of current and former Fox News employees are essentially deciding whether the U.S. is going to war.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Gavin Newsom

Fox Lies Obscure The Facts About Trump-Newsom Phone Dispute

A Fox News anchor, the network’s White House correspondent, and two of its prime-time hosts all apparently decided to lie to their audiences on Tuesday about a dispute over when Donald Trump last spoke to California Gov. Gavin Newsom, with each dissembling over what Trump or Newsom said rather than admitting that the president was wrong. And Trump’s own furious response to an inaccurate Fox chyron apparently set off that Orwellian chain of events.

A reporter asked Trump at an Oval Office event on June 10 when he last spoke with Newsom, whom the president has suggested should face arrest for his handling of rioting in the Los Angeles area. Trump replied that he called Newsom “a day ago” to criticize his response.

Newsom’s X account quickly reposted the video clip of the Oval Office exchange, saying, “There was no such call.”

As is often the case with Trump, it’s difficult to determine whether the president had been deliberately lying about the call, accidentally misspoke, or had some sort of senior moment. But the president quickly doubled down — albeit while directly proving his own initial statement was inaccurate.

Fox “news side” anchor John Roberts discussed the dispute a dozen minutes after Newsom’s post. He aired the video of Trump saying he had called Newsom “a day ago,” and provided Newsom’s post on X “pushing back.” Roberts promised to “try to get to the bottom of that and find out when the call actually happened."

Notably, on-screen text during the segment read, “Newsom says Trump never called him over L.A. riots.” That’s not true — Newsom responded on X to Trump’s claim that they had spoken “a day ago,” but the governor previously discussed a call with the president that he said occurred “late Friday night, about 1:30 plus, his time” in which he said Trump “never once brought up the National Guard."

That error may have proved crucial. The president, who is notorious for his obsession with Fox’s programming, was apparently watching Roberts’ show on Air Force One and took the time to quickly call the anchor to respond, as Roberts relayed on-air a half hour after his initial segment. He told viewers that Trump had told him he had a call with Newsom that lasted 16 minutes on which the president told the governor to “get his ass in fear and stop the riots” and that he produced “evidence” Newsom was “a liar."

Roberts also posted Trump’s statement on X, as well as an image of a call log showing that Trump placed a call to Newsom at 1:23 a.m. ET on June 7 (for Newsom, in California, 10:23 p.m. PT on June 6). MAGA influencers quickly presented that as case-closed proof that Newsom had lied and Trump had been vindicated.

The “evidence,” as Trump put it, that he spoke with Newsom on June 6/7 does disprove the claim from the inaccurate Fox chyron that Trump “never called” the governor. But Trump producing proof of a June 6/7 call to which Newsom already attested, but not the June 9 call he claimed, also suggests the latter did not occur. It only proves Trump’s Oval Office statement correct if one pretends that June 6/7 occurred the day before June 10.

Telling Fox viewers that the president was wrong about something, however, is not really in the job description for the network’s employees — such acts of reporting could even irritate the network’s audience enough to drive them to a competitor.

Roberts finessed that difficulty on-air by lying to his viewers about what the president had initially said. The Fox anchor claimed that Trump had said in the Oval Office that he phoned Newsom “the other day, maybe yesterday,” while not calling attention to the fact that the call log he had obtained placed the call several days earlier.

JOHN ROBERTS (ANCHOR): President Trump is winging his way to Fort Bragg, North Carolina aboard Air Force One. He is clearly watching the program and saw that we said that Gavin Newsom claimed that the call that the president alluded to that was made the other day, maybe yesterday, never happened. Well, the president told me this in recent moments. He said the first call was not picked up. The second call Gavin picked up. We spoke for 16 minutes. I told him to essentially “get his ass in gear and stop the riots, which were out of control.” More than anything else, this shows what a liar he is. He said I never called, here is the evidence. We will see if the California governor responds to that, but that from President Trump before Air Force One just a couple moments ago.

In another report on the dispute the following hour, Roberts again hid that Trump had been wrong, falsely claiming the president had said he spoke to Newsom “yesterday or the other day.”

Notably, neither of Roberts’ segments about Trump’s response aired the video of Trump’s June 10 claim that he had spoken to Newsom “a day ago,” which had been included in the initial report that provoked the president.

