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Fox News Investigates: What 'Yard Line' Has US Reached In Trump's Iran War?

Fox News Investigates: What 'Yard Line' Has US Reached In Trump's Iran War?

As Donald Trump’s war against Iran stagnated into a stalemate and strategic defeat, hawkish Fox News personalities who urged the president to attack in the first place have repeatedly used a football metaphor to emphasize how close the U.S. was to some nebulous victory.

Trump and his Fox allies began predicting an imminent end to the Iran war just days after the start of the U.S. bombing campaign. But four weeks into the war, the Iranian regime was intact and its closure of the Strait of Hormuz threatened global trade in energy and fertilizer, rattling even some of the president’s allies.

Fox contributor Marc Thiessen, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, and Fox senior strategic analyst Jack Keane, a retired Army general — both avid Iran hawks whose commentary on the subject reportedly influenced Trump’s thinking — responded by stressing that the U.S. was “on the 20-yard line” and “in a red zone.”

“After three weeks of operations, we’ve got them at the 20-yard line, but you’ve got to get into the end zone to score,” Thiessen said during a March 26 interview on Fox & Friends. “The question is how do we finish those last 20 yards? The last 20 yards are the hardest. What’s left — all the easy targets have been hit. What’s left is the hardened targets, the hidden targets, the deeply buried stuff. We are dismantling that. We have a plan to do that.”

Thiessen repeatedly claimed over the following months that the U.S. remained at the “20-yard line” but could score whenever it mustered the will to do so, before conceding last month that he was “willing to live with” stopping in that position because Trump had gone “80 yards better than any president before him.” His Fox colleagues and their guests, meanwhile, more hopefully claimed that the U.S. was even closer to victory — and abruptly dropped the metaphor over the summer as the war settled into a quagmire.

March 27. “I try to describe it in a football analogy,” Keane explained on Fox & Friends. “You know, we’re in the red zone here, we’re on the 20-yard line, trying to get to the goal line, and the opposition is putting as much impediments in because they can see how close we are to attaining our objectives.”
April 1. The late Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), discussing a speech in which Trump said the war was “nearing completion,” told Fox’s Sean Hannity: “We’re inside the 10-yard line, and he’s telling Iran how this movie ends.”
April 21. “I still agree with the general though — Gen. Jack Keane — is, we’re on the 5-yard line right now,” Fox & Friends co-host Lawrence Jones said on the show.
April 22. Jones again cited Keane the following day, saying, “We’re on the 5-yard line right now.” His co-host Ainsley Earhardt responded: “We’ve continuously heard that we’re on the 5-yard line. We’ve got to finish, we’ve got to make that touchdown, and we’ve got to bleed them dry, and that’s what President Trump is doing.”
May 11. “There is no doubt in my mind, taking out the ayatollah, a lot of their leadership, has put us in a better position,” said Jones. “Are we on the 5-yard line? Of course, but the president had to take this action.”
June 9. Thiessen, responding on America Reports to Iran downing a U.S. helicopter, said Trump should “finish Operation Epic Fury, which was stopped at about the 20-yard line, take it into the finish line, announce that you've achieved your objectives. Then once they have been disarmed of all that capability, open up the strait by force and over time hand it off to an international coalition, and then arm the Iranian people to take down this regime.”
June 10. On Special Report the following night, Thiessen defended Trump’s frequent claims that a deal with Iran was imminent by saying, “He doesn’t need a deal. … He was at the 5-yard line, we have to hit the targets.”
June 11. The Five co-host Dana Perino commented, “It feels like we’ve been in this doom loop on the 1-yard line for three months, and I hope that that is true.”
July 8. Jones said on Fox & Friends that “from a military standpoint, we’re still on the 5-yard line.”
July 21. Thiessen, asked on Special Report how the war could end, said: “We stopped the fighting and the ceasefire on the 20-yard line, we take it into the end zone. We have about 14 days of combat where we have to take out all the targets that we have available. We took out 85% of their defense industrial base, we take out 95% of it, we set back all their programs, and we further entomb the nuclear dust. Then we stop major combat operations, we impose the blockade, we open up the Strait of Hormuz, and then we go and we help the Iranian people overthrow the regime.”
July 25, July 29, July 30. Thiessen reiterated his July 21 remarks claiming the U.S. campaign was “on the 20-yard line” before the ceasefire on multiple Fox shows.
August 4. On The Story, Thiessen credited Trump with “huge accomplishments” in Iran but added: “We have to acknowledge that when we had the ceasefire in April, we stopped at the 20-yard line. … If it turns out that we are only going to go to the 20-yard line, I'm willing to live with that. You know, it's 80 yards better than any president before him and it's a huge accomplishment, but we have this opportunity here to irreversibly change the course of the Middle East sitting right here for the president to seize.”

The war reached the six-month mark on August 28, having “deteriorated into a quagmire of the president’s own making with no clear goals, no obvious strategy and no end in sight,” while senior U.S. military leaders warn that “prolonging large-scale operations against Iran is unsustainable and risks weakening their ability to confront threats elsewhere, including the U.S. homeland.”

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters

Pete Hegseth

Fox News Did One Thing Right, And Hegseth Has Shunned Network Ever Since

Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy, while anchoring The Sunday Briefing on October 5, 2025, aired a lengthy interview he had conducted the previous day with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on the sidelines of the Navy-Air Force football game. Hegseth, who was plucked by President Donald Trump from the cast of Fox & Friends' weekend edition to serve as the Pentagon’s leader, hasn’t returned to the network since.

Over that 11-month period, Trump and Hegseth embroiled the U.S. military in an open-ended war with Iran; the U.S. military continued to carry out their policy of illegally bombing purported drug cartel boats at sea and oversaw a regime change in Venezuela; and the defense secretary repeatedly came under fire for purging the top ranks of the armed forces.

Hegseth’s disappearance from Fox is notable as he initially remained a fixture on the network’s airwaves — his interview with Doocy marked Hegseth’s 24th Fox interview since he was sworn in on January 25, 2025, according to a Media Matters review. And while the defense secretary maintains an antagonistic relationship with the press, he has not abandoned media appearances since his most recent Fox hit, sitting down with CBS News for interviews in January and June.

It’s unclear why Hegseth has not appeared on Fox since October 5 of last year — but the timing is conspicuous. Just days after that interview, Fox became one of numerous outlets to condemn the defense secretary’s stringent new restrictions on Pentagon reporters.

When Doocy asked Hegseth during the interview about “leaks coming out the Pentagon,” the defense secretary not only decried the leakers but said journalists were “disgusting” for attempting to “solicit things like that.” (Pentagon reporters quickly disputed Hegseth’s claims about their methods on social media.)

He went on to tease the newly proposed press restrictions, which included requiring credentialed journalists “to sign a pledge to refrain from reporting information that has not been authorized for release — including unclassified information.”

“We're setting clear rules at the Pentagon,” he told Doocy. “We're not playing games. We're not allowing everybody to roam around the building.”

“Yes, you can be in the press area, briefing room, but if you want to move around the building, you're going to have a badge,” he explained. “It's going to be clear. You're going to be escorted when you do so. We have the expectation that you're not soliciting classified or sensitive information.”

“The Pentagon press corps can squeal all they want, we're taking these things seriously,” he added. “They can report, they just need to make sure they're following rules.”

The Pentagon Press Association's efforts to negotiate over the restrictions failed, and Fox joined every major news organization as well as some right-wing outlets like Newsmax in publicly refusing to sign the new access rules.

Fox, ABC News, CBS News, CNN, and NBC News issued the following joint statement on October 14, 2025 — nine days after Hegseth’s final Fox interview aired:

Today, we join virtually every other news organization in declining to agree to the Pentagon’s new requirements, which would restrict journalists’ ability to keep the nation and the world informed of important national security issues. The policy is without precedent and threatens core journalistic protections. We will continue to cover the U.S. military as each of our organizations has done for many decades, upholding the principles of a free and independent press.

Fox chief political anchor Bret Baier read the statement on Special Report that night. His guest, Fox senior strategic analyst Jack Keane, a retired general who served as U.S. Army vice chief of staff, then laid into both the restrictions and the Pentagon’s motives.

“What they're really doing, they want to spoon feed information to the journalists, and that will be their story,” Keane said. “That's not journalism. Journalism is going out and finding the story and getting all the facts to support it. And that no one's going to walk in and bang on a door of a four star general or or senior civilian policy leader in the Pentagon.”

Keane went on to say that when he served at the Pentagon, he always saw the press as “your conduit to the American people,” adding: “Were there times when stories were done that make me flinch a little bit? Yeah. But that's usually because we had done something that wasn't as good as we should have done it.”