Others on Fox followed Roberts’ lead in shielding their viewers from the fact that Trump had said something that wasn’t true.

Peter Doocy, Fox’s White House correspondent, aired Trump saying he spoke to Newsom “a day ago” in a segment on Special Report, the network’s flagship “news side” broadcast. But he then suggested Trump’s response to Roberts disproved Newsom’s denial, saying, “Newsom then claimed, ‘There was no call, not even a voice mail.’ A screenshot of an iPhone call log provided to Fox's John Roberts shows two calls from the president to Newsom on Saturday. One lasted for 16 minutes.”

Fox’s hardcore Trump propagandists, of course, were all-in on the notion that Trump had caught Newsom in a lie.

Trump crony and Fox prime-time host Sean Hannity claimed on his radio show, “I just love when politicians get caught red-handed in a lie. Gavin Newsom saying that Trump never even called him, and Donald Trump actually takes a picture of his phone showing that they talked … for 16 minutes."

Jesse Watters, whose show generally amounts to a reheated TV version on the day’s takes from MAGA influencers, aired a version of Trump’s Oval Office statement about his call with Newsom that was cut to exclude the president’s statement that the exchange happened “a day ago.” Watters then lied about Newsom’s response.

“Newsom responded and he said there wasn't a phone call — he said Trump never called him, not even a voice mail, he said,” Watters claimed. “But John Roberts got Trump's call logs and it shows Trump called him late Friday night and they talked for 16 minutes."

“Why would Newsom lie and claim Trump never called him? Why would he do that?” Watters asked.

Watters also falsely claimed on The Five that “Gavin Newsom said Trump never called me. Trump showed his phone to John Roberts, he had a 16-minute conversation."

Watters added, “They just tell you you are not seeing what you are seeing and think they can get away with it."

Indeed.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Fox Fantasizes About Migrant 'Insurrection' To Justify Tyrannical Response

Fox Fantasizes About Migrant 'Insurrection' To Justify Tyrannical Response

Fox News’ depiction of the protests that began in and around Los Angeles over the weekend is a grim fantasy — but one that encourages President Donald Trump to realize his vision of U.S. troops crushing left-wing dissent.

Prime-time host Jesse Watters laid out his network’s dominant narrative in a Monday night monologue.

“Democrats are causing mayhem in their cities, so when Trump restores order, they can label him a dictator and stir up even more hatred and violence against him,” Watters alleged. “They're burning their own cities just to prove to their bloodthirsty base that they're fighting Trump in the streets, burning their own cities for power.”

None of this is true. The LA immigration protests are an organic response to Trump’s dramatic escalation of immigration enforcement. Democratic politicians have vocally opposed the riots that have sometimes accompanied those protests. That rioting, while deplorable, has not engulfed the city. But Trump has used it as a pretext to deploy U.S. troops for the confrontation with protesters he has long sought.

It is a core function of the government to maintain order on the streets and enforce the laws. That is properly the responsibility of officials like Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, who have condemned the rioting, attacks on law enforcement, and destruction of property that at times have occurred amid the protests and called for legal accountability for perpetrators.

By suggesting that those officials are instead actively supporting riots, while inflating the extent of those riots, Fox is creating a justification for Trump to step in. And given Trump’s drive to dominate his perceived enemies and his glorification of state violence, that could end very badly.

Immigration protests are an organic response to Trump’s escalation of enforcement

The Wall Street Journal published on Tuesday an extensive investigation of what it termed “The White House Marching Orders That Sparked the L.A. Migrant Crackdown.”

The story details how White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller — disappointed by a pace of daily deportations that was below what the Biden administration attained last year — instructed Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials to “just go out there and arrest illegal aliens” at targets like Home Depot and 7-Eleven.

According to the Journal, “ICE agents appeared to follow Miller’s tip and conducted an immigration sweep Friday at the Home Depot in the predominantly Latino neighborhood of Westlake in Los Angeles, helping set off a weekend of protests around Los Angeles County, including at the federal detention center in the city’s downtown.”

The story also provides this summary of the extraordinary tactics the Trump administration has used to try to increase its deportation numbers:

Federal agents make warrantless arrests. Masked agents take people into custody without identifying themselves. Plainclothes agents in at least a dozen cities have arrested migrants who showed up to their court hearings. And across the U.S., people suspected of being in the country illegally are disappearing into the federal detention system without notice to families or lawyers, according to attorneys, witnesses and officials.

Trump won the 2024 presidential election while promising an agenda of mass deportation. But the naked cruelty and questionable legality of these policies will inevitably spur dissent, and some who oppose them will exercise their First Amendment rights to speak out against them, including at public protests.

Democratic politicians don't support rioting that sometimes accompanied those protests

The civic core of Los Angeles has seen unacceptable levels of violence over the past several days. As the Los Angeles Times reported, “Protests have devolved into clashes with police and made-for-TV scenes of chaos: Waymo taxis on fire. Vandals defacing city buildings with anti-police graffiti. Masked men lobbing chunks of concrete at California Highway Patrol officers keeping protesters off the 101 Freeway.”

That rioting, according to LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell, was caused not by “the people that we see here in the day who are out there legitimately exercising their First Amendment rights,” but “by masked ‘anarchists’ who he said were bent on exploiting the state of unrest to vandalize property and attack police.”

Fox propagandists like Watters, echoing Trump administration officials, have suggested that Democrats could instantly make the rioting stop but are refusing to do so because they support the violence.

They don’t offer evidence for this Democratic support for rioting. Democratic leaders have rightfully and repeatedly condemned the violence targeting law enforcement and destruction of property as anathema, as a simple perusal of their X accounts reveals. In addition to denouncing such tactics on their merits, they frequently point out that rioting plays into Trump’s hands.

Newsom’s messages to the public over the last few days have included:

Bass has likewise said:

Their statements are not anomalous. Sen. Alex Padilla’s (D-CA) “message to the people in LA” is “keep speaking out and protest peacefully.” His colleague Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA) posted, “Los Angeles — violence is never the answer. Assaulting law enforcement is never ok.” Other caucus members who are as ideologically diverse as Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) are on the same page, calling for peaceful protest while condemning violence. Indeed, the lack of support for rioting has led to condemnations of the Democratic Party from the left.

No one in a position of authority in the Democratic Party is following the path that Trump and his supporters at Fox took after the January 6 insurrection by making excuses for rioting and paving the way to pardon the offenders.

These riots, while deplorable, have not engulfed the city

Right-wing pundits have suggested that journalists are minimizing the violence by pointing out that the protests are occurring in a tiny fraction of a massive city where the vast majority of residents are unaffected by any violence that has occurred. But the scope of the problem really does matter in determining the appropriate government response.

Trump claimed on Sunday that Los Angeles “has been invaded and occupied by Illegal Aliens and Criminals” and that action is needed “to liberate Los Angeles from the Migrant Invasion, and put an end to these Migrant riots.” On Monday, an official Defense Department social media account reported that “Los Angeles is burning, and local leaders are refusing to respond.”

The more extensive the destruction, the more justification there is for federal action.

In 1992, for example, President George H.W. Bush deployed the National Guard to Los Angeles in response to days of widespread rioting following the acquittal of the police officers who were videotaped beating Rodney King. Time reported of the LA riots:

Over the course of several days, more than 60 people died, while another 2,000 were injured. More than 1,000 buildings were defaced, leading to damages that amounted to some $1 billion.

Bush called up the National Guard under the Insurrection Act, which authorizes the President to deploy the typically state-controlled military force in certain situations involving invasions or insurrections, on the third day of the riots.

“What followed Wednesday's jury verdict in the Rodney King case was a tragic series of events for the city of Los Angeles: Nearly 4,000 fires, staggering property damage, hundreds of injuries, and the senseless deaths of over 30 people,” Bush said in an address at the time. He went on to announce the commitment of thousands of additional troops to the city “to help restore order” at the behest of the governor and mayor, and the federalization of the National Guard.

The violence against law enforcement and property damage that has occurred since Friday is unacceptable, and the governor and mayor are right to try to control the chaos. It’s also not on the scale of the Rodney King riots, happening over what amounts to a handful of city blocks, as these graphics from The New York Times show.