“Well, we're all standing in solidarity — almost all of us — and we hope that changes,” Baier replied.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters

JD Vance Refuses To Condemn Antisemitism Voiced By Crony Carlson

JD Vance Refuses To Condemn Antisemitism Voiced By Crony Carlson

Vice President JD Vance put his relationship with Tucker Carlson back in the spotlight this week when he was asked about the right-wing podcaster’s history of promoting antisemites at a meeting of Jewish Republicans and refused to condemn his longtime political ally.

“Vance was asked during the fireside chat about right-wing podcasters who have platformed antisemites, including former Fox News host Tucker Carlson,” The Washington Post reported of his appearance at the Republican Jewish Coalition’s summit on Monday night. “He declined to criticize Carlson specifically, instead training his fire on podcaster Nick Fuentes, who Vance said ‘really does hate Jews.’”

Carlson spent the last decade diving deeper and deeper into the far-right fever swamp, drawing plaudits from white nationalists for bringing their bigoted talking points and conspiracy theories like the “great replacement” to his then-platform at Fox News. (As Andrew Anglin, a neo-Nazi, put it in 2016: “Tucker Carlson is literally our greatest ally. I don’t believe that he doesn’t hate the Jews.”) He also became a GOP kingmaker, helping shape the party’s platform and pick its candidates, and received a plum speaking slot to endorse Donald Trump at the 2024 Republican National Committee.

But Carlson’s star has dimmed somewhat since Trump’s reelection. His rhetoric has become ever more bizarre and bigoted (he said earlier this year that “the defining fact of our lives is that whites around the world are being eliminated” and previously suggested Jewish university donors were behind the “white genocide”). His softball interview with Fuentes last year drew condemnations from fellow right-wingers and drove a media and political firestorm. And he had a falling out with Trump over the Iran war and his sense that the administration has been less fascistic than he expected. Carlson recently called for Trump’s removal from office, while the president posted that the podcaster “is a loser, and always has been!”

Fuentes is, as Vance alluded, a notorious white nationalist whose long trail of noxious commentary includes claiming that “Jews are running society” and “are money changers, bullshit artists, psychopaths, charlatans, grifters, manipulators”; explicitly describing “the Jews” as among “our actual enemies”; saying the Holocaust is “fake”; and proposing the identification and arrest of all members of “American Jewry.” And Vance has been happy to condemn Fuentes in the past, saying during the 2024 presidential campaign, “I think the guy's a total loser. Certainly I disavow him.”

But Fuentes’ star continued to rise after Trump’s reelection in no small part due to the willingness of Carlson to promote him. The former Fox host offered up his platform to Fuentes for an interview that Fuentes himself described as “so friendly” (even as he excoriated the host for being merely “antisemite-light”).

So why did Vance pass — yet again — when the opportunity to condemn Carlson was handed to him on a silver platter? Perhaps because the vice president owes the former Fox host for his political success.

Vance underwent a dramatic transformation as he entered the political arena, using dozens of appearances on Carlson’s show beginning in 2017 to rebrand himself from an elite favorite to a populist culture warrior in the vein of the host himself. Carlson, in turn, lavished Vance with praise, and privately lobbied Trump to endorse Vance’s campaign for the U.S. Senate and, two years later, pick him as his running mate.

It’s unclear, at this point, how close Vance and Carlson remain.

In a May interview with The New York Times, Carlson repeatedly refused to divulge when he last spoke to the vice president, saying, “I don’t want to cause him more problems.”

“I couldn't be a bigger fan of him as a man,” he later added.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters

Fox Hosts Are Talking Nonstop About WNBA 'Drama' But Can't Explain Why

Fox Hosts Are Talking Nonstop About WNBA 'Drama' But Can't Explain Why

Fox News stars are struggling to defend the obscene volume of coverage their programs have been devoting to culture war stories about the WNBA.

Fox dedicated 206 segments and more than 13.5 hours of airtime to WNBA coverage from June 25 through August 11, typically demagoguing issues related to race and trans inclusion in the women’s basketball league, a Media Matters study found. Such content, which has by no means abated since August 11, is likely more palatable and less depressing for its viewers than the deterioration of President Donald Trump’s Iran war or the GOP’s dwindling prospects in the midterm elections.

The co-hosts of Fox & Friends stressed the necessity of such seemingly endless coverage on Tuesday morning, portraying themselves as having their hands forced by the league’s actions.

“Let's talk about the WNBA because it's been seven minutes and I think we should be talking about that league,” Brian Kilmeade said, teeing up a segment about the Sunday ejection of Enes Kanter Freedom from a WNBA game after his courtside stunt provoked an altercation with Chicago Sky guard Natasha Cloud.

“I cannot believe how much we are talking about the WNBA, but having said that,” Kilmeade added.

“It’s not about the basketball at all, it’s all about the other drama,” Lawrence Jones replied.

After the hosts spent several minutes discussing the “drama,” Jones closed the segment by blaming the WNBA for the hosts’ decisions to cover the Freedom controversy instead of the league’s on-court play.

“The whole thing is ridiculous that we are to this point,” Jones said. “Like, [Indiana Fever star] Caitlin [Clark] gets 30 points the other night. This would be something that we would be talking about, like, that's historic … but instead we are talking about drama. And that’s not a league that is going to be taken seriously. You never talk about this sideline stuff in the NBA, and you just want to see a good game, and they are destroying it, they are destroying the league.”

Fox & Friends has featured discussions of the league on at least 14 of its 17 episodes this month, according to a Media Matters review.

The discussion of the network’s coverage by the Fox & Friends cohosts echoes similar remarks from America’s Newsroom anchor Dana Perino, who noted Monday that “we are talking about the WNBA in this way three to four times a week amongst all the other problems in the world,” and questioned whether the “controversy” is “helping or hurting the league.”

Fox News primetime host Jesse Watters, meanwhile, expressed exasperation during an August 3 WNBA segment on the panel show The Five, complaining: “I don’t want to cover women’s basketball. … We have to do this again, really?”

The Five subsequently covered the WNBA on four more episodes through Monday, when co-host Perino declared: “They are proving that women shouldn't have a league. It's too dramatic. Why can't you just play?”

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters

Trump's War On Press Has Intensified Since Speech At Correspondents Dinner

Trump's War On Press Has Intensified Since Speech At Correspondents Dinner

One month ago, the White House Correspondents Association gathered for its annual “dinner that celebrates the First Amendment” with President Donald Trump.

Journalists assembled in Washington, D.C., sat impotently as the president delivered remarks that mixed empty platitudes about his “respect for your profession” with withering insults directed at individual reporters. The evening “was a public humiliation for the White House Correspondents’ Association” that “left the association looking naïve about its decision to invite the man who has spent years using both his personal and government means to wage war against the free press and its ability to report on his actions,” Status’ Jon Passantino wrote.

Trump’s behavior was extremely predictable given his long record of vitriolic attacks on journalists and news outlets — not to mention his administration’s frequent use of state power to try to cudgel them into line. And the president’s long war on free speech and the free press has continued without pause since he broke bread with reporters at the Waldorf Astoria on July 24.

Since then:

  • The Washington Post reported that Trump secretly left the old Air Force One jumbo jet on the tarmac in Turkey last month and used an alternate military transport to fly to Britain in response to an Iranian assassination threat, effectively turning into a “decoy” the plane that carried top aides — and the unwitting press corps. The WHCA subsequently asked the Trump administration to “work with us on a protocol for handling extraordinary security circumstances in the future.”
  • Disney and ABC sued the Federal Communications Commission, saying it violated the First Amendment with its pretextual and retaliatory decision to order an unprecedented early review of Disney’s eight ABC station licenses. The FCC’s move came the day after Trump, who has frequently called for networks to lose their stations over coverage he dislikes, demanded that Disney and ABC “immediately fire” Jimmy Kimmel over a joke the late night host told on his ABC show.
  • Trump’s personal lawyers threatened a $5 billion lawsuit against the Center for American Progress if the progressive think tank did not withdraw its report which found “no evidence that National Guard deployments have reduced violent crime.”
  • The Defense Department fired the editor in chief and publisher of Stars and Stripes, a newspaper that covers the U.S. military and is partially funded by the Pentagon but whose editorial independence is enshrined by statute. Erik Slavin, the editor in chief, said in a statement that according to the termination notice he received, “I am being fired for stating in a CBS interview that censorship of news for service members would constitute a red line.”

None of this seems likely to convince the WHCA to change course, and it’s unclear what if anything Trump could do to the press that would result in the rescission of his invitation for next year’s dinner.

The organization’s leadership has moved from an employee of one pro-Trump media oligarch to another, with Weijia Jiang, senior White House correspondent for David Ellison’s CBS News, succeeded by Jacqui Heinrich, White House correspondent for Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News. And Heinrich told New York magazine earlier this month: “This dinner precedes President Trump. It will continue after President Trump. And we will invite the president no matter who the president is every year.”