But Trump has responded in unprecedented fashion. He has federalized and deployed roughly 4,000 soldiers of the California National Guard, an order the state called “unlawful” and that Newsom said came without the president “conferring with the state.”

He also deployed 700 U.S. Marines, which “are typically not trained or equipped to deal with civil disturbances,” as retired Army Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré told Task and Purpose. Absent clear coordination, the arrival of those forces “presents a significant logistical and operational challenge for those of us tasked with safeguarding this city,” according to McDonnell.

Trump is determined to get an escalation

The president has been described as a fascist by those who served at the highest levels of his first administration, including his former White House chief of staff, retired Gen. John Kelly, and former Defense Secretary Mark Esper, as well as by Gen. Mark Milley, who served under him as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

He promised on the campaign trail to “root out the communist, Marxist, fascist and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country,” and floated using the National Guard or even the military against “the enemy from within,” which he described as “radical left lunatics.”

He reportedly considered invoking the Insurrection Act during the 2020 civil unrest following the murder of George Floyd, was rebuffed by Esper and Milley, and said that he regretted not “immediately” sending in the military.

He has selected more pliant defense officials for his second term, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, a former Fox host who supported the domestic deployment of the military and is known for defending U.S. service members who had been accused and convicted of war crimes.

Trump has praised the Chinese government’s murderous response to student protesters at Tiananmen Square, saying it showed “the power of strength,” and has repeatedly urged law enforcement officers to use rougher, more brutal tactics in dealing with those they apprehend.

And the president does not appear to observe a distinction between peaceful protest and violent riot — if the perpetrators aren’t his supporters, it’s all insurrection to him.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Even 'Fox & Friends' Can No Longer Deny Tax Bill Will Explode Deficit

Even 'Fox & Friends' Can No Longer Deny Tax Bill Will Explode Deficit

Reality crept into Fox News’ coverage of the Republican tax bill on Monday when a Fox & Friends co-host acknowledged that the legislation will increase the budget deficit because the GOP Congress is prioritizing President Donald Trump’s tax cut agenda.

The White House and House Republican leaders seem to have adopted a strategy of flatly lying about the deficit implications of their “Big, Beautiful Bill.” Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought falsely claimed that the bill “doesn’t increase the deficit or hurt the debt” while House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) falsely claimed it is “not going to add to the debt” in June 1 appearances on Sunday morning political talk shows.

But Fox & Friends' Ainsley Earhardt acknowledged the following morning that the bill will cause the deficit to increase due to its tax cuts — though she minimized by how much.

“I don't think anyone wants the deficit to go up,” Earhardt said. “But more importantly, it was the permanent tax cuts, it was no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, no tax on Social Security, that’s more important to the American people than seeing the deficit go up a little bit.”

“No one wants that, but they prefer to have these other things,” she added.

While Earhardt claimed that the bill would cause the deficit to rise only “a little bit,” nonpartisan budget analysts say it would “balloon federal deficits by well over $1 trillion.” The Congressional Budget Office, for example, found that the legislation’s “tax provisions would increase the federal deficit by $3.8 trillion over the decade, while the changes to Medicaid, food stamps and other services would tally $1 trillion in reduced spending,” for an overall increase in the debt of over $3 trillion over 10 years.

The legislation’s proposed spending cuts — while much too small to make the bill deficit-neutral given the mammoth size of the tax cuts — would nonetheless be devastating to millions of Americans. The bill would “reduce federal spending on Medicaid by at least $600 billion over a decade and reduce enrollment by about 10.3 million people,” according to the CBO, and “take food assistance away from millions of low-income families” through the “deepest cut” to food stamps “in history,” the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found.

And while Earhardt directed attention to Trump’s campaign promises about cutting taxes on tipped income, overtime income, and Social Security, those account for a tiny fraction of the bill’s tax cuts. The bulk of the deficit increase is caused by the bill’s extension of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, which disproportionately benefit the wealthiest Americans.

The CBO combined the impact of the tax and spending portions of the bill and found that it would reduce resources for the poorest households while increasing them for the richest.

At the same time, the bill is projected to fuel little economic growth and could trigger a bond market meltdown that could raise interest rates for consumers, increase borrowing costs, and threaten the broader economy.

As Earhardt might say, “no one wants that, but they prefer to have” tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Jeanine Pirro

Fox Producer Said Pirro Is 'Nuts,' So Trump Names Her Top D.C. Prosecutor

Fox News host Jeanine Pirro is so unhinged that the network took her show off the air following the 2020 election out of (subsequently confirmed) fear that she’d use it to launder deranged conspiracy theories about the results. But she’s a fanatical supporter of President Donald Trump, and that is apparently enough to get her tapped as the top federal prosecutor for Washington, D.C.

Trump announced Thursday night that he was appointing Pirro as interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, specifically praising her Fox News career. Earlier in the day, Trump indicated that he planned to move on from acting U.S. Attorney Ed Martin, another right-wing media figure, who appeared unable to muster sufficient votes for Senate confirmation. Pirro is the 23rd person with Fox on their resume whom Trump has selected to join his second administration.

While Martin’s legal support for January 6 defendants reportedly played a major role in the failure of his nomination, Pirro has no recent legal experience to speak of. She was elected as a Westchester County Court judge in New York in 1990, and then she served as the county’s district attorney before suffering through an aborted run for U.S. Senate in 2005. Pirro joined Fox in 2006 and has been firmly ensconced on its sets for the last two decades, serving as a legal analyst, host of the weekend evening program Justice with Judge Jeanine, and then co-host of the weekday panel show The Five.

Following Trump’s rise to the presidency, Pirro stood out among the network’s stable of shills and propagandists for providing what my late colleague Simon Maloy deemed “advocacy for the president [that] is so aggressive that it often borders on insane.”

Her lowlights during his first term included calling for a “cleansing” of the FBI and the Justice Department, which she said were full “of individuals who should not just be fired, but who need to be taken out in handcuffs”; describing Trump as “a nonstop, never-give-up, no-holds-barred human version of the speed of light” and comparing his negotiation prowess to the skill of NFL running back Saquon Barkley; repeatedly urging then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to resign if he was unwilling to protect Trump and prosecute his enemies; speaking on stage at a Trump campaign event in apparent violation of network policy; and getting suspended by Fox for pointing out that Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) wears a hijab and asking, “Is her adherence to this Islamic doctrine indicative of her adherence to sharia law which in itself is antithetical to the United States Constitution?”

Pirro’s zealous support for Trump loomed over her coverage of his lies that the 2020 election had been stolen from him through election fraud. Fox preempted her first broadcast of Justice following Election Day. But when she returned to the airwaves for subsequent broadcasts, she provided conspiracy-minded segments that promoted false claims about the election results, including attacks on technology company Dominion Voting Systems. Those segments played a key role in Dominion’s defamation lawsuit against Fox, which the network ultimately settled for a massive sum.

That lawsuit also provided a keyhole view of how Pirro’s own colleagues viewed her. In an email, Fox executive David Clark, who oversaw her show, privately explained why he had taken her off the air at first: “I don’t trust her to be responsible. … Her guests are all going to say the election is being stolen and if she pushes back at all it will just be a token.” Internal Fox communications also show her executive producer describing her as a “reckless maniac” who is “nuts,” promotes “conspiracy theories,” and “should never be on live television.”

But it’s hard to get fired from Fox for being too supportive of Trump — and indeed, Pirro subsequently received a promotion to The Five. She used that post to furiously denounce the legal cases against Trump and the prosecutors and even jurors involved in them.

“We have gone over a cliff in America,” she said after a New York jury found Trump guilty on 34 counts. “This is a new era in America, and I think it goes against the ilk of who we are as Americans and our faith in the criminal justice system.”

Since Trump returned to office, Pirro has kept busy by showering him with praise. “Donald Trump is not panicked and neither should we be because he's bringing us to the golden age, Harold, and that's the end of it,” she said last month.

She’s also lashed out at anyone attempting to stand in his way, from federal employees who “think they’re entitled to a job” to “stupid” judges who rule against him to governors who won’t let state law enforcement cooperate with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement.

Pirro spent years denouncing the Justice Department for not serving as an extension of Trump’s will and throwing his political foes in jail. Now she’ll have the opportunity to do just that.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Trump White House Escalates War On The Press

Trump White House Escalates War On The Press

President Donald Trump is ramping up his assault on the press, opening new avenues for federal retribution against outlets which displease him as his administration prepares to mark 100 days in office.