“I thought it was valuable to have him taking part in a tradition that recognizes the importance of the free press,” Heinrich later added, without addressing who it might benefit or how. “And he’s already said he’s going to come next year. It’s going to be at the Hilton. If they want to complain about it, that’s fine, but it’s happening.”

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters

Trump Binkie: Natalie Harp's Rise Began With This Appearance On 'Fox & Friends'

Trump Binkie: Natalie Harp's Rise Began With This Appearance On 'Fox & Friends'

Natalie Harp, who serves as President Donald Trump’s executive secretary, has been at the center of a media firestorm since Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) invoked her name during a speech last Sunday, saying: “And while the sailors on the Lincoln fight his war, while he fruitlessly drains our munitions and oil reserves, the president sleeps through his meetings. He golfs and trades stocks. See, he doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar.”

While right-wing pundits feigned outrage over the reference to Harp, reporters at mainstream outlets used the opportunity to empty their notebooks on the heretofore little-discussed White House aide. Harp, readers learned, is Trump’s gatekeeper and social media posting partner, someone so zealously committed to the president that she writes him devotional letters and once jumped into the trunk of an SUV to ensure she could accompany him to a courthouse. Trump’s other aides have nicknamed her “the human printer” because part of her job entails printing out articles for him, and she has been termed Trump’s “binkie” by New York Times White House correspondent Maggie Haberman, the paper’s longtime Trump beat reporter.

Harp’s story, as with so much of the saga surrounding Trump and his orbit, would have been impossible without Fox News, the MAGA propaganda outlet with a central role in shaping the president’s worldview.

Trump was first introduced to Harp through a June 14, 2019, segment on Fox & Friends, the sycophantic morning show that helped launch his political career. During that segment, the hosts tried to parry then-Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s promise to “cure cancer” if elected by lifting up Harp, who in a LinkedIn essay had credited the “Right to Try” law Trump signed in May 2018 for saving her life from terminal cancer.

Harp punctuated the interview with praise for the president. “I’m not dying from cancer anymore, thanks to President Trump, I’m living with cancer,” she said. “I’m walking, I’m healthy. I am living the quality of life that I always wanted to have that it took me four years to find because I wasn’t offered it here. It took President Trump going to Washington to be able to get that for me.”

(After Harp repeated these claims during a speech at the 2020 Republican National Convention, The Washington Post reported that experts “point out that Harp’s description of the treatment she received and her timeline for receiving it make it unlikely Trump had any effect on her case”).

“Thank you so much, and happy birthday, President Trump,” Harp interjected at the conclusion of the interview. “He’s hearing you, he’s on in an hour and a half,” co-host Brian Kilmeade replied.

Kilmeade was right: Trump was watching Harp’s interview, and — as he did hundreds of times during his first term via the process I’ve termed the Fox-Trump feedback loop — soon responded on social media to what he had seen on TV.

“Natalie Harp fighting Stage 2 Cancer and doing really well was a GREAT guest on @foxandfriends,” he posted shortly after the segment aired. “Right To Try is producing some truly spectacular results. Proud of Natalie!”

Trump also brought up the “young, beautiful woman” unprompted during his own Fox & Friends interview after Kilmeade mentioned an Esquire report that claimed Trump “hates the job” of president.

“No, I love the job. Well, it’s the fake media. You know, they’re just so fake, you don’t even respond to them anymore,” Trump said. “I love it because I don’t think anybody’s accomplished so much in two and a half years, what we’ve done. You know, I watched Natalie Harp, that young, beautiful woman, who was — they made some kind of a medical mistake a long time ago and she’s lived a tough time. And I watched her. I think she’s one of the best guests you’ve ever had. … Her spirit was so incredible.”

Trump later added, “There’s so many people like Natalie, but I thought she was just an incredible person.”

Less than two weeks later, Trump declared during a speech at the right-wing Faith and Freedom Coalition Conference that Harp had “lit up the television screen like very few people I’ve ever seen do it,” before inviting her to join him onstage and tell her story.

From there, Harp would rise through the MAGA ranks. She spent two years as a host for the far-right One America News Network, where she drew attention for her notably obsequious treatment of Trump and her hardcore election denial, before taking a job working for Trump in 2022 and, after his 2024 election, joining his White House.

But as with the careers of numerous Trump administration aides and several of the president’s major initiatives in office, it all started with Trump liking what he saw on Fox.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters

Hegseth For President? It's A Laughable Idea That Must Be Taken Seriously

Hegseth For President? It's A Laughable Idea That Must Be Taken Seriously

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth may be contemplating a promotion. His Monday trip to campaign with Republican congressional candidates in Iowa, home of the first-in-the-nation presidential caucuses, spurred a Washington Post report that the visit is consistent with the belief among “officials familiar with Hegseth’s thinking” that he “is considering a run for president or some other political office after his time in the Trump administration is over.”

Hegseth, a bombastic former Fox News weekend host who spent years speaking directly to the Republican base through that MAGA propaganda network, may be uniquely attuned to the right's attention economy. He could become the presidential candidate of the right-wing media’s id, running a furious culture war campaign fixated on domestic political enemies that checks all the boxes for authoritarian-minded pundits indifferent to traditional policy issues.

Anti-Muslim. Hegseth has much to offer the MAGA pundits who casually declare that “Islam is here to kill us and convert us” and call for “using military force to start raiding mosques and removing these people from our country.” At home, he has decried the “Muslims’ birth rates” in multiple states and fearmongered about the success of Muslim political candidates, warning that “Islamists” are trying “to seed the West with as many Muslims as possible.” And abroad, he has written that “just like the Christian crusaders who pushed back the Muslim hordes in the twelfth century, American Crusaders will need to muster the same courage against Islamists today” — then literally overseen U.S. forces bombing Muslims in Iran and Yemen as defense secretary.

Anti-DEI. At Fox, Hegseth was at the forefront of the right’s assault on policy initiatives promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, warning that such policies had weakened the military and calling for “a new commander in chief that’s going to get rid of all of this CRT, DEI nonsense, all the gender nonsense.” He’s now put that into practice at the Pentagon, firing or canceling the promotions of numerous Black and female senior officers, overseeing the banning and attempted expulsion of trans service members, and launching a study that seems engineered to ban women from serving in combat roles.

Anti-press. Right-wing media hate the traditional press, and Hegseth, who urged readers of his 2020 book to “disdain, despise, detest, [and] distrust” the news media, never misses an opportunity to demonstrate his contempt for mainstream reporters. He’s smeared news outlets as unpatriotic for not running headlines like “Iran increasingly desperate,” and mocked and derided individual reporters, even denouncing his former Fox colleague Jennifer Griffin as “the one who misrepresents the most intentionally.” Under his leadership, the Pentagon rolled out a stringent new set of rules for reporters and, when journalists at major news outlets turned in their press passes rather than signing them, replaced those reporters with right-wing influencers and staffers from MAGA outlets.

Anti-immigrant. Perhaps no current issue unites the right-wing commentariat like virulent attacks on immigrants — and Hegseth’s rhetoric aligns perfectly with them. “When you import the Third World, you get Third World hierarchy, values, and chaos,” he said in a November 2024 Fox segment, adding: “Your quality of life is going down. You feel less safe. Your resources are being drained. ... But don't speak up about that. If you do, you're the racist.” As defense secretary, he used a speech in France marking the anniversary of D-Day to attack the “invasion” of migrants hitting European beaches, asking, “When will European capitals do something about that invasion?”

Pro-war crimes. It’s not an overstatement to say that Hegseth has his current position because the president appreciated his Fox advocacy on behalf of U.S. service members accused or convicted of war crimes, which he seems to reject as a legitimate category. He wrote in 2024: “Should we follow the Geneva Conventions? What if we treated the enemy the way they treated us? Would that not be an incentive for the other side to reconsider their barbarism?” At the Pentagon, Hegseth “has fired and reassigned uniformed lawyers and dismantled many of the offices set up to prevent the targeting of civilians and related sites,” focused his public statements on the need for “lethality,” and carried out operations in the Middle East, Indian Ocean, eastern Pacific Ocean, and Caribbean Sea that experts say could include war crimes, as The New York Times reported.

Pro-Christian nationalism. Hegseth has “invok[ed] Christian theology in public statements about the war with Iran,” including urging the American public to pray “every day, on bended knee” for a military victory in the Middle East “in the name of Jesus Christ,” and told a conference of defense ministers from the Western Hemisphere that “our nations” are “Christian nations under God,” the Times reported. He invited Pastor Doug Wilson, “a self-described Christian nationalist who wants to repeal a woman's right to vote, has defended slavery and believes homosexuality should be a crime,” to give a sermon at the Pentagon earlier this year.

Together with his abject loyalty to Donald Trump, those positions make Hegseth a plausible candidate for the GOP ticket. That could come in the form of a 2028 primary battle against Vice President JD Vance, who has fallen out of favor with much of the right-wing media. But the former Fox & Friends Weekend co-host is also just 46 years old — if Vance wins the nomination but loses the general election that year, Hegseth could easily spend a few years returning to the network as a contributor or hosting a podcast, sitting on defense industry boards, and campaigning for Republicans before running for the 2032 nomination.

Hegseth was manifestly unqualified for his current position, his stewardship of the Pentagon has been a series of rolling disasters, and he is among the most unpopular members of Trump’s widely reviled administration. But in a world in which the former host of The Apprentice is currently serving his second term in the Oval Office, it is worth taking Hegseth’s potential candidacy seriously.

Hannity Resumes Coverage Of Iran War -- And Urges More 'Credit' For Trump

Hannity Resumes Coverage Of Iran War -- And Urges More 'Credit' For Trump

Sean Hannity, an avid hawk and sycophant to President Donald Trump, had largely abandoned discussions of the floundering Iran war in recent weeks. But on Wednesday night, he engaged with the conflict on his Fox primetime show for the first time since late July — and lamented that Trump is not getting sufficient “credit” for his purported success there.

Trump’s administration has spent the past several months in negotiations premised around the U.S. giving Iran sufficient economic benefits to convince them to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, with the Iranian nuclear program that was theoretically the crux of Trump’s decision to launch the war in the first place relegated to nebulous future discussions. With those negotiations apparently going nowhere and Trump himself moving on from them, Hannity has decided to move straight to celebrating Trump’s purported victory.

“Under President Trump’s strong leadership, America is once again leading on the world stage,” Hannity introduced the segment. “By the way, it never gets credit — Iran will never have a nuclear weapon thanks to Donald Trump. Does anyone ever give him credit for that?” (Then-Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard submitted testimony in March that Iran had no nuclear enrichment capability, and a U.S. intelligence assessment reportedly found in May that the war had not affected “the time Iran would need to build a nuclear weapon.”)

Hannity claimed that “Iran has suffered yet another economic setback” via the United Arab Emirates’ announcement that it was cutting off trade ties, saying that Trump “expressed optimism over the situation with Iran” earlier that day. He then aired a clip in which Trump responded to a question about whether he planned to reopen stalled negotiations with Iran by saying: “Maybe at some point, but right now, I think the situation is so good, but maybe at some point. Look, it's very simple.”

The Fox host added, “They are breaking financially. But Iran is not the only regime that the president is holding to account. As he indicated, a meeting with North Korean supreme leader — he's back — little rocket man, Kim Jong-un could come later this year.”

Hannity did not explain how Trump was “holding to account” the North Korean regime by gifting its dictator with a personal meeting after ordering the curtailment of planned U.S.-South Korean joint naval exercises on the grounds that those exercises were “very insulting” to Kim, who the president said “likes me.”

The host then turned to Kevin Corke — who is nominally a news correspondent — to deliver an upbeat report on Trump’s “busy” foreign policy with Iran, North Korea, and Canada. Corke concluded: “And I want you to consider this, Sean, consider all of that that I just shared and compare it to the previous president. And it is unmistakable that we have a president now who is clearly very hard at work for all of us, Sean.”

Hannity’s on-air push to attack Iran reportedly helped sway Trump’s decision to launch the war in February. The Fox host had promised his audience that the fight would be quick and easy, predicting on his March 30 radio show that “it’s going to be on the verge of wrapping up no later than three weeks from today.”

But since July 23, when Hannity predicted Trump was about to order a massive assault on Iran — only for Trump to pull back — the host had pulled back his coverage of the war. Hannity’s only extensive discussion of the Iran war on his Fox show between that segment and Wednesday’s show came during an interview with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu he aired on July 28, according to a review of the Nexis database.

While Hannity was addressing the ongoing war in the Middle East only in passing mentions on his Fox show, Trump again threatened a massive attack before again backing down; transits through the Strait of Hormuz, a vital channel for global trade, remained limited; Iran and Oman closed in on a deal that would impose transit fees for passage through the strait; and reports circulated about poor living conditions on a U.S. aircraft carrier that were due in part to successful Iranian strikes on a U.S. base in Bahrain.

Meanwhile, Fox's Hannity devoted 11 segments and 46 minutes of coverage to the WNBA between July 28 and August 19, according to a Media Matters review.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters

Griff Jenkins

Echoing Senate GOP Memo, Fox  Targets 'Far Left' Data Center Opposition

Republican leaders who fear that the furious, bipartisan backlash against AI data centers could cost their party in the midterm election are getting help from their loyal propagandists at Fox News. On its flagship morning show, the network’s hosts and contributors are attempting to convince viewers to support data centers by telling them that the “far left” is behind the opposition.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee warned in a private memo to top AI companies that “toxic views of U.S. data centers are killing the party's chances of holding a vital seat in Ohio,” Axios reported Wednesday morning. The memo, which Axios published, urges the AI companies to fix their “toxic brand” and suggests that if the GOP’s Senate candidate loses, “and data centers get the blame, politicians across the country will take notice — and they will not go near the next one.” The NRSC further suggests that Republicans benefit when voters are told that Democratic opposition to data centers “will cause America to lose the AI race to China.”

Fox apparently got the message. Just hours after the Axios story was published, Fox & Friends ran a segment seeking to negatively polarize viewers against data center opposition by portraying it as a “culture war” position favored by the “far left.”

Guest co-host Griff Jenkins teased the discussion at the top of the 8 a.m. ET hour, saying: “Data centers are the backbone of the AI boom, and now a political target — why Democrats are turning them into the next culture war fight.”

Jenkins began the subsequent segment by airing remarks Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor offered Tuesday in issuing an executive order tightening the regulation of data centers, before commenting: “Gov. Josh Shapiro isn’t the only Democrat pushing back against the data center boom. Far-left members of their party make their battle against them a central part of the populist platform.”

As Jenkins spoke, Fox aired a graphic warning of “Dems Data Center Frenzy.”

Fox then aired comments criticizing data centers from three politicians the network regularly attacks: Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), and Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed. As they spoke, on-screen text read: “Far-left makes data centers latest populist target.”

Jenkins then asked, “Could turning AI data centers into the left's boogeyman put the race for AI dominance at risk?” He turned to Fox Business contributor Lou Basenese, who highlighted the “national security” implications and echoed the NRSC memo’s invocation of China.

After the pair agreed that “we’re in a race with China,” Jenkins asked if “the rising opposition to data centers in this country is one of the biggest threats to our development and achieving dominance.”

“China is building out capacity while the far left is building out opposition,” Basenese replied, before praising President Donald Trump’s support for data centers.

Such efforts to paint broad data center opposition as the work of the “far left” and warnings that China will be its beneficiary have become habitual in Fox Business’ coverage of the story. And with the issue’s rising salience in the midterm elections, as indicated by the NRSC memo, those arguments are now moving to the bigger GOP megaphone of Fox News.

But there’s a split on data centers among the right-wing commentariat, with prominent figures like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens criticizing them and even calling for local opposition to their construction.

And that means the Fox propaganda effort to portray opposition to data centers as a “far-left” position has some real limitations.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters

Hannity Goes Quiet On Iran War As Trump's 'Massive Attack' Evaporates

Hannity Goes Quiet On Iran War As Trump's 'Massive Attack' Evaporates

Fox News host Sean Hannity all but stopped talking about Iran on his primetime show in recent weeks, after President Donald Trump called off further escalations in his six-month-long war. It’s a remarkable shift for Hannity, who is the network figure closest to the president and whose repeated calls for U.S. military action against Iran apparently helped sway Trump’s final decision to launch hostilities in February.

Hannity declared at the top of his July 23 broadcast that the “gloves” were “about to come off” and the U.S. would soon be “launching a massive attack on Iran,” citing comments Trump made to Axios that day.

“We're talking about bridges, power plants, airports, roadways, checkpoints, Kharg Island, the nuclear site at Pickaxe Mountain, everything now on the table,” Hannity exclaimed. Introducing correspondent Kevin Corke for a report, the host commended: “Kevin, remember the scene in Gladiator? ‘At my command, unleash hell.’ That's what it sounds like to me.”

"Before Epic Fury, I was warning Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, because there were reports that a jet, probably with a lot of money on it, [was] waiting to take him to Vladimir Putin's Russia,” he later added. “I would advise the heads of the IRGC similarly, maybe they want to get on a jet themselves and do it pretty quickly. Just a guess. What do I know? I'm just a little old talk show host. I'm, you know, just guessing.”