Trump has long railed against journalists as the “enemy of the people,” used the power of the state as a cudgel against the industry in his first term, and promised more of the same in his second.

His return to office brought what Columbia Journalism Review’s Jon Allsop described as a “sharp, often contemptuous rupture” between the federal government and the press, with the White House seeking over the last few months to dominate reporters, place new restrictions on critical outlets, and lift up right-wing propagandists in their place.

The president’s threats against news outlets have been so extreme for so many years that by contrast, such moves struck some observers as “small beer” or “trivial nonsense.”

But Trump’s talk is cheap until it isn’t — at any time, on a whim, he or the assortment of ideologues and shills he’s appointed can set the gears of government grinding against his foes. And this weekend brought a sharp escalation and worrying signs for the future.

Justice Department ends restrictions protecting journalists

Attorney General Pam Bondi on Friday laid the groundwork for the imprisonment of journalists who produce reporting that damages the president’s interests.

In an internal Justice Department memo, Bondi rescinded Biden-era protections which restricted prosecutors “from seeking records and compelling testimony from members of the news media,” stating this was necessary “in order to identify and punish the source of improper leaks” by individuals whose conduct she described as “treasonous.”

Notably, her memo targets not just the leaking of classified information but also “disclosures that undermine President Trump’s policies, victimize government agencies, and cause harm to the American people.”

Trump regularly rails against reporting based on anonymous sources. Bondi’s move raises the prospect of the Trump administration responding to such reports by forcing reporters to choose between revealing their sources and going to jail.

Bondi, a Trump loyalist who previously parlayed frequent Fox appearances defending Trump into a post on his first impeachment legal defense team, will apparently be making the call over when the Justice Department uses that legal tool.

Other top prosecutors and investigators who might weigh in include her deputy, Emil Bove, who previously represented Trump in state and federal prosecutions; Ed Martin, the lawyer for January 6 defendant who now serves as interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia; FBI Director Kash Patel, who has called for the federal targeting of journalists; and his extremely online deputy, the former Fox host Dan Bongino.

How far will they go? Trump wants them to go very far indeed.

Trump calls for investigations of media pollsters

Trump responded on Monday to new surveys which show his approval ratings plunging in light of his catastrophic tariff rollout by calling for investigations into the pollsters and the media outlets which conduct them.

Trump claimed in an early morning post on Truth Social that results from New York Times/Siena and ABC/Washington Post polls were due to the surveys “looking for a negative result.”

“These people should be investigated for ELECTION FRAUD, and add in the FoxNews Pollster while you’re at it,” he wrote. “They are Negative Criminals who apologize to their subscribers and readers after I WIN ELECTIONS BIG, much bigger than their polls showed I would win, loose a lot of credibility, and then go on cheating and lying for the next cycle, only worse.”

Trump regularly accuses his media foes of breaking the law, and in a March speech at the Justice Department headquarters he instructed its employees to “watch for” their “totally illegal” behavior.

The president is currently suing Iowa pollster J. Ann Selzer over the results of one of her presidential campaign surveys.

Trump has personally dictated Justice Department investigations into two former officials from his first administration who became critics, as well as into ActBlue, the hub for Democratic campaign fundraising — and he could launch a similar legal assault on any news outlet which displeases him at any time.

A cry of desperation from CBS News

60 Minutes anchor Scott Pelley concluded Sunday’s broadcast with a blunt explanation for the resignation last week of Bill Owens, a journalist with decades of experience at CBS News and the show’s longtime executive producer.

“Our parent company, Paramount, is trying to complete a merger,” he said. “The Trump administration must approve it. Paramount began to supervise our content in new ways. None of our stories has been blocked, but Bill felt he had lost the independence that honest journalism requires.”

Trump and his administration had targeted CBS News for retribution following a 60 Minutes interview of Kamala Harris, the editing of which the president alleged had been unfair to him.

Trump launched a lawsuit seeking $10 billion in damages from the network, which First Amendment attorneys described as “ridiculous junk” and “a frivolous and dangerous attempt by a politician to control the news media.” Brendan Carr, his handpicked chair of the Federal Communications Commission, is conducting an investigation into the editing that former FCC commissioners have denounced.