“Good guess,” Corke replied.

It was not a good guess: Two days later, Trump reportedly “set aside” the escalation plans due to fears about diminished U.S. munitions stockpiles and the potential for a widening war.

Hannity’s war is such a debacle he’s stopped talking about it

Hannity’s only extensive discussion of the Iran war on his Fox show since that July 23 broadcast came during an interview with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu he aired on July 28, according to a review of the Nexis database. Since then, he’s offered nothing more than a few stray comments.

There’s been plenty of news about the Iran war for Hannity to discuss since then — it just all makes him look bad.

The following week, Trump again threatened a massive attack before again backing down on August 1, this time publicly citing concerns from Persian Gulf states and claiming to have the “perimeters of a deal” with Iran that would reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

But no deal has since materialized, and while Trump and Iranian leaders trade public demands for war reparations, Iranian and Omani negotiators are closing in on an agreement that would impose transit fees for passage through the strait, leading the Gulf states to reportedly conclude “that Iran’s control over the Strait of Hormuz will become permanent, disrupting their oil and gas exports and global energy supplies indefinitely” — and that further escalations to the war would be worse.

Meanwhile, experts reportedly fear China or Russia could seek to take advantage of the depletion of U.S. missile supplies caused by the war.

Amidst this omnishambles for U.S. strategic interests, Hannity has been all but silent about the war he encouraged Trump to launch.

One explanation for Hannity’s reticence to defend Trump’s war could be that he is beginning to fear its potential blowback for the GOP’s midterm hopes. GOP strategist Matt Towery warned that the war is creating a headwind for the party in a Monday interview on Hannity’s radio show (where the host has discussed the war somewhat more frequently than he has on Fox).

“This thing has got to conclude because every week we go by that the president says well, we're going to bomb the hell out of them and destroy them, and then two weeks — two days later, we hear well, we're in talks, and then the Iranians pulled the rug out from under him — it weakens the president in the eyes of his supporters,” Towery told Hannity’s radio listeners on Monday. “And so it's time to put up or go home, in my opinion. That's just my advice.”

“The president … has to be able to put Iran aside and say, ‘look, we dealt with it’ one way or another,” Towery later added. “If we go into these midterms with Iran still hanging over everybody's head, I don't think — there'd be a lot of states that would be lost and unnecessarily so because the president's record has been obscured by all this.”

It’s also possible that the situation has become so bleak, and the president’s leadership so shaky, that even Hannity is having trouble defending it. After all, Hannity sold the war to his viewers — and to Trump — on the grounds that it would be a quick and easy response to an existential threat, with no regard for the likelihood that Iran would respond by closing the Strait of Hormuz.

It might also be awkward for Hannity to explain to his audience why the war seems no closer to being finished in August than it did when he told his radio audience on March 30, “It's going to be on the verge of wrapping up no later than three weeks from today is my prediction.”

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters

How Fox News Is Trying To Cover Up Max Miller's Domestic Abuse Scandal

How Fox News Is Trying To Cover Up Max Miller's Domestic Abuse Scandal

Fox News is keeping its viewers in the dark about the gruesome allegations that Rep. Max Miller (R-OH) physically and emotionally abused his ex-wife, Emily Moreno, and his 2-year-old daughter. Since late July, when the story began receiving national attention, Fox has given it only 6 minutes of airtime — and none at all in primetime.

The New York Times — following a story from Mother Jones about Miller’s custody dispute and alleged history of violent behavior — published an article on what it termed the “sordid, years-long family drama” on July 28. The paper detailed a flurry of accusations against Miller from court filings across multiple lawsuits and countersuits, all of which Miller, a former Trump aide, denies:

Ms. Moreno, the daughter of Senator Bernie Moreno, also an Ohio Republican, has said that Mr. Miller scalded her chest and stomach by throwing hot water from a skillet at her body; held a gun to her head; pushed her against a wall and hit her head; and fractured their daughter’s collarbone and bruised her shoulder.
According to court documents, their daughter at one point told Ms. Moreno, “Daddy kill you.”

Since then, Sen. Moreno has publicly declared his son-in-law unfit for office; Ohio’s other Republican senator, Jon Husted, has called on Miller to resign; questions from reporters have forced Ohio Gov. Mike Dewine, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), and Trump himself to weigh in; the president has reportedly raised concerns with the congressman about his reelection campaign; and the deadline has passed to replace him on the November ballot.

While Fox responded to the scandal with a mere six minutes of coverage, its right-wing competitors at Newsmax provided one hour and 43 minutes of airtime, according to a Media Matters review.

The bulk of Fox’s coverage of the Miller saga came from two correspondent reports on Fox’s “news” flagship Special Report and four headline reports (three of which ran on weekends). The scandal has been mentioned just once by one of the network’s “opinion” stars, during a July 31 exchange on the panel show The Five.

At the end of a lengthy segment about purportedly radical Democratic candidates, Jessica Tarlov, the program’s Democratic co-host, asked whether Miller, “who has been accused of abusing his wife and his daughter” should be “thrown out” of the GOP. Greg Gutfeld replied, “Sure,” before admitting he was unaware “what you're talking about” and pointing out that the story wasn’t “in the A-block.”

The story wasn’t in The Five’s A-block — or indeed, any block — in the days since. Nor has Miller’s saga and the GOP’s response to it drawn attention from the Fox star vehicles hosted by Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and Jesse Watters, or the hosts of its high-profile morning show, Fox & Friends. And across the “news” and “opinion” sides, no Republican politician interviewed on Fox has had to field the sort of uncomfortable questions about Miller they’ve faced on other networks.

While scandal-plagued Republicans seeking an opportunity to do damage control have for years made a beeline to Fox’s greenrooms, Miller has instead sought to deny and defuse the allegations through interviews on CNN and Newsmax, which have significantly lower ratings (and in CNN’s case is despised by the president and his base).

Did every single Fox “opinion” host independently decide not to throw Miller a lifeline? Did they and the bulk of their “news side” colleagues all determine that there was no value in informing their viewers about the allegations against him, even as the GOP became embroiled in the scandal?

Fox’s non-coverage of the Miller scandal is reminiscent of how the network left then-Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) for dead back in 2021, following a Times report that Gaetz was under federal investigation for alleged sex trafficking.

For his part, Gaetz — who routinely feuded with Miller when they were both in the House, left office under a cloud of scandal in 2024, and is now a host at the far-right One America News — has used his own show to decry Miller’s “sad train wreck.”

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters

Comical Feud Erupts Between Pirro And Burgum Over Reflecting Pool Fiasco

Comical Feud Erupts Between Pirro And Burgum Over Reflecting Pool Fiasco

U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro, who is now feuding with Interior Secretary Doug Burgum over his role in failed prosecutions for the alleged vandalism of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, previously touted Burgum as a “straight shooter” and endorsed him to become Donald Trump’s 2024 running mate in her prior role as a Fox News host.

Pirro said that Trump’s pick would come down to one of JD Vance, Marco Rubio, and Burgum during a discussion of his vice presidential shortlist on the June 6, 2024, edition of Fox panel show The Five.

“Trump actually got more Hispanic votes in Florida than Rubio did,” she said. “And you know, JD Vance is good but I really think it's Burgum. I do.” Noting that she had “met him several times,” she claimed that “there's something about him that he just seems like a straight shooter.”

Two years later, Pirro, who was once described by her own executive producer as “nuts” and a “reckless maniac,” is no longer a Fox host — she’s a top federal prosecutor. And rather than a “straight shooter,” she now reportedly thinks Burgum is “an incompetent liar.”

Pirro slammed the Interior Department in her motion to dismiss charges on Friday against David Hearn — the only person to face a felony charge over damage to the Reflecting Pool — effectively blaming Burgum’s agency for both slow-walking the production of evidence showing the damage “was the result of flawed installation by the contractor … and the rush to complete the project” rather than of vandalism.

Since her decision undermined Trump’s previous claims that the damage had been the work of “Deranged Vandals,” the president publicly claimed Pirro was “100%” wrong, reiterated that it had been a “pure case of VANDALISM,” maligned her for having “choked,” and reportedly considered replacing her. Burgum, meanwhile, dismissed Pirro’s argument, saying on social media, “The evidence is clear, vandals have repeatedly caused damage to the Reflecting Pool.”

The feud came to a head on Monday during what The New York Times described as an “Oval Office showdown” attended by Trump, Pirro, and Burgum.

“During the meeting on Monday, Ms. Pirro, her voice raised at times, directly confronted Mr. Burgum, accusing him of misleading the president,” the Times reported. “She made the case that Mr. Burgum had promoted a self-serving cover story to conceal his own missteps.”