Rather than stand firmly behind the company’s journalists, Paramount Chair Shari Redstone is reportedly seeking a settlement with Trump and an agreement with Carr that will allow the company’s merger to go through.

Trump gloats about media owners bowing to his will

Trump thinks he’s winning his battle against the press, as The Atlantic reported in a recent interview with the president:

“Tell the people at The Atlantic, if they’d write good stories and truthful stories, the magazine would be hot,” he said. Perhaps the magazine can risk forgoing hotness, he suggested, because it is owned by Laurene Powell Jobs, which buffers it, he implied, from commercial imperatives. But that doesn’t guarantee anything, he warned. “You know at some point, they give up,” he said, referring to media owners generally and—we suspected—[Washington Post owner Jeff] Bezos specifically. “At some point they say, No más, no más.” He laughed quietly.

Trump understands that many of the news outlets whose work he decries are owned by multinational corporations or wealthy magnates whose business interests make them vulnerable to federal retaliation.

After only a few months in office, he’s seen the pressure he’s exerted on CBS News push it to the breaking point, while the resolve of major newspaper owners is seemingly crumbling. And he has years more time in office to try to break them to his will.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Pete Hegseth

Amid Pentagon Chaos, Fox Hosts Stepping Away From Hegseth

Fox News’ biggest stars have stopped defending Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth amid the weeklong firestorm over their former colleague’s dysfunctional management of the Pentagon and his potentially illegal handling of classified information.

Three months after Vice President JD Vance broke a 50-50 Senate tie to install the historically underqualified Hegseth at the Pentagon, journalists routinely describe a department in “chaos.” Five top Hegseth aides have left the department since last Friday amid reports of “vicious rivalries,” and a “leadership vacuum.” Reporters further revealed that Hegseth had shared details about U.S. strikes in Yemen in a second unsecured Signal chat, potentially endangering U.S. service members, and had the app installed on his Pentagon computer.

Hegseth responded to his growing list of scandals with a combative Tuesday appearance on Fox & Friends, whose hosts defended his conduct.

But other Fox hosts have been silent, even after rallying to support Hegseth when his nomination came under fire and again following the first revelation of his use of Signal to share attack plans.

Fox’s evening lineup of The Ingraham Angle, Jesse Watters Primetime, Hannity, and Gutfeld! have ignored Hegseth’s struggles this week (a passing remark from guest Jimmy Failla to host Laura Ingraham was the only mention of the story on any of those shows). The Five, the Fox panel show which features Jesse Watters, Greg Gutfeld, Jeanine Pirro, and Dana Perino, also has not covered the subject.

Even Will Cain, who spent years sharing the couch with Hegseth as co-hosts of Fox & Friends’ weekend edition, hasn’t mentioned his former colleague’s name on his afternoon show this week. (He did not comment on Fox correspondent Kevin Corke’s report about the Signal story during Monday’s program.)

As Fox’s stars take a pass, full-throated defenses of Hegseth’s leadership are coming from the likes of MAGA stalwarts like Charlie Kirk, Benny Johnson, and Laura Loomer, while their corporate cousins at The Wall Street Journal editorial board savage his handling of the Pentagon.

Two explanations seem plausible for why Fox’s biggest stars have gone silent as their former colleague comes under fire:

  • They’ve decided that the best way to help Hegseth is to keep pretending the Signal story is over, hide other damning reports about his leadership from their viewers, and hope the firestorm dies out.
  • They think Hegseth’s performance is so bad and the stakes of his failure at the Defense Department are so high that they are unwilling to keep sticking their necks out for him.

Either way, this disaster was the predictable result of President Donald Trump putting a former Fox weekend host with little relevant experience in charge of the Pentagon. The secretary of defense oversees a massive budget and bureaucracy and has the authority under certain circumstances to launch nuclear weapons and end human civilization. The risks of handing the position over to someone because of their takes on TV are almost incalculably high.

Hegseth is currently struggling to manage the Pentagon when its biggest problem is a costly, ineffective, and apparently unending bombing campaign in Yemen. How will he respond if India and Pakistan start trading fire?

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.