Curiously, Pirro’s former colleagues at Fox seem to be avoiding taking sides in the fracas. The network’s coverage is noticeably muted, with her former “opinion side” stablemates in particular ignoring it (or in the case of Laura Ingraham, mentioning it in passing only to mock unnamed commentators for “obsessing about things like Trump’s Reflecting Pool drama”).

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters

Reflecting Fool: How Jesse Watters Pushed Trump's Bogus 'Vandalism' Case

Reflecting Fool: How Jesse Watters Pushed Trump's Bogus 'Vandalism' Case

When Fox News host turned U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro dropped a high-profile case and acknowledged the alleged vandalism of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool had not occurred, she left her former colleague Jesse Watters out to dry. Watters had repeatedly portrayed the supposed vandals as America-hating leftists bent on destroying the country, devoting several segments to the story in increasingly explicit terms.

President Donald Trump has strenuously and repeatedly blamed “Deranged Vandals” for damaging the pool after he ordered its renovation and repainting earlier this year — even as reporting from as early as May pointed to problems with the work of the installer, who received a lucrative no-bid contract. The president claimed the purported culprits should face “years in jail.”

But on Friday, Pirro’s office moved to dismiss charges against David Hearn — a former Olympic canoeist arrested after sticking his hands in the pool and the only person to face a felony charge over the damage — along with three misdemeanor cases, citing new evidence “showing that the damage was the result of a botched installation and not vandalism.”

The motion to dismiss stresses that the Department of Interior provided the initial reports that were the basis for Hearn’s indictment — but only later “provided additional documents” showing the damage “was the result of flawed installation by the contractor, Atlantic Industrial Coatings (“AIC”), and the rush to complete the project prior to events associated with the America 250 celebration in the weeks surrounding Independence Day 2026.”

(Trump subsequently posted that he disagreed “100%” with Pirro, and on Monday he publicly maligned her in the Oval Office; he is now reportedly considering removing her in response, because in this administration, telling the truth when it contradicts the president is a fireable offense.)

While Hearn’s indictment — and the case’s apparent demise — may seem like a sideshow, it presents an important window into how this administration and its propaganda apparatus operate. Federal prosecutors have tried but often failed to carry out Trump’s demands that his real or imagined foes face legal punishment, and those political prosecutions often rely on support from the president’s media allies.

No one in MAGA media had carried more water for the baseless claims about the Reflecting Pool than Watters, who is uniquely positioned to serve as a vessel for such propaganda campaigns: He hosts or co-hosts two of Fox’s premiere programs and is a hardcore Trumpist who lacks both ideological moorings and basic moral scruples. Watters previously plumbed the depths of the internet fever swamps to peddle deranged conspiracy theories about the home invasion and assault of Paul Pelosi, the husband of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA).

The Fox host initially celebrated Trump’s effort to repaint the pool as part of a grand struggle over our national identity during a June 12 discussion on The Five — after algae turned the pool green and damage to its surface became apparent, but before Hearn’s arrest.

Watters argued that the left was “purposely subverting the greatness of America, the bedrock of Western civilization,” by allowing the pool and other national icons to “go into disrepair.” By contrast, he argued that Trump was attempting to preserve “a physical and visual reminder of our greatness and our connection to our European heritage.”

When Trump began claiming that vandals were responsible for damage to the pool and Pirro charged Hearn, Watters fit that allegation into his preexisting narrative and assailed “Democrats” and “the left” for what they had supposedly done. But on Friday night, after Pirro’s office moved to dismiss the charges, he did not mention on his show that his account was all wet.

Watters pushes Trump, Department of Interior pool “vandals” story

Watters began promoting Trump’s allegations that the pool had been vandalized on June 22, while still leaving space for the possibility that the damage had been caused by faulty installation.

“On the Reflecting Pool, Trump said that they have evidence of someone slicing and dicing the bottom of the pool and that evidence will be shown in court,” he told resident Democratic panelist Jessica Tarlov on The Five. “And that we have made five arrests. Five individuals are under investigation and I'm waiting to see the video evidence of it. Or they botched the redo. OK. Either way, this is all you got on this guy?”

“Liberals would never vandalize public works — did you see BLM, the statues, the graffiti?” Watters continued.

“You guys make a job out of destroying cities,” he went on to say. “Look at Penn Station. It's a horrible place to be. And you're pointing a finger at a pool he's trying to make better. Come on, Jessica.”

“Did the contractors boot it? We don't know,” Watters added that night on his own program. “But the president says people are pouring chemicals into the Reflecting Pool, carving up the bottom with knives. Not only is the National Guard standing watch, but concerned citizens are keeping an eye out for sabotage.”

“The Park Police arrested a former Olympic canoer,” he added, referring to Hearn. “Records show he's an Obama donor who's been arrested by Park Police before. The Olympian Democrat donor was charged with a misdemeanor, destruction of government property, and he told the AP he is just a concerned citizen. While this curious and concerned citizen is now being repped by one of the most famous Democrat lawyers in the country. I think we know what is going on here.”

The following night, Watters led his primetime show with “the tapes” he said had been provided by the Department of Interior that he claimed provide “a look at individuals suspected of vandalizing the Reflecting Pool.”

“Now we haven't been able to verify the video, but take a look,” he said, before airing and describing it.

“Maybe the contractors screwed up the pool, and they're fixing it, but we have a hunch there was also foul play,” he added. “We could be wrong, but we're seeing preliminary reports alleging vandalism.”

He later referenced Hearn, “the canoer who says he did nothing wrong,” calling him “a longtime Democrat donor, gave money to Obama and ActBlue, arrested by Park Police once before, back in ‘96, and now he has a GoFundMe and a lawyer who just happened to have prosecuted Trump in the first impeachment.”

While Watters carefully hedged his discussion, he left no question about which theory he believed. “Now, while the left is out there taking a knife to America, literally, the rest of the world can't get enough of it,” he said as he transitioned to a discussion of tourists praising the country as they visited it for the first time.

That pool is America's mirror,” he went on to say. “We look in it and we love what we see — we're looking at ourselves, our history, our heritage — and the left hates everything they see. They want it broken and murky. They don't want it to reflect the greatness of the nation. They don't believe America was ever great, and they don't believe we can make America great again.”

“We shouldn't need foreigners to remind America who we are, and vandals will never be able to damage the American identity,” he concluded.

Watters then brought on actor Kelsey Grammer, who suggested that the purported Reflecting Pool vandalism shows that “a virus that has infected some — a very small number of people, I think, who just want to tear things down. They have been consumed by hatred, and, of course, hatred ends up basically destroying you.”

Two days later, Watters went off the deep end.

“The Democrats are ripping up the Reflecting Pool,” he claimed on The Five. “Now, a couple days ago, a lot of people at this table pooh-poohed the idea that you guys would vandalize the pool, but now we have hard evidence reported by The New York Times and the Park Police, because I've looked at all the reports.”

He went on to say that Hearn “got caught pulling up while he videotaped himself ripping up the bottom.”

That night, Watters suggested on his own show that the vandalism had now been proven based on a single anonymous source who spoke to him.

“A senior official confirming someone cut the liner along the bottom of the pool and took the sealant with it,” he said. “We don't know who did it, but we have a pretty good idea where to start looking,” he added, pointing viewers back to the “exclusive” video the Department of Interior had provided to Jesse Watters Primetime.

The host went on to claim that “Primetime is collecting police reports like baseball cards” and touted his “look at some preliminary documents.”

Watters and Trump’s “favorite attack dog” Pirro team up to promote pool charge

A week later, after Pirro’s office initially secured its indictment against Hearn, Watters’ former co-host on The Five went on his show for a curtain call.

“Fox News Alert: I hope Democrats enjoyed their little pool party, because Judge Jeanine just shut it down,” Watters said to introduce the segment. Trump “was fed up watching his new Reflecting Pool get savaged, so he sent his favorite attack dog to bite back — and she came armed with an indictment.”

After a brief debate over who missed the other more, Watters told Pirro: “A lot of people, when this first happened with the pool, didn't believe the president that there was vandalism. That's not the case.”

“Yes, it is not the case at all,” Pirro replied. “In fact, I was at the Reflecting Pool yesterday. There not only is a vandalism that is reflected in today's indictment, but there is a cutting of the liner of the pool, at the base of the pool for several yards across the pool.”

“And someone was intent on doing incredible damage to the pool, but what we've seen after are other people who want to do continuing damage,” she continued. “And one of the biggest problems, and one of the ugliest things that I think is out there are people trying to destroy monuments and statues — you know, part of our history.”

"We saw a lot of this start around the BLM riots — we never really saw people tear down statues in this country before,” Watters claimed. He later asked Pirro: “Why do you think that's taken hold, where they want to destroy these big, beautiful monuments, they want to deface the Reflecting Pool and topple Columbus?”

“Well, I think that people, they resent this country,” she replied. “They don't respect the country. We celebrate the country and the freedoms — they hate it. They hate the leader right now, and they are exercising, as far as I'm concerned, political violence.”

“This is not about free speech,” she concluded. “This is not anything that is justified, and we've got to make sure they understand. They are going to be made accountable, and in D.C. they will be.”

“I’m sure they will be,” Watters replied.

But as Pirro’s office now acknowledges, the case didn’t hold water.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters

How Trump Uses A 'Chum Cycle' To Promote Conspiracies And Attack Democracy

How Trump Uses A 'Chum Cycle' To Promote Conspiracies And Attack Democracy

President Donald Trump’s latest attack on American democracy relies on an old tactic. Throughout his second administration — and even dating back to his first — Trump appointees have laundered documents they claim prove Democratic and “deep state” malfeasance through credulous right-wing outlets, counting on MAGA media to amplify their conspiracy theories and hoping that mainstream outlets would pick them up as well. Now they’re applying the same playbook to election denial.

On Thursday night, Trump plans to use a White House address to relitigate his Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him. While details are sparse, reports suggest he could use declassified intelligence documents to accuse China and Venezuela of election interference and target the 2020 Senate elections in Georgia. Allies in the election denial community have suggested such claims could be used as a "predicate" to declare a “national emergency” that would justify an executive order implementing voter suppression policies by fiat.

Right-wing journalist John Solomon and Trump crony Bill Pulte, recently installed by the president at the White House and as acting director of national intelligence, respectively, are reportedly leading the effort to scrounge up the documents Trump will use to make his case — and taking those records out of context to support his conspiracy theories (“They try to put bits and pieces together and then make these conclusions,” one administration official told MS NOW).

Such duplicitous methods are necessary because the 2020 election’s security has been litigated over and over again, with the intelligence community under Trump’s auspices finding “no indications that any foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect” of the voting process and the attorney general he appointed, William Barr, stating in December 2020 that “we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.” But MAGA hacks like Benny Johnson and Steve Bannon are already frothing at the mouth over the speech, promising that it will bring about “doomsday for the deep state” and “change the direction of politics.”

The salvo Trump and his administration are telegraphing is incredibly dangerous — but it is simply the election denial version of what they’ve previously tried to do to delegitimize the federal probes of Russian interference in the 2016 election, Trump’s retention of classified documents, and his role in the January 6 insurrection, among other cases. I previously described this tactic as the Trump administration’s "chum cycle":

The Trump administration chums the waters by handing over documents related to one of the myriad past investigations into the president’s actions; the president, top Trump officials, and Republican officeholders say they show a massive scandal; and mainstream reporters point out their narrative is farcical while MAGA media stars call for the indictment, arrest, prosecution, jailing, and perhaps execution of their political enemies.

Amid one such campaign, which targeted former President Barack Obama, The New York Times reported that “Trump hopes enough information will be released by his intelligence appointees to muddy the waters and lend a patina of confusion about what Mr. Obama may have done, according to people familiar with his thinking.” Trump has tried to stock his administration with officials who will employ the same tactic to the same ends.

The innovation this time around seems to be that Trump is using a primetime White House address to detail the allegations, rather than merely using his social media platform or a Fox interview to accuse his enemies of crimes or misconduct.

The right used a “chum cycle” to muddy Russia, January 6, and classified documents probes

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As Trump Ends Ceasefire, Hawks Demand Iran Invasion -- And Nuclear Strike?

As Trump Ends Ceasefire, Hawks Demand Iran Invasion -- And Nuclear Strike?

Right-wing media hawks are floating a new wave of risky and at times bloodthirsty escalations after Iranian forces struck commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz, the U.S. retaliated by resuming military strikes, and President Donald Trump declared the long-shaky ceasefire with Iran “over.”

Fox News contributor and Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen wants to “destroy 100 percent” of Iran’s defense industrial base and “set them back to the Stone Age militarily and then declare victory, open the strait by force, reimpose the blockade, and declare victory. And then help the Iranian people overthrow the regime.”

Newsmax host Carl Higbie is calling for “mass destruction” in Iran, including “a legitimate discussion of the threshold of a nuclear strike,” arguing, “That is the attitude we need to have to fight these savages.”

Fox & Friends’ Brian Kilmeade says Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz is their “new nuclear weapon” and the U.S. military is “going to have to take back the strait” (he also wants Vice President JD Vance and envoy Steve Witkoff pulled from the U.S. negotiating team). His co-host Lawrence Jones agrees about the strait, saying, “We have got to take it over and we have to send a message that they can no longer use this as a tool for political pressure.”

Fox contributor Paul Mauro argues that “I don't see how you get the straits open, rid of the IRGC, and the nuclear materials secreted in a way that we can definitely say it's all out of there, without” putting “boots on the ground” — and if we won’t do that, we should have a “decoupling” with Iran that leaves them in charge of the strait, since “we don’t need” the oil that passes through it.

Newsmax guest retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg and Fox guest retired Vice Adm. Robert Harward are both calling for U.S. ground troops — Kellogg in order to take “very strategic targets in Iran” like Kharg Island and “the islands in the strait” and even stand up a “provisional government,” and Harward to send “the message to the population of Iran that America is serious and is going to finish this thing” and “easily control” swaths of Iranian territory.

Newsmax’s Greg Kelly, meanwhile, says that “a lot of people are fake hyperventilating about this war” when in reality, “It's not even a war. This is not full-scale combat. We don't have boots on the ground or anything like that.”

To sum up: The right-wing media hawks, having convinced Trump to launch an unprovoked and ill-conceived war of choice against Iran only for the regime to survive the attack with its nuclear status unchanged and very predictably respond by closing the strait and hobbling global trade, are scrambling for a way to avoid strategic defeat and at least make it back to status quo ante. We could have just not done any of this.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters


Ten Years Later, Right-Wing Media Ghouls Revive Bogus Seth Rich Murder Conspiracy

Ten Years Later, Right-Wing Media Ghouls Revive Bogus Seth Rich Murder Conspiracy

It's 2026 and MAGA lickspittle Benny Johnson is hosting a discussion of whether Hillary Clinton had former Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich killed in 2016.

“This is why it's called a conspiracy theory,” former American Conservative contributing editor Chris Brunet told Johnson during a lengthy interview about Rich’s tragic murder on Johnson’s show Wednesday. “It's because it's a conspiracy of top DNC officials, including Hillary Clinton, to essentially murder Seth Rich in cold blood, is the conspiracy theory. And I believe that's what happened. I don’t believe he was the victim of a random mugging.”

Brunet added that President Donald Trump “should open a new investigation into the murder of Seth Rich to try to find his killers.”

“I would love for there to be a full investigation into this,” Johnson replied, later telling his audience to subscribe to Brunet’s Substack and “send tips if you know anything about this.”

These ghouls are reviving the Seth Rich conspiracy theory nearly a decade after it first became a cause célèbre for the online right, which baselessly linked Rich’s tragic murder on July 10, 2016, in what police determined was an unsolved botched robbery while he was walking home late at night in Washington, D.C., to WikiLeaks’ release 12 days later of thousands of internal DNC emails whose contents damaged Clinton’s presidential campaign.

News accounts citing intelligence sources quickly suggested that Russian hackers had stolen the emails and provided them to WikiLeaks; the U.S. intelligence community publicly stated in October 2016 that Russia had hacked the DNC; and the final report from then-special counsel Robert Mueller, who secured indictments against 12 Russian intelligence officers for the DNC hack, concluded that the emails were stolen and released through WikiLeaks as part of a Kremlin plot to undermine Clinton’s campaign.

But right-wing conspiracy theorists, seeking to undermine arguments that Trump was too close to the Kremlin, claimed based on just about nothing that Rich had been the true source of the emails, and that he had been murdered — perhaps on Clinton’s order — in retaliation for their release.

The conspiracy theory was relegated to far-right fever swamps at first. But the story burst into the mainstream 10 months after Rich’s death, after Fox News published a thinly sourced online article and aired a series of on-air segments that bought into the far-right narrative. Veteran Fox host Sean Hannity became the conspiracy theory’s biggest champion, arguing that it debunked “the whole Russia collusion narrative.”

Meanwhile, Rich’s anguished family begged him and the rest of the conspiracy theorists to stop. “With every conspiratorial flare-up, we are forced to relive Seth’s murder and a small piece of us dies as more of Seth’s memory is torn away from us,” his parents wrote in The Washington Post. Ultimately, Fox retracted its article, claiming that it had not met the network’s standards, and Hannity stopped talking about the story.

This was perhaps the saddest and most grotesque saga I’ve seen come out of the right-wing media in my 19 years at Media Matters. And as the 10th anniversary of Rich’s murder approaches, the conspiracy theorists are back.

The hook for Brunet’s appearance on Johnson’s show is an allegation from attorney Ty Clevenger, posted online Monday and boosted the next day by the conspiracy theory site Gateway Pundit, claiming that “an attorney for the government told me that I would soon be getting confirmation that several hundred pages of documents related to Seth Rich were found in a previously-hidden room at FBI headquarters” where they were supposedly “among the files designated for destruction.”

Jim Hoft, an endless font of credulity and stupidity, explained in his post why this is supposed to matter:

This is the same FBI that originally told Clevenger back in 2017 it had zero records on Seth Rich because the bureau “was not involved” in the investigation of his death. They claimed it was nothing more than a “botched robbery” handled solely by local D.C. police.
Over the years, through relentless FOIA litigation and court pressure, the FBI has been forced to admit it actually possesses thousands of pages of Seth Rich documents, including his work laptop, an image of his personal laptop, and a DVD. Yet they continue to fight tooth and nail to keep the full truth hidden.

One possible explanation for this alleged disparity is that while the FBI did say in May 2017 that it was not involved in the investigation of Rich’s death, Mueller’s April 2019 final report suggests that some investigation did subsequently take place: It specifically confirms that Rich was not the source that provided the DNC emails to WikiLeaks. The records, in other words, could have been created while the FBI was knocking down the online right’s conspiracy theory.

The fever-swamp explanation, however, is that the FBI was in on the conspiracy in which Clinton had Rich killed for leaking the DNC emails to WikiLeaks, covered it up, kept all the evidence through the four years of the first Trump administration and the four years of the Biden administration and only decided to destroy them when Trump came back into power, but waited too long and his minions found it.

Dabbling in this particular insanity is not without risk. While Fox did not hold its employees accountable for their repulsive behavior, the network paid what was reportedly “a lucrative seven figure payment to the Rich family” to get them to settle a lawsuit. But the story offers Johnson’s ilk a priceless opportunity to talk about FBI documents that aren’t the Epstein files that acting Attorney General Todd Blanche is illegally withholding.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters

MAGA Media Deploying Twin Big Lies To Subvert 2026 Midterm Elections

MAGA Media Deploying Twin Big Lies To Subvert 2026 Midterm Elections

he MAGA plot to subvert the 2026 midterm elections is coming into focus. Election denial bigwig Steve Bannon has outlined a scheme in which President Donald Trump — aided by right-wing journalist John Solomon at the White House and Bill Pulte as acting director of national intelligence — would declassify and release documents purporting to show significant foreign interference in past U.S. elections. The president would then use that theory as the “predicate” to declare a “national emergency” and try to seize control of the elections apparatus to curtail voting rights in November.

The foundational lie of this scheme — and of election denial writ large — is that Trump is such a popular figure that only massive election fraud could explain the defeat of his movement at the polls. And the right’s propaganda apparatus is essential in buttressing that lie by ignoring or explaining away all evidence to the contrary. Outlets like Fox News don’t just celebrate the president as an heroic, visionary figure — they tell viewers that the polls are wrong and “The MAGA Momentum Is Unstoppable.”

Here's how this scheme has worked in the past, and a glimpse into how Trump and his propagandists are kicking into gear again this cycle.

Poll trutherism is the foundation of election denial

Trump is an historically unpopular president. Polls over the decade since he entered the political spotlight have consistently found that he is broadly disliked, and his job approval is currently tracking near its all-time lows, according to poll aggregations from The New York Times, Nate Silver’s Silver Bulletin, and the conservative RealClearPolitics. The most recent results from pro-Trump Fox News are in line with those averages, showing 39 percent of respondents approve of the job Trump is doing while 60 percent disapprove, with his performance underwater by large margins on issues from the economy to immigration.

The president has responded to these dire numbers not by trying to appeal to a broader swath of the country but by declaring that he is actually popular and that news outlets have fabricated these results to damage his political standing.

“Fake polls — I got one today,” the president told reporters in February. “I saw one today that I'm at 40 percent. I'm not at 40 percent. I'm at much higher than that. I'd love to run against anybody. The real polls say ‘you'd kill everybody, it wouldn't even be close.’”

In late June, he likewise argued that other, unnamed surveys show his “REAL POLL NUMBERS ARE THE HIGHEST THEY HAVE EVER BEEN,” with his job approval at “at 65 percent, and more!”

As with so many of Trump’s actions, this is simultaneously laughable and menacing. It is ridiculous on its face that the president of the United States is so unwilling to accept that the majority of the public don’t like him that he’s instead concocted a vast conspiracy theory implicating the bulk of the nation’s pollsters and media outlets while apparently inventing “REAL POLL NUMBERS” that show he is beloved.

But Trump inevitably carries that absurd argument to its logical conclusion: When election results correspond with the public polls and Trump loses, he decries those elections as “rigged.” He famously attributed both his popular vote defeat in 2016 and his popular and electoral vote losses in 2020 to election fraud, and baselessly warned in the leadup to the 2024 election that only rigging could explain it if he lost again (this time he won both the popular and electoral votes despite his low favorability).

He’s also extended that argument to elections for other allied candidates. If you accept the polls, Trump’s actual unpopularity is “putting the Republican Party at risk of a severe rebuke from voters in just six months’ time in the 2026 midterm elections,” as CNN noted in May. But Trump’s lie turns that reasoning on its head — if his “REAL” numbers are so good that the GOP should really be romping in their elections and only massive election fraud could explain Democratic victories.

Last month, for example, Trump baselessly claimed that “cheating dogs” who administer elections in California had stolen the Los Angeles mayoral race from former reality TV personality and conservative candidate Spencer Pratt. He added that “they” had only “approved” Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton to make the run-off because “I started hitting them” with baseless fraud allegations. (Pratt’s share of the vote was on track with polling of the race and just under the vote share Trump himself received in LA in 2024, while Hilton and fellow Republican gubernatorial candidate Chad Bianco combined to run three points under Trump’s statewide total that year — but the president has claimed that loss was also the result of fraud.)

He has also urged Republicans to pass legislation to curtail voting rights, arguing that failure to do so will result in midterm defeats. “We can only lose the midterms if we allow ourselves to lose the midterms, if we are foolish, stupid and unwise,” Trump said Friday. “But if we terminate the filibuster as we should do and immediately vote for the SAVE America Act, then we will not lose an election for 100 years.”

MAGA media are hiding Trump’s unpopularity from their audience

The right-wing propaganda machine plays a key role in this farce.

Republicans spent decades tearing down the press and urging their supporters to get their information only from ideological allies. That opened up the party base to Trumpian lies, like his claims about news outlets producing fake polls.

MAGA media could try to keep their audiences grounded in reality, leveling with them about Trump’s unpopularity and pushing the party to change course. But in the lead-up to both the 2020 and 2024 elections, they portrayed Trump as the odds-on favorite and suggested a defeat could only result from fraud. And since Trump returned to office, the right-wing commentariat has largely toed the president’s line and hidden worrying signs about his faltering support.

The strategy is particularly obvious — and noxious — on Fox. The network’s hosts and commentators are aware that Trump is deeply unpopular, as it employs pollsters whose own surveys show it. But they are concealing that knowledge from viewers — a group that often includes the Fox-obsessed president himself — rather than leveling with them.

Fox hosts hide the network’s brutal polls while touting Trump as “the ultimate dealmaker” ushering in a “golden age” that makes the United States “the envy of the world” — and that “America, just like McDonald’s, we’re loving it.”

Its pundits swoon over how his “support among his base, among Republicans, is as strong as any president we've seen in modern history” and assure viewers that “the polling that you're seeing come in on Trump is incorrect.”

They point to outdated polls that suggest Trump’s actions are popular over their own survey data when it says otherwise.

After the crowd at Madison Square Garden loudly jeered the president when he appeared on the Jumbotron at Game 3 of the NBA Finals between the hometown New York Knicks and the San Antonio Spurs, Fox & Friends claimed his reception was actually “mixed.”

And when dismal turnout marred Trump’s efforts to make the celebration of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence all about himself, they pretended otherwise.

Those efforts have not fully assuaged the president — he has publicly urged Fox to fire its pollsters and even threatened to have them criminally investigated on the grounds that their negative results purportedly constitute “ELECTION FRAUD.”

But by downplaying the evidence of the president’s unpopularity, the network is nonetheless priming its viewers to believe him if Republicans are defeated in the midterms and he responds by crying “fraud.” And with election deniers consolidating power across the administration and laying the groundwork for a future attempt to subvert the vote, the stakes couldn’t be higher.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters