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Matt Gertz

Amid Propaganda Firestorm, Mainstream Media Privileges Trump's Lies

The right-wing propaganda machine’s opportunistic and unhinged response to the wildfires sweeping the Los Angeles area provide an instructive but foreboding look at what the next four years could look like.

Firestorms have swept parts of Los Angeles Country and its environs since last Tuesday, as a “perfect storm” of dry conditions (spurred in part by human-caused climate change) and winds gusting over 80 miles per hour sparked apocalyptic conflagrations and severely hampered firefighters’ response.

While the fires are not uniquely large, the fact that they are burning in a densely populated area has resulted in staggering costs — at least ten people are reported dead as of Friday morning, tens of thousands have fled their homes, and more than 9,000 structures are damaged or destroyed, with economic loss estimates in the tens of billions of dollars.

Political leaders would ideally respond to such horrific circumstances by putting aside partisan differences and standing together to help the victims rebuild. But something very different is happening this week in right-wing spaces.

President-elect Donald Trump is lying a lot in order to blame his political opponents for the fire. The president-elect's Truth Social feed this week is alternating between memes highlighting his purported plans to take over Canada and Greenland and falsehood-heavy rants about how “the gross incompetence and mismanagement” of President Joe Biden and California Gov. Gavin Newsom are responsible for the fire.

Trump’s MAGA media allies are aiding his effort by turning the right-wing information ecosystem into an unrelenting wave of bogus attacks related to the fires. When any major story breaks, the top priority for the hosts on Fox News, Trumpist social media influencers, and the rest of the echo chamber is to identify scapegoats for their audiences to rage against.

As destruction spreads across Southern California, they are chiming in with a familiar cast of enemies: Democrats, environmentalists, and diversity. These claims have in turn fueled attacks on media outlets for debunking right-wing falsehoods, as well as demands that Trump threaten to hold back desperately needed assistance to the region once he takes office later this month.

None of this is going to inform right-wing audiences about the unfolding disaster, much less reduce the risk that another one strikes in the future. But that’s not the point. The commentariat knows that their audiences are united in their hatred of the left, and by providing the usual villains, they keep viewers, listeners, and readers engaged for their movement’s political gain.

As SoCal burns, the right finds false scapegoats

Responding to natural disasters is a core function of government, and leaders’ response to such tragedies deserves careful scrutiny. But the evidence Trump and his allies are pointing to in order to claim that California’s fires stem from liberal mismanagement don’t hold up.

The main avenue the right has seized upon — blaming California Democrats and environmentalists for supposedly limiting the water supply used to fight the fire — is entirely false.

Trump alleged on Truth Social that there was “no water for fire hydrants” to fight the fire because “Newscum refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water to flow” from northern to southern California because he wanted to protect populations of the delta smelt, a rare fish.

His right-wing propagandists quickly parroted his argument to their audiences. On OAN, Dan Ball claimed that “You liberal Democrats running that city, county, and the state have blood on your hands tonight,” before reading Trump’s post. On Fox, Jesse Watters claimed of Newsom that “there is no water coming out of the fire hydrant because this man mismanages the water there.” And Larry Kudlow said on his Fox Business show that the governor “cut the water flow that never got to Southern California, in defense of this obscure fish.”

But none of this is true.

It’s not a water shortage that is impeding the firefighting effort — Southern California’s reservoirs are full, and LA County officials say they filled “all available water storage facility tanks” before the fires started. Some water hydrants ran dry in the Palisades because the extraordinary high demand on the area’s tanks (“four times the normal demand of water was seen for 15 hours straight in the area of the fires”) depleted them faster and reduced the water pressure needed to replenish them.

The long-running dispute over protecting the smelt has nothing to do with the firefighting effort — beyond the fact that there wasn’t a water shortage, that dispute hinges on whether water resources should be used instead for farm irrigation in the South and Central Valley.

And the “water restoration declaration” doesn’t exist, according to Newsom’s staff.

The right regularly responds to disasters by fixating on efforts to hire a diverse workforce, and this case has proved no different. On social media, right-wing influencers targeted Los Angeles Fire Department Chief Kristin Crowley, the first woman and first openly LGBTQ person to serve in the role, claiming her leadership of the department shows that “DEI is quite literally getting people killed,” “DEI = DIE,” and “DEI has deadly consequences.”

Such attacks moved swiftly up the right-wing food chain. “This is the leadership of the LA Fire Department — I sure hope they know what they’re doing,” Fox star Jesse Watters said on Wednesday while shaking his head. He later claimed that “California is committing suicide before our very eyes. DEI is deadly.”

And at times, the discourse became nakedly conspiratorial with Fox personalities darkly alleging that “the homeless” or “outside agitators” were responsible for starting the fires and that the government was deliberately allowing them to burn unimpeded.

The right uses the same playbook after every disaster

The right treats every disaster as an opportunity to attack the left, with talking points bubbling up from the fever swamps or filtering down from Trump, then spreading swiftly through the ecosystem thanks to the all-encompassing nature of its propaganda machine.

We’ve seen the same pattern repeatedly over the last few years, following deadly natural disasters in North Carolina and Puerto Rico and California, among others.

But because this is such well-trodden territory, it is disturbing when legacy media outlets are unable or unwilling to bat down the false claims.

The New York Times’ write-up of Trump’s remarks about Newsom’s water management is headlined “Trump Blames California’s Governor, and His Water Policy, for Wildfires.” Only in its final paragraphs does the story explain that the Trump claims detailed in its opening sentences are false.

Privileging the lie like this leaves Times readers poorly informed. The good news for the paper is that another opportunity for better coverage will surely follow the next natural disaster.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Book: Fox Insider Texted Questions To Trump Before Town Hall

A Fox News insider gave Donald Trump's campaign the questions in advance of Trump’s January 2024 town hall on the network, according to a forthcoming book. Later that year, Trump baselessly claimed someone at ABC had “very likely” provided Vice President Kamala Harris with the questions for their debate — and called for government retribution against the network if that were confirmed.

CNN reported on the Fox revelations Wednesday after obtaining advance excerpts of Politico reporter Alex Isenstadt’s book Revenge: The Inside Story of Trump’s Return to Power. Isenstadt writes that shortly before the start of Trump’s Iowa town hall, moderated by Fox anchors Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum, a Trump staffer started receiving text messages from a Fox insider with the questions. From CNN’s article:

“About thirty minutes before the town hall was due to start, a senior aide started getting text messages from a person on the inside at Fox. Holy s–t, the team thought. They were images of all the questions Trump would be asked and the planned follow-ups, down to the exact wording. Jackpot. This was like a student getting a peek at the test before the exam started,” Isenstadt writes.

“Trump was pissed” about the questions, which he thought were too aggressive, but the campaign “workshopped answers” with him, Isenstadt reported.

While it's unclear who might have had access to the town hall questions, there is no shortage of Fox employees who value Trump’s political success over questions of journalistic integrity. The network effectively fused with Trump’s first-term White House, as several network hosts served as his advisers and a revolving door opened up between Fox and his administration. The network’s fawning coverage of his 2024 campaign helped him win the GOP primary and the general election, and he has since named 17 current or former Fox staffers to top posts in his second administration.

(A Fox spokesperson told CNN that “we take these matters very seriously and plan to investigate should there prove to be a breach within the network,” a comical sentiment based on the network’s past handling of Trump-related ethics violations.)

For his part, Trump subsequently claimed that a campaign receiving the questions from a news outlet source before a high-profile event should trigger serious consequences for the host outlet.

Following his disastrous September 2024 debate performance, Trump alleged on his Truth Social platform that “People are saying that Comrade Kamala Harris had the questions from Fake News ABC. I would say it is very likely.” He went on to claim that if that were the case, “ABC’s license should be TERMINATED.”

The former president’s claims were total garbage and a reflection of his poor information diet. Trump subsequently made clear he was running with the claims of a random X poster — whose profile stated “Black Insurrectionist--I FOLLOW BACK TRUE PATRIOTS” — who claimed to be in possession of an affidavit from an “ABC whistleblower” which alleged that “the Harris campaign was given sample questions."

ABC categorically denied Black Insurrectionist’s claims, and the document he eventually released was rife with inconsistencies (which did not stop several prominent MAGA influencers and Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo from running with it). The Associated Press subsequently revealed that “Black Insurrectionist” was a white man who has “repeatedly been accused of defrauding business partners and lenders."

Trump’s threats of government retaliation, however, are deadly serious.

The Federal Communications Commission does not license broadcast networks — but it does license individual broadcast stations, including the eight owned and operated directly by ABC and the hundreds of additional affiliates. FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel, a Biden appointee, responded to Trump’s call by suggesting it runs afoul of the First Amendment.

But when Brendan Carr, a Republican FCC member and the author of Project 2025’s chapter on the commission, was asked about the controversy during a House hearing, he “would not answer if he believed the FCC had grounds to revoke the ABC license after the debate.” Trump has since named Carr to replace Rosenworcel as FCC chair — and Carr subsequently suggested in a letter to Bob Iger, CEO of ABC’s parent company, Disney, that his FCC would closely scrutinize ABC’s affiliate agreements.

Trump is an authoritarian who looks for any opportunity to punish news outlets he doesn’t like. But if Isenstadt’s story is accurate, he has no problem taking all the help he can get from favored ones.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

You Won't Believe...What Trump's Fluffers Once Said About January 6

On January 6, 2021, as a violent mob stormed the U.S. Capitol and halted Congress’ counting of electoral votes, Fox News host Brian Kilmeade dashed off a desperate text to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.

“Please, get him on TV. Destroying everything you have accomplished,” he wrote of Trump, who had summoned the enraged crowd to Washington, D.C., and incited it with lies that the 2020 election had been stolen as part of a plot to subvert that election.

Kilmeade expressed a drastically different view on Monday, as a new Congress prepared to count the electoral votes that would return Trump to the Oval Office.

In one of Fox & Friends’ few references to the January 6 insurrection that morning, he mocked Democrats who “want to point out how different” today’s events will be “from four years ago” when “democracy was in danger.”

Kilmeade added that the American people think that January 6, “as bad as that day was, it’s a small part of the Donald Trump story” and that it would be “put to bed even further after today happens.”

The Fox & Friends host is one of an array of right-wing media figures who said at the time that the January 6 insurrection was a calamity, that the rioters were criminals, and that Trump himself bore responsibility for their actions. But over the past four years, they have participated in the right’s Great Forgetting, making their peace with Trump’s attempted coup and supporting his return to the presidency.

When the right said January 6 was “deplorable” and its participants were “criminals”

“Remember what yesterday’s attempted coup at the U.S. Capitol was like. Very soon, someone might try to convince you that it was different,” The Atlantic’s David Graham wrote the next day. “The health of the republic depends both on what swift consequences come—for Trump and for others—and also on how people remember the participants’ actions later on.”

Graham’s warning proved prescient. As the attack unfolded and in its immediate aftermath, many media figures on the right joined those on center and left in condemning the attack — and Trump’s work to incite it — in the strongest possible terms. But they did not sustain their initial response.

“Shoot the protestors,” influential commentator Erick Erickson wrote that afternoon. He added that Trump should receive immediate consequences that would end his political career: “Waive the rules, impeach. Waive the rules, convict. Waive the rules, deny the ability to run for election again.”

Four years later, Erickson offered this take: “First, Happy January 6th to all who celebrate. Note to the media: The exit polling in November showed that most voters do not care. That you will try to make them care today is another reason trust in the media is beneath that of Congress itself.”

Fox chief political analyst Brit Hume likewise denounced Trump at the time for having “fueled the worst suspicions of his supporters with wild claims that the election was stolen. And now we see the result.” But on Election Day 2024, he declared this “a BS issue” because “the thing was over in a matter of hours.”

Erickson and Hume are among a long list of right-wing media notables who condemned January 6 — and even Trump for bringing it about — but came around to implicitly or explicitly support his return to the presidency, even as he showed no remorse for his own actions and valorized the rioters.

Rupert Murdoch, whose right-wing media empire is one of the most potent forces in Republican politics, wrote in an email to Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott on Inauguration Day 2021 that Trump’s election lies had been “pretty much a crime” that made January 6 “inevitable.” He added: “Best we don't mention his name unless essential and certainly don't support him."

On Fox, numerous hosts condemned the criminal acts of the mob and said its members deserved punishment, with some even describing such denunciations as morally necessary.

“Those who truly support President Trump, those that believe they are part of the conservative movement in this country, you do not — we do not support those that commit acts of violence,” offered Fox host and Trump adviser Sean Hannity. “Every good and decent American, we know, will and must condemn what happened at the Capitol.”

“The actions at the United States Capitol three days ago were deplorable, reprehensible, outright criminal,” Jeanine Pirro likewise declared. “Anyone watching this must condemn it.”

Fox contributor Marc Thiessen was among the few to single out Trump on the network’s airwaves, saying the then-president had been “responsible for what happened,” and he went much further in a Washington Post column.

“It was one of the darkest moments in the history of our democracy. And Trump is responsible for it,” he wrote. “Trump formed and incited the mob. He stoked their anger with self-serving lies. He betrayed his followers. He betrayed his office. And now he has blood on his hands.”

The organs of the upper-crust right were united in blaming Trump for the attack.

Murdoch’s Wall Street Journalwrote in a January 7, 2021, editorial that Trump should resign the presidency after committing “an assault on the constitutional process of transferring power after an election.” The New York Post editorial board wrote that “while the roots of this madness were many, with some blame across the spectrum, it’s fundamentally on President Trump.” And the editors of National Review said Trump “found a new low” by having “whipped up and urged on a mob toward the U.S. Capitol, where it breached the building and forced his vice president and lawmakers to flee.”

The hosts of the All-In podcast, which became a key venue of the MAGA tech right, were even more scathing at the time, describing Trump as “a complete piece-of-shit fucking scumbag” who had engaged in “insane, deranged, criminal, lunatic behavior” and had “disqualified himself from being a candidate at a national level.”

The Great Forgetting and what comes next

These comments reflected the widespread initial consensus that January 6 had been horrific — and that Trump had been responsible for it. In the first days following the attack, politicians of both parties, corporate leaders, and the public at large responded with revulsion and demands for consequences.

But that unity ultimately proved fragile. A coterie of Trumpists, led by former Fox host Tucker Carlson, worked diligently to unwind it, reframing the sacking of the U.S. Capitol as either unimportant — or a conspiracy driven by Democrats and the media in which the assailants were the real victims of a crackdown on “political dissidents,” as Fox’s Rachel Campos-Duffy put it last week.

As this fraudulent counternarrative became increasingly widespread, most other conservative media figures eventually chose to join the right’s Great Forgetting. They pretended that a president who they knew had tried to overturn the republic was fit to return to that office. And in so doing, they helped power Trump from his post-January 6 position of disgrace back to the GOP nomination and the presidency.

Trump’s return to office sets the stage for more authoritarian acts. He never repudiated his election lies or the attack they incited, instead valorizing the January 6 “hostages” and promising they will receive pardons as one of his first acts in office. And he is assembling a team to carry out the “retribution” he has promised to inflict on his political foes, including an FBI director who proposed legal action against the conspirators, “not just in government but in the media,” who he claimed “helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections.”

Trump’s authoritarian impulses may ultimately come to nothing. But with their actions after January 6, the leading lights of the right have already signaled their willingness to accept whatever he does.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Together Again: Fox And Trump Spread Lies About New Orleans Truck Attack

President-elect Donald Trump keeps falsely suggesting that the native-born U.S. Army veteran who rammed a pickup truck into a crowd in New Orleans on New Year’s Day was an immigrant. He appears to have been misled by a Fox News report — subsequently retracted — alleging that the assailant crossed the border from Mexico two days before the attack.

The falsehoods mark a resumption of the Trump-Fox feedback loop that powered his communications during his first term in the White House. The then-president, an obsessive consumer of Fox programming, sent nearly 1,300 tweets in response to coverage he saw on Fox News and Fox Business over the last 29 months of his tenure.

At around 3:15 a.m., the driver of a pickup truck sped through a crowd of revelers on New Orleans’ Bourbon Street, killing at least 15 people and injuring dozens more before being killed in a shoot-out with police. The driver was later identified as Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar, a U.S. citizen and Army veteran born and raised in Texas who claimed to have joined ISIS.

But at 10:40 a.m. ET on Wednesday — before authorities had confirmed the suspect’s name — Fox aired an anonymously-sourced bombshell report claiming that he had crossed the border from Mexico earlier that week.

“According to federal sources, the suspect drove a truck with that Texas license plate, OK — so this is just coming into our newsroom now. This is from Griff Jenkins and David Spunt working their federal sources on this,” anchor Molly Line said. “According to their sources, this person came through Eagle Pass, Texas, two days ago.”

Within minutes, Trump amplified Fox’s incendiary claim, arguing that the New Orleans attack showed he had been correct about “criminals coming in” to the U.S.

“When I said that the criminals coming in are far worse than the criminals we have in our country, that statement was constantly refuted by Democrats and the Fake News Media, but it turned out to be true,” he posted to his Truth Social platform at 10:48 a.m. “The crime rate in our country is at a level that nobody has ever seen before. Our hearts are with all of the innocent victims and their loved ones, including the brave officers of the New Orleans Police Department.”

But as Trump parroted Fox’s reporting, the network’s reporters were walking it back, saying that the sources only confirmed that the truck, and not the suspect, had crossed the border earlier in the week.

“We’re hearing that the vehicle was traced to coming across from Mexico into the United States at Eagle Pass, Texas, two days ago,” Spunt told Fox’s audience at around the same time Trump posted.

“To be clear, we don’t 100% know that this man — and we do know the suspect is a man — was the person driving that crossed the border,” he continued. “That is unclear at this point. We just know that the actual license plate was picked up by a reader at a border crossing. This is per two federal law enforcement sources to Fox News."

“I know that raises more questions than answers, but we are providing information to our viewers as we get it, the most accurate information,” Spunt added.

But Fox had not carefully provided its viewers — including the former president — with “the most accurate information."

Roughly an hour later, a Fox anchor reported that the network’s sources had confirmed that the pickup truck actually crossed the border at Eagle Pass on November 16 — nearly two months ago, not two days — and that the driver at the time had not been the suspect. The car-sharing company Turo later confirmed that the suspect had rented the truck used in the attack.

A few hours after that, as more information about the suspect came out, Spunt ended up in the curious position of correcting the false Trump claim that his own reporting had seemingly spurred. Spunt read the Truth Social statement during the 4 p.m. ET hour and commented, “Now, the former president said ‘criminals coming in’ in his statement, meaning into our country, but to be clear, Molly and Brian, the suspect was born in the United States.”

The correction did nothing to deter Trump, who posted overnight that “this is what happens when you have OPEN BORDERS” and blamed Democrats “for allowing this to happen to our Country.”

By the following morning, Trump’s incoming national security adviser, Michael Waltz, was on Fox & Friends explaining that the attack demonstrated the need to “close the border, secure our sovereignty.”

Minutes after that, Trump posted that the attack by a native-born citizen had proven him correct about the border. “With the Biden ‘Open Border’s Policy’ I said, many times during Rallies, and elsewhere, that Radical Islamic Terrorism, and other forms of violent crime, will become so bad in America that it will become hard to even imagine or believe. That time has come, only worse than ever imagined,” he wrote.

Trump appears to be starting his second term the same way he spent his first one — by riffing on what he sees on his television.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Media Matters Names Its 'Misinformer Of The Year'

The role of the free press, enshrined by the Constitution’s First Amendment, is an essential element of our democracy. The public cannot become informed about the problems facing our country and the efforts to improve or worsen them without robust protections for journalism.

But powerful people hate the light journalism shines on them and the dissent it can spur. A coalition of right-wing billionaires, Republican law enforcement officials, and an authoritarian once and future president are using wealth, lawfare, and government power to silence the press and carry out their political agenda unimpeded. And they are perilously close to succeeding.

Media Matters is naming anti-media intimidation the Misinformer of the Year for 2024 for its chilling effect on essential press freedoms.

ABC News’ agreement to settle Donald Trump’s defamation lawsuit is a foreboding sign of the current media climate and where it may be headed.

Legal experts and executives at ABC News parent company Disney reportedly thought that the outlet would eventually prevail. But its lawyers reportedly feared “litigating against a vindictive sitting president and risking harm to its brand.” They even worried that the suit could “become a vehicle for Mr. Trump and his allies to overturn the landmark First Amendment decision in New York Times v. Sullivan,” The New York Times reported.

If media lawyers are worried that a defamation lawsuit could ultimately demolish the bedrock legal precedent limiting such suits, then that protection functionally no longer applies.

The results of that shift could prove devastating to news outlets large and small and chill speech across the nation.

Trump’s lawyers have already filed a new lawsuit against Iowa pollster Ann Selzer, her polling firm, The Des Moines Register, and the Iowa paper’s parent company Gannett, accusing them of consumer fraud for publishing Selzer’s poll.

Other suits from anyone else who benefits from a cowed press will surely follow.

The purpose of these intimidation tactics — to which we had already been subjected — is to silence adversarial speech. If powerful individuals can force critics to pay a hefty price, they will be much more hesitant to take risks. And those without the financial resources for protracted legal fights will either back down or risk crippling costs. With journalists silenced, crucial stories will go unwritten — and the American public will lose out to right-wing power.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Named To VOA, Lake Hates 'Fake News,' Called Fox 'A Globalist Network'

Donald Trump's pick to lead the federal government's international news agency is an unhinged conspiracy theorist who lashes out at the press, hobnobs with far-right and antisemitic extremist outlets, and has criticized Fox News as “a globalist network.”

Trump announced Wednesday that he wants Kari Lake, a former TV news anchor who was the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate and governor in Arizona over the last two election cycles, to serve as the director of the Voice of America in his next administration. VOA claims a weekly international audience of more than 350 million people across TV, radio, and digital platforms; U.S. officials say it promotes democratic values, including the free press, and serves as a counterweight to foreign propaganda.

It’s unclear whether Lake will ever actually ascend to the VOA post. It is unusual for a president to name someone for the position and there are statutory and bureaucratic guardrails that could stall or prevent her installation, as CNN’s Brian Stelter noted.

But Trump’s selection of Lake — who he asserted will “ensure that the American values of Freedom and Liberty are broadcast around the World FAIRLY and ACCURATELY, unlike the lies spread by the Fake News Media” — is a nakedly partisan assault on journalistic values that demonstrates the level of fealty he expects from the press.

Lake’s 2022 gubernatorial campaign was a Fox-fueled fever dream. An obsequious backer of Trump and supporter of his election fraud lies, she campaigned alongside MAGA extremists and drew support from figures linked to QAnon and white nationalism.

She habitually attacked reporters during the campaign, describing them as “the right hand of the devil” and running an ad in which she said “it’s time to take a sledgehammer to the mainstream media’s lies and propaganda” before smashing several televisions depicting cable news hosts, whom she accused of following “a communist playbook.” On Election Day, she promised journalists that after she won, she would “be your worst fricking nightmare.”

— (@)

Lake lost. But in true Trumpian fashion, she spent the next two years claiming the governorship had been stolen from her, even as courts savaged her complaints.

As she prepared to run for Senate (even as she claimed to be Arizona’s rightfully elected governor), Lake expanded her attacks on the press to Fox itself. “Fox has proven that they are a globalist network,” she said on its competitor Newsmax in July 2023, adding that Fox supported the “uni-party swamp.” Speaking at this year’s Republican National Convention, she continued to go after the “fake news” for “lying about President Donald Trump and his amazing patriotic supporters.”

What type of media does Lake prefer? She is a friend and supporter of Laura Loomer, the deranged pro-Trump sycophant; praises the “massive following” of a QAnon show; embraces antisemitic streamers who sympathize with Nazis and claim that Jews are “taking over the world,” control the media, and “control us”; and cozies up to Brenden Dilley, the far-right podcaster who heads Trump’s “meme team.”

Lake would replace the journalist Michael Abramowitz if she actually becomes head of VOA. Abramowitz previously served as head of Freedom House, a nonprofit organization that supports journalists and human rights advocates, after more than two decades at The Washington Post. But Trump wants U.S. journalists pumping out propaganda, and Lake represents his bid to get it.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Fox News Hosts Fight To Save Embattled Hegseth From Scandals

The nomination of Pete Hegseth — the weekend Fox & Friends host Donald Trump selected to serve as defense secretary — is in trouble. Weeks of disturbing stories about Hegseth’s character and competence have Republican senators sitting on the fence, while Trump himself is reportedly contemplating other options.

But Hegseth’s Fox colleagues, who initially ignored the reports, have finally come to his defense over the last day, setting up a potential test of the influence the right-wing propaganda network will hold over the second Trump administration.

Hegseth is wildly underqualified to lead the Pentagon. The defense secretary’s job is to oversee a massive bureaucracy with millions of military and civilian employees and a budget in the hundreds of billions, and while Hegseth is a decorated military veteran, he has no experience managing such a large organization.

For Trump, however, Hegseth has the skills and experience required for any position: The former president likes his work on TV.

Hegseth spent the past decade as a Fox talking head. In that role, he pontificated about the perils of allowing women to serve in combat roles, defended U.S. service members and contractors who had been accused or convicted of war crimes, and floated military assaults on Iran and North Korea.

Along the way, Hegseth relentlessly propagandized on Trump’s behalf, which made him an influential figure during Trump’s first presidency. His selection to run the Pentagon was not an aberration — a slew of current and former network personalities could join Hegseth in the second Trump administration thanks to the incoming president’s Fox obsession.

But relying on Fox to vet cabinet nominees has left something to be desired when it comes to Hegseth, who has been battered by a series of devastating reports:

Days after Trump named Hegseth as his pick for defense secretary, local officials in California confirmed that the former Fox host had been investigated for sexual assault in October 2017 after speaking at a convention of the California Federation of Republican Women. A woman told police that Hegseth had “physically blocked her from leaving a hotel room, took her phone, and then sexually assaulted her even though she ‘remembered saying “no” a lot,’” while Hegseth said they had a consensual encounter, CNN reported. No charges were filed, but Hegseth later paid a settlement agreement which included a confidentiality clause because “he didn’t want to lose his job at the network if the accusation became public,” according to Hegseth’s lawyer.

The New York Timesreported last week that in a 2018 email, Hegseth’s mother wrote to him, “On behalf of all the women (and I know it’s many) you have abused in some way, I say … get some help and take an honest look at yourself.” The paper noted that she emailed her son amid his “contentious divorce from his second wife, Samantha, the mother of three of his children,” who had been his co-worker at Vets for Freedom and that “Samantha Hegseth filed for divorce after her husband impregnated a co-worker,” a Fox executive producer whom he married the following year.
The New Yorkerreported last Sunday: “A trail of documents, corroborated by the accounts of former colleagues, indicates that Hegseth was forced to step down by both of the two nonprofit advocacy groups that he ran—Veterans for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America—in the face of serious allegations of financial mismanagement, sexual impropriety, and personal misconduct. A previously undisclosed whistle-blower report on Hegseth’s tenure as the president of Concerned Veterans for America, from 2013 until 2016, describes him as being repeatedly intoxicated while acting in his official capacity—to the point of needing to be carried out of the organization’s events.”

Fox’s right-wing propagandists and “news side” reporters alike remained silent about these controversies, as CNN’s Brian Stelter reported on Tuesday, instead using euphemisms about how Hegseth was facing “problems about his personal conduct” and is “headed for a tough confirmation.”

“In effect, Fox has insulated its conservative audience from reports that might dim their perception of Hegseth and Trump, instead offering viewers a safe space where their existing beliefs are reinforced by sympathetic hosts and guests,” Stelter wrote.

With Fox on the sidelines, GOP senators backed away from supporting Hegseth’s nomination. Trump himself reportedly began looking at other options for the Defense Department, such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, another Fox favorite.

But Hegseth’s Fox colleagues finally rallied to his defense on Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning, as his nomination reportedly faced an “absolutely critical” juncture.

After NBC News reported Tuesday night that Hegseth “drank in ways that concerned his colleagues at Fox News, according to 10 current and former Fox employees” and had at times smelled of alcohol on the set, Hegseth’s Fox & Friends weekend co-host Will Cain organized public denials from network employees and testimonials to their former colleague’s character.

Fox & Friends’ co-hosts on Wednesday morning offered several minutes of praise for Hegseth, denials of the reports about him, and attacks on what they termed a media “witch hunt.” “No, we will not succumb to the left’s playbook,” Emily Compagno said. “We will not succumb to Kavanaugh becoming a verb in that the left likes to wield the media and a very public witch hunt to thwart the possibility for actual success.”

They hosted Hegseth’s mother later in the show, who defended her son, saying that he “doesn't misuse women” and that while he “has been through some difficult things. … I would just say that some of those attachments or descriptions are just not true, especially anymore.”

She also made a direct appeal to Trump himself.

Hegseth himself remains defiant, and he will reportedly sit down tonight with Fox chief political anchor Bret Baier for an interview aimed at an audience of one — Trump, who will almost certainly be watching as he decides whether to keep pushing for Hegseth’s nomination or cut him loose.

With Hegseth’s Fox friends trying to preserve his spot at Defense he has a chance, but their effort may be too little, too late.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Trump Hiring Fox's Medical Contributors To Oversee Health Policy

Then-President Donald Trump repeatedly favored the Fox News hosts and guests he saw on his television screen over federal health policy experts as he managed the response to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, and it had calamitous consequences. He's going even further as he prepares for his second term, picking familiar faces from the right-wing propaganda network to run the government health bureaucracy.

Trump, a Fox obsessive, staffed his first administration with at least 20 former Fox personalities, and he continues to rely on that method as he stocks his second one. But the network’s dominance among Trump’s announced picks to carry out his second-term health policy is nonetheless striking.

Anti-vaccine activist and Fox hero Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will lead the Department of Health and Human Services. He will potentially oversee former Fox contributor Dr. Marty Makary at the Food and Drug Administration, Fox medical contributor Dr. Janette Nesheiwat as U.S. surgeon general, and frequent Fox guests Dr. Jay Bhattacharya at the National Institutes of Health and Dr. Mehmet Oz at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

These picks, to an extent, show Trump aligning his health policy hires with his own Fox-molded views.

As president during the pandemic, he clashed with his official advisers when they contradicted what he was hearing from Fox personalities. The result was often chaos in decision-making, implementation, and public messaging.

Makary, Bhattacharya, Oz, and Nesheiwat received regular Fox airtime because on issues like the use of untested drugs such as hydroxychloroquine or nonpharmaceutical interventions like office and school closures, they tended to hew close to the Fox line — which also became the Trump line. If another pandemic hits, it is possible that they will be able to mitigate Trump’s worst impulses; they have real medical credentials, and Trump is likely to have greater confidence in them due to their shared past views.

But while Trump’s promotion of COVID-19 vaccines through Operation Warp Speed was an unalloyed triumph in his first term, Kennedy is a crank who was openly hostile to the drugs. And other members of the second-term team regularly went on Fox to warn about the purported health impacts of the vaccines and criticize mandates to ensure their use. That does not bode well for the prospect of a successful response should another pandemic hit during the next four years.

RFK Jr. at HHS is a Fox-fueled disaster for health policy

Fox hosts and other right-wing media figures like Tucker Carlson spent 18 months irresponsibly championing Kennedy as part of a strategy to return Trump to the White House. The network regularly promoted him as a Democratic candidate, then showered him with praise and vouched for his health views after Carlson ensured that he endorsed Trump.

The result is that Kennedy — who has pushed debunked claims about childhood vaccination causing autism, questioned the well-established science over whether HIV actually causes AIDS, and promoted kooky conspiracy theories about 5G cellular towers and chemtrails — is Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.

Kennedy was among the biggest U.S. sources of anti-vaccine misinformation during the coronavirus pandemic, terming the COVID-19 vaccine “the deadliest vaccine ever made.” Other noted anti-vaccine figures and fringe crackpots claim to be advising him on the transition.

He also suggested that the pandemic may have been “planned,” that public health efforts taken in response constituted “a pharmaceutical-driven, biosecurity agenda that will enslave the entire human race and plunge us into a dystopian nightmare,” and that the virus itself had been “ethnically targeted” to afflict “Caucasians and Black people” while sparing “Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese."

Trump picked other people he saw on Fox to run health agencies

Several other Trump picks for top health posts were heavily featured during the Fox’s coronavirus coverage.

Oz, the television personality and grifter Trump selected to lead the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, became a Fox regular in 2020. He made scores of network appearances at the start of the pandemic, particularly championing hydroxychloroquine, the antimalarial drug that right-wing media figures promoted as a treatment for or preventative to COVID.

Oz’s commentary attracted the attention of Trump, who reportedly urged aides to consult with the TV doctor about the outbreak. Oz subsequently ran for the U.S. Senate with the support of Fox star and Trump adviser Sean Hannity, but he came up short in the 2022 midterms.

Makary, Nesheiwat, and Bhattacharya also seemingly became Fox regulars because of their willingness to contradict COVID-19 guidance from federal public health agencies on its airwaves.

FDA selection Makary — who argued in a February 2021 Wall Street Journal op-ed that the U.S. would reach “herd Immunity by April” — used his Fox platform in the months leading up to the emergence of the deadly delta variant to criticize public health officials for warning of new strains of the virus. He also criticized vaccine mandates, particularly for children, citing the vaccine’s purported health risks.

Reported NIH pick Bhattacharya — a signatory of the 2020 Great Barrington Declaration, which called for building up herd immunity through “natural infection” — likewise used his time in Fox’s spotlight to criticize vaccine mandates. He agreed with Fox host Laura Ingraham during an August 2021 segment that the FDA approved COVID-19 vaccines “too fast,” saying, “The FDA approval does not change the fact that we don't have long-term safety data with the vaccine."

And Nesheiwat, the Fox medical contributor Trump selected as surgeon general, promoted the use of supplemental zinc as a COVID-19 treatment and repeatedly highlighted the purported health risks of vaccination for children and young men.

Their commentary was part of a massive and effective effort by Fox to undermine the COVID-19 vaccination program. Now, if confirmed, they will be running major federal health bureaucracies.

The last pandemic — and the next one

Trump regularly leaned on Fox’s programming and personalities for advice, and the network shaped both his worldview and his administration’s actions. No event demonstrated the extent of the network’s influence more than his response to the coronavirus pandemic.

Trump didn’t treat COVID’s initial spread as an emergency because Fox was telling him that the media and Democrats were deliberately exaggerating the danger it posed.

He propped up hydroxychloroquine because the network told him it could be a miracle cure, refused to wear masks or socially distance because its hosts said those interventions didn’t work, and then urged the swift reopening of the economy they demanded.

He cut off support to the World Health Organization because one of Fox's stars suggested it and selected a White House adviser from the network’s green room to implement a “herd immunity” strategy.

The result was mass death.

The saving grace of the Trump pandemic response was Operation Warp Speed, an innovative program that sped the development of safe, effective vaccines against the virus. But Trump was out of office by the time the vaccines were deployed, and Fox responded with a yearslong campaign against the drugs. Fox regulars like Makary, Nesheiwat, and Bhattacharya pitched in by criticizing the safety of the vaccines or mandates for their use.

The four doctors Trump picked from Fox’s airwaves do have real medical credentials, and their selections have received some praise from public health experts.

Dr. Peter Hotez, a vaccine scientist, said Nesheiwat is “a good appointment,” describing her as “very smart, thoughtful, interested in learning.”

Dr. Ashish Jha, who served in President Joe Biden’s White House, called the appointments of Makary, Oz, and Bhattacharya “pretty reasonable,” adding: “I have plenty of policy disagreements with them. They are smart and experienced. We will need them to do well.”

Indeed, they may take office as H5N1 bird flu spreads in American livestock and from livestock to people. If that virus makes the jump to human-to-human transmission, the U.S. health bureaucracy will be forced to grapple with another deadly pandemic.

Focusing specifically on Bhattacharya, Slow Boring’s Matt Yglesias offered the best-case scenario for how Trump’s health appointees could impact a pandemic response:

Bhattacharya’s criticisms of nonpharmaceutical intervetions during 2020 went further than I would have, and I don’t agree with him per se. That said, he is well-credentialed and smart and also aligned with Trump on the substantive question.

Four years ago, Trump had a lot of people in place who he didn’t have confidence in and didn’t listen to, and then he had a lot of unqualified people articulating his views.

Bhattacharya can do what an executive branch official is supposed to do and channel Trump-style views in a professional way.

What’s more, precisely because his anti-NPI credentials are unimpeachable, if a much deadlier virus comes around that shifts Trump’s sense of the cost-benefit balance, he would be the right person to deliver that message.

But as he further notes, “the most effective weapon against Covid was pharmaceutical interventions” — and in Kennedy, Trump has selected “an anti-vaccine crank” as Bhattacharya’s boss.

That means things could get bad fast.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

How Fox Shaped Trump's First Term -- And Now Propels His Second

Fox News dominated wide swaths of federal decision-making during Donald Trump’s first presidency, as his administration effectively merged with the right-wing propaganda network that had propelled him to power.

It’s currently unclear how the battle for Trump’s attention will shake out in a second one — but here’s how his media diet influenced the U.S. government the last time he was in the White House.

Trump owed his 2016 political ascent to that right-wing media ecosystem. A longtime Fox regular, he was obsessed with the network’s programming and channeled its demagoguery on the campaign trail, winning over its audience, as well as upstart alt-right organs like Steve Bannon’s Breitbart.com. He dominated Fox’s airtime on the way to his primary campaign win, bending the network and the GOP to his will before garnering a narrow Electoral College majority.

Once Trump was in office, Fox became a state TV outlet that lavished him with praise and denounced his foes, and in doing so it gained unprecedented influence over the U.S. government. The hours Trump spent each day consuming the network’s content and speaking privately with its stars shaped his worldview and dictated his reaction to various events. Hundreds of his hyperaggressive, seemingly stream-of-consciousness tweets came in response to what he was seeing on his television, a phenomenon I dubbed the “Trump-Fox feedback loop.”

Fox’s employees affected wildly important policy decisions on matters of war and peace, and they turned right-wing tantrums into matters of national importance because the president of the United States happened to be tuning in.

It’s impossible to overstate how ridiculous — or dangerous — this Fox-Trump pipeline could be. At one point, after a Fox contributor turned to the camera and urged Trump to renounce his support for a bill, the president appeared to do so on Twitter, causing chaos on Capitol Hill. Later in his term, Trump put the full force of government behind a purported coronavirus “miracle cure” that he had seen touted on Fox but proved ineffective against the virus.

Below, I detail how Trump's communications, his administration’s personnel, and his administration’s actions on executive clemency, law enforcement investigations, domestic policy, and even military strikes all came to revolve around Fox during his first term.

Communications

Journalists struggled in the early days of Trump’s presidency to explain his Twitter activity. The sitting president’s often-hyperaggressive tweets would begin early in the morning and continue late into the night, skipping from topic to topic with little clear rhyme or reason.

While some attributed the pattern to strategic genius and others to mental instability, the truth was more prosaic: Trump was spending much of his days watching cable news, particularly Fox, and responding in real time to segments that captured his fancy.

I ultimately traced nearly 1,300 Trump tweets back to Fox News and its sister channel, Fox Business. He live-tweeted dozens of different Fox shows, with hundreds of his missives attributed to his favorite program, Fox & Friends, alone, on a bevy of topics. These live tweets — and thus, Fox’s coverage — often set the agenda for the broader news media, as reporters dropped whatever they were working on to cover the newsworthy comments from the TV-addled president.

Some of the Fox live tweets were a humorous sideshow — a June 2019 tweet about Mars and the moon that baffled journalists turned out to be Trump giving feedback to a NASA official he had just seen on Fox Business.

But Trump’s reactions to the network were often deadly serious: Based on what he saw on Fox, he raised tensions with foreign adversaries; demanded investigations of his political foes; lashed out at public officials with racist invective; denounced an array of journalists and media outlets; undermined the public health response to the coronavirus pandemic; and fueled the election fraud conspiracy theories that ultimately triggered the January 6 insurrection.

While Trump has in recent months at times feuded with Fox, that hasn’t stopped him from continuing to promote segments from its programming.

Personnel

Trump’s unprecedented relationship with Fox created a revolving door between the network and his administration during his first term.

Trump relied on Fox as a staffing agency, filling the ranks of the federal government with familiar faces from his TV screen. At least 20 former Fox employees ended up working for the Trump administration in some capacity, a tally that included multiple Cabinet secretaries (Ben Carson and Elaine Chao), top White House aides (Kayleigh McEnany and John Bolton, among others), and U.S. ambassadors (Scott Brown and Georgette Mosbacher). Fox, in turn, hired at least 16 members of his administration for roles at the network or its parent company during his presidency or after it concluded.

Trump also relied on advice from Fox personalities who remained at the network. He reportedly spoke with Sean Hannity so frequently that White House aides described the Fox host as “the unofficial chief of staff.” He also brought Laura Ingraham into the White House to brief administration officials, patched Lou Dobbs into Oval Office meetings via speakerphone, and privately consulted with Jeanine Pirro, Pete Hegseth, and Tucker Carlson.

These relationships proved so strong that some of the unofficial Fox advisers dislodged official Trump appointees: Attorney General Jeff Sessions resigned after losing a power struggle with Pirro, as did Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen with Dobbs, U.S. Navy Secretary Richard V. Spencer with Hegseth, and Bolton with Carlson.

Trump appears to be returning to the same source as he begins filling out his second administration. His initial spate of picks included five former Fox employees: Fox & Friends Weekend host Hegseth for defense secretary, former host Mike Huckabee for U.S. ambassador to Israel, and former contributors Tulsi Gabbard, Tom Homan, and Michael Waltz as director of national intelligence, “Border Czar,” and national security adviser.

Policy

Fox’s coverage and the influence of its personalities permeated every aspect of federal policy during Trump's first term, including but not limited to:

Domestic actions. Trump blew up a potential immigration deal after consulting with Hannity. He abruptly changed his trade policy with China due to criticism from Dobbs and Brian Kilmeade. He triggered a partial government shutdown after goading from Fox hosts; awarded a contract to build border wall due to a Fox PR campaign. He backed an ineffective treatment as a coronavirus “miracle cure” because it was championed by Fox stars. And in response to critical Carlson segments, he terminated a federal antisegregation plan, abandoned police reform legislation, and launched an administration-wide turn against diversity training.

Foreign actions. Trump launched the Ukraine abuse of power scheme that resulted in his first impeachment in response to coverage from Hannity. He publicly criticized South Africa’s government after seeing Carlson promote false white nationalist talking points, leading South African to condemn his statement. He responded to a Fox segment about North Korea by threatening nuclear war. And he both cut off funding to the World Health Organization and repeatedly called off military strikes on Iran due to Carlson monologues.

Executive clemency. Fox influenced at least 25 of Trump’s acts of executive clemency. He gave pardons and commutations to individuals whose cases had the support of Trump-loving network personalities and to clients of prominent pro-Trump lawyers who regularly appeared on its shows. Individuals seeking clemency and their family members and lawyers used the president’s favorite programs to request clemency from him directly. Hegseth in particular played a key role in lobbying for clemency for alleged and convicted war criminals.

Law enforcement investigations. Trump repeatedly demanded — and received — law enforcement action against his perceived foes in response to coverage he saw about them on Fox, including John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Google, and the Russia probe.

Who knows what the second term will bring.

This post is adapted in part from my op-ed at MSNBC.com.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Fox News Has Become Trump Transition's Staffing Agency

Incoming president Donald Trump’s unprecedented relationship with Fox News is once again creating a revolving door between the right-wing propaganda network and his administration. Trump has named three current or former Fox employees to high-ranking positions in the week since he was elected president — and more seem sure to follow.

Trump, an obsessive Fox viewer whose worldview is shaped by the network’s programming, stocked his first-term White House and federal agencies with familiar faces from the network. At least 20 people with Fox on their resumes joined his administration over the course of his tenure, including Cabinet secretaries, top White House aides, and ambassadors.

Trump also consulted privately with an array of Fox stars, creating a shadow Cabinet of advisers with immense influence over government affairs whose key credential was their ability to attract attention via right-wing bombthrowing. And he frequently made important decisions based on what people were telling him on his favorite network — at times with disastrous results.

As Trump ramps up his second term, he is once again plucking top administration officials from the network’s stable.

The list below will be updated as additional former Fox employees join or leave the Trump administration.

Tulsi Gabbard, Director of National Intelligence
Gabbard is a former Democratic member of Congress who ran a quixotic campaign for the party’s presidential nomination in 2020. Fox hired her as a contributor in 2022 amid a political transformation that saw her become a favorite of Tucker Carlson and the MAGA movement, adopt increasingly hard-right rhetoric, and ultimately endorse Trump’s presidential run. Trump announced on November 13, 2024, that he plans to nominate Gabbard as director of national intelligence, a position that oversees the 18 U.S. intelligence agencies.
Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Defense
After serving in the Army National Guard and as executive director of a right-wing veteran’s organization, Hegseth joined Fox as a contributor in 2014 and subsequently became a co-host of Fox & Friends’ weekend edition. In that role he caught Trump's eye, with the then-president reportedly considering him for secretary of veterans affairs and taking the Fox host’s advice in granting executive clemency to several service members accused or convicted of war crimes. On November 12, 2024, Trump announced that he plans to nominate Hegseth for defense secretary, which would give the cable news figure oversight of a sprawling bureaucracy staffed by nearly 3 million military and civilian employees that spends hundreds of billions of dollars each year.
Tom Homan, “border czar"
Homan joined Fox as a contributor in August 2018, two months after his retirement as acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (where he reportedly served as the “intellectual ‘father’” of Trump’s family separation policy). As a Fox employee, he staunchly supported Trump’s immigration policies and statements and called for draconian responses to the purported migrant “invasion.” Trump announced on November 10, 2024, that he is naming Homan “Border Czar” and giving him responsibility for the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants.
Mike Huckabee, Ambassador to Israel
Huckabee, a former governor of Arkansas, hosted a weekly Fox program for more than six years before stepping down in 2015 to explore a presidential run. He subsequently rebooted his show for the Christian cable network Trinity Broadcasting Network and has remained a frequent Fox commentator who the network sporadically identifies as a contributor. Trump announced on November 12, 2024, that he plans to nominate Huckabee as U.S. ambassador to Israel.

Michael Waltz, National Security Adviser
An Army veteran and Republican member of Congress from Florida who served as an adviser in the Pentagon and White House, Waltz became a paid Fox contributor in 2017, the year before he was first elected to the U.S. House. He still touts that credential on his campaign website. Waltz made at least 569 Fox appearances between August 2017 and Election Day 2024. His 176 appearances from January 2023 to that date were more than any other member of Congress over that period. On November 12, 2024, Trump named Waltz as his national security adviser.
Frequent Fox guests
Several other people Trump plans to nominate for high-ranking positions in his administration have spent the last several years regularly appearing on the president-elect’s favored network.

According to the Media Matters database, from August 2017 through Election Day 2024:

Stephen Miller, Trump’s pick for deputy White House chief of staff for policy, made at least 374 weekday Fox appearances, including 174 since January 2023.
Former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), Trump’s pick for attorney general, made at least 347 weekday Fox appearances, including 26 since January 2023.
Former Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-NY), Trump’s pick for administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, made at least 307 weekday Fox appearances, including 92 since January 2023.
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), Trump’s pick for secretary of state, made at least 263 weekday Fox appearances, including 70 since January 2023.
Former Trump Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, Trump’s pick for CIA director, made at least 180 weekday Fox appearances, including 71 since January 2023.
South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, Trump’s reported pick for secretary of homeland security, made at least 135 weekday Fox appearances, including 46 since January 2023.
Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), Trump’s pick for ambassador to the United Nations, made at least 108 weekday Fox appearances, including 32 since January 2023.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

MAGA Propaganda Machine Revived Trump -- And It's Still Poisoning America

Donald Trump was reelected president on Tuesday, four years after fomenting a coup which saw a mob of his supporters storm the U.S. Capitol and then leaving the White House in disgrace. He owes his return at least in part to a rankly dishonest right-wing information ecosystem that helped carry him through countless scandals that would have ended the careers of most politicians, driving his comeback to the pinnacle of power.

Conservative audiences are dependent on a right-wing media complex that bombards them with falsehoods and grievances while dissuading them from consulting any alternative sources of information, be they legacy news outlets or government officials or medical experts.

Once Trump captured the GOP and ascended to the presidency in 2017, that bubble served him and his interests. Within it, for example, his supporters were convinced by a sprawling conspiracy theory portraying the then-president as the victim of a shadowy “deep state” cabal that justified vast retribution.

The January 6 insurrection presented Trump’s propagandists with a crossroads. Rupert Murdoch, whose media empire includes right-wing bastions like Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, and New York Post, privately sought for him to become a “non person.” But Tucker Carlson and his allies at Fox and elsewhere instead went to work creating a counternarrative in which Trump was blameless. People who knew better either played along or actively participated in the whitewashing of that day.

Trump’s various indictments for a host of crimes provided additional hinge points. Right-wing media figures who could have used evidence of his abject criminality as a rationale for cutting him loose instead rallied to him and sought to delegitimize those seeking to bring him to justice.

The right-wing media bubble’s eagerness to excuse Trump’s actions gave him a dominant position in the Republican primary. As he romped to the nomination, his opponents complained that they were unable to gain traction because the party’s propaganda wing had united behind him.

Trump again became the nominee of one of the two major parties. He selected Ohio Sen. JD Vance, a Carlson favorite, as his running mate, and demonstrated the importance of the right-wing echo chamber by giving Carlson himself a prime-time speaking slot at the Republican National Convention.

With the general election set between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, right-wing propagandists went to work holding the GOP base together with a combination of grievance-mongering and silence.

They flooded the zone with a bogus narrative of “migrant crime” while ignoring evidence that violent crime was actually plummeting from its Trump-era high.

They instructed their audiences to treat immigrants as a scapegoat, falsely claiming that federal disaster aid desperately needed to respond to hurricanes had been siphoned off to benefit migrants and ginning up grotesque lies about Haitian immigrants eating pets.

They lashed out at the press, urging the Republican base to treat Trump’s poor showing in his debate against Harris as the result of media bias.

When an unprecedented string of former Republican officials and Trump’s own former administration aides came forward with dire warnings of what Trump did in his first term and could do in a second one, they hid the news from their audiences.

And they kept quiet on a host of unpopular aspects of Trump’s policy agenda, from Social Security to reproductive rights, while beating back burgeoning scandals over his alleged January 6 crimes, communications with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and a political event at Arlington National Cemetery.

Journalists and political strategists will spend the next weeks and months grappling for explanations as to how Trump returned to the White House. But without the support of the right-wing propaganda machine, he would not have been in position to sweep his party’s nomination in the first place — and in an evenly divided country amid a global anti-incumbent wave, that provided a strong position to win the presidency.

Now, the same propagandists who helped him back to power are poised to help him carry out his extreme agenda of destruction and retribution.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Fox Promotes RFK Jr -- Whose Lunacy Could Exact A Terrible Cost

Fox News irresponsibly championed notorious anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s potential role overseeing federal health policy in a second Trump administration. In the final days of the presidential campaign, the dire impact he could have on the American public has now come fully into view.

Fox hosts have spent the last 18 months building up in the minds of their audience members a wackadoo conspiracy theorist who has blamed self-described “cognitive problems” on having a literal worm in his brain as part of a play to return Donald Trump to the White House. The network promoted Kennedy as a potential spoiler in the Democratic presidential primary, then lavished him with praise when he ended his independent candidacy and endorsed Trump.

The network’s hosts even touted Kennedy’s health views as, in Fox & Friends co-host Ainsley Earhardt’s words, “music to every mom’s ears,” while hiding from viewers his disturbing record of spreading unfounded claims falsely linking childhood vaccinations and autism and his attacks on the COVID-19 vaccine as “the deadliest vaccine ever made.” Kennedy’s advocacy reportedly helped drive down vaccination rates in American Samoa, triggering “one of the worst measles outbreaks in recent memory.”

Trump and Kennedy have both said in recent days that Kennedy will play a major part in a potential second Trump administration. Trump has said that Kennedy will be permitted to “go wild on health” and “go wild on the medicines,” while Kennedy has alleged the former president “has promised” him oversight of the Department of Health and Human Services and agencies under its purview, which include the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration.

Kennedy’s public statements — and those of other Republican leaders about his potential role — suggest that the consequences could prove disastrous.

Kennedy’s “rising influence was reflected” in an appearance by Trump transition co-chair Howard Lutnick, who said on CNN he had come to doubt the safety of vaccines following a conversation with Kennedy and that he approved of Kennedy getting access to federal data about vaccines and making recommendations. Jerome M. Adams, who served as U.S. surgeon general under Trump, said in response, “It’s hard to implement your other political priorities if you’re busy dealing with a measles or polio outbreak.”
Kennedy said on social media: “On January 20, the Trump White House will advise all U.S. water systems to remove fluoride from public water.” Water fluoridation, which federal officials endorsed more than 70 years ago, strengthens teeth and reduces cavities, according to the CDC. A federal agency said earlier this year that there is “moderate confidence” in a link between fluoride levels double the recommended limit in drinking water and lower IQ in children.
Trump told a reporter on Tuesday that advising water systems to remove fluoride “sounds okay to me” and that he is open to banning vaccines.
Kennedy has reportedly recommended Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo to the Trump transition team as a potential candidate for HHS secretary. Lapado has fought with federal regulators over the safety of the COVID-19 vaccine and earned notoriety for spreading health misinformation and for his fringe associations.
Charlene Bollinger, a longtime Kennedy friend who recently said she is working with him to advise the Trump transition team, is a fringe commentator who describes cancer as “just an imbalance” and whose social media account endorsed threads praising Adolf Hitler and pushing claims about a “Jew World Order.”
Kennedy recently appeared in a pro-Trump ad for a group that works to oppose in vitro fertilization, which it has labeled “evil” and “immoral.”

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

How Trump Would Crush A Free Press If He Wins The Presidency

If Donald Trump returns to the White House, the fate of the U.S. press may rest on whether corporate executives who control mammoth multimedia conglomerates are willing to prioritize the journalistic credibility of the news outlets they oversee over their own business interests.

Trump will put wealthy media magnates to the test, forcing them to decide whether they are willing to suffer painful consequences for keeping their outlets free of influence, or whether they will either compel their journalists to knuckle under or sell their outlets to someone who will.

Trump spent his presidency demanding that his administration target his perceived political enemies with federal pressure — from regulatory action to criminal investigations — and says he would be even less restrained in enacting “retribution” in a second term.

In recent months, prominent commentators have warned that the press could become such a target of Trump, whose own former top aides describe him as a fascist. New York Times Publisher A.G. Sulzberger, in an extraordinary warning in the pages of The Washington Post, wrote last month that Trump takes as his model Hungary’s autocrat Victor Orban, who has “effectively dismantled the news media in his country” as “a central pillar of Orban’s broader project to remake his country as an ‘illiberal democracy.’”

These fears that Trump would use a second term to crack down on the press are rational. The former president demands sycophantic coverage and describes those who do not provide it as the “enemy of the people.” Trump’s rhetoric and record show that he is keenly aware of the vulnerabilities some news outlets have and is eager to exploit them if he returns to the White House.

Corporate media owners are vulnerable to Trump’s pressure — and some are already bending

Trump’s presidency revealed the dark playbook he and his allies use against perceived enemies such as individual journalists. Its potential tactics include publicly denouncing reporters, stripping them of access, inciting supporters to target them with violence, threatening them with investigation, and sending federal agencies like the Justice Department after them. These heinous maneuvers could and likely would be used against journalists in a second Trump term.

But perhaps the greater threat to the free press as an institution comes from Trump’s ability to target for retaliation the corporate barons who control the newspapers, broadcast and cable networks, and other outlets that employ those journalists.

While some publications like the Times are functionally standalone journalism businesses, many others are either small divisions within massive multimedia companies whose executives are ultimately responsible to stockholders or privately held entities that represent a tiny fraction of their owner’s assets.

CNN is part of Warner Bros. Discovery, a publicly traded company that also owns film and TV studios, streaming services, and a host of other businesses.

Comcast provides cable and internet services to consumers and owns and operates broadcast and cable TV channels and a movie studio, in addition to overseeing NBC News and MSNBC.

CBS News is owned by Paramount Global. ABC News is part of the Walt Disney Co.

Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post (where my wife works as letters and community editor) but his billions come from founding Amazon, which is the nation’s second-largest private employer with subsidiaries in industries from online retail to web services, artificial intelligence to groceries. Patrick Soon-Shiong used a fraction of the wealth he earned in biotech to purchase the Los Angeles Times.

Trump understands that those broader corporate structures create a host of potential vulnerabilities an authoritarian president with no interest in preserving the rule of law could utilize against the owners of news outlets that displease him. Individuals and corporations that own major news outlets have other business interests that may rely on government contracts or federal patents or regulators who oversee their mergers and acquisitions and other practices.

The former president knows that even if journalists want to stand up to him, he can force their outlets to change course by threatening corporate executives and owners who have different priorities.

Trump does not just lash out at the Post — he targets the “Amazon Washington Post.” When he goes after NBC and MSNBC, he calls out Comcast’s CEO by name. He shares attacks on Disney’s Bob Iger as part of his war on ABC News. He is telegraphing the future trouble he may bring down on the corporate owners if they do not bring their news outlets to heel — and forcing those owners to determine how much pain they are willing to endure over a division that likely provides a small fraction of the overall corporation's revenues.

Some media owners seem to be responding to Trump’s authoritarian message in advance of Election Day. Bezos and Soon-Shiong both reportedly overruled the editorial boards of the papers they own and spiked planned editorials endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign in the final weeks of the race, while NBC will not air a documentary about the impact Trump’s administration had on migrant families until December. While all three have offered other explanations for their moves, observers have noted that their other business interests give each extensive exposure to a Trump presidency.

Corporate executives also know that there are rewards for knuckling under and following the paths of avowed pro-Trump figures like Rupert Murdoch, whose multimedia empire includes right-wing fixtures Fox News and the New York Post, and David Smith, whose Sinclair Broadcasting Group is a telecommunications giant that owns and programs scores of TV stations. Both received favorable regulatory treatment during Trump’s presidency.

Case study: How Trump could target CBS News in a second term

Others will come under increasing pressure if Trump returns to the White House. For example, the former president has decried the network’s editing of a 60 Minutes interview with Vice President Kamala Harris as “the biggest scandal in broadcast history” and said that CBS should be stripped of its broadcast license.

While Trump apparently lacks a clear understanding of how the government regulates news networks like CBS, he is making clear that he expects federal retribution against the network — and Paramount Global, its parent company, is acutely vulnerable to such retaliation.

Paramount Global, after a monthslong search for a buyer, agreed in July to a proposed merger with Skydance Media, the production company founded by filmmaker David Ellison. The deal will need to go through Justice Department antitrust regulators who, under a normal administration, are supposed to scrutinize its impact on media consolidation.

But Trump eschews the traditional independence of the Justice Department, seeing it instead as an extension of the president’s personal will. If he returns to the White House, it will be impossible to separate the DOJ’s handling of the Paramount-Skydance merger from his personal grudge with CBS News. And the executives of those companies will be pressed to respond.

What happens if Trump gets elected and the Justice Department derails the merger? If Trump’s associates tell Paramount executives that it might get back on track if CBS News provided more positive coverage of Trump’s administration, how would they respond?

Journalists at CBS News might resist that kind of pressure. But what would happen if Skydance’s Ellison suddenly got a call from Lachlan Murdoch suggesting that CBS News was holding up the deal and offering to buy it? If that hypothetical sounds far-fetched, consider that it is reportedly quite similar to reports about the Trump-era merger featuring the parent company of CNN.

Ellison doesn’t have roots in journalism; he’s a film producer and the son of the billionaire Oracle founder Larry Ellison. Does he — and other corporate owners like him — care more about the preservation of the free press than completing a megamerger?

We may find out.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters .

With Irrational Bluster About Victory, Right-Wing Media Prepare Trump's Steal

Right-wing media figures are displaying irrational levels of confidence in Donald Trump’s chances of winning the presidential election. While poll aggregators and models suggest the race is a toss-up, MAGA pundits are deluging their supporters with the message that Trump’s victory is inevitable.

Whether or not this is a deliberate strategy, the result is that right-wing audiences — which generally trust information only when it comes from right-wing sources — are not being prepared for the possibility of Trump’s defeat. That makes it more likely that they will disbelieve such an outcome and rally to a Trumpian effort to overturn it.

When the right-wing media ecosystem similarly presented Trump as an overwhelming favorite in the waning days of his 2020 campaign against Biden, I warned that they were laying the groundwork for a potential violent coup attempt by the then-president:

Fox’s effort is a necessary -- if not sufficient -- step toward enacting Trump’s openly touted plan to try to steal the election (if it is close enough to do so) by preventing the counting of ballots legally cast for Biden. And even if the network fails to keep Trump in the White House, its reckless disinformation could raise tensions to feverish heights, potentially leading to political violence.

Indeed, Trump declared victory on election night and, backed by the right-wing propaganda machine, used pretextual claims of voter fraud to try to overturn Biden’s victory, culminating with the storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Four years later, the same scenario is playing out again.

Right-wing media aren't acknowledging the possibility of defeat

Polls currently show a tight race for president that could go either way. “In an election where the seven battleground states are all polling within a percentage point or two, 50-50 is the only responsible forecast,” Nate Silver wrote in an October 23 op-ed. “Since the debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, that is more or less exactly where my model has had it.”

But it often seems that the U.S. commentariat has sorted itself such that the nation’s most hubristic optimists are all supporting the GOP while its most anxious pessimists are loyal Democrats. The result is that right-wing pundits spend every election cycle predicting victory, while left-wing pundits worry over the prospect of defeat. This election is no different.

In the run-up to the 2012 presidential election, right-wing media figures embraced poll trutherism and told their audiences that former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney was going to defeat then-President Barack Obama in a “landslide.” The right was so primed for victory that Fox political analyst Karl Rove, who had predicted a sizable Romney win, ended up arguing with his own network’s decision desk over the state of the race as results rolled in on election night showing Obama had been reelected.

Trump epitomizes the right’s irrational confidence — but with the added twist that only fraud could explain any Republican defeat.

“We should have a revolution in this country!" he tweeted on election night 2012, calling the results “a total sham and a travesty.”

After eking out a narrow electoral vote victory in 2016, he falsely claimed that he had lost the popular vote only due to “millions of people who voted illegally.” And he asserts to this day that he won the 2020 election but it was robbed from him by fraud, a lie that has permeated his party.

The 2022 midterms brought more predictions of an impending “red wave” of Republican victories. Tucker Carlson, for example, told Fox viewers in the leadup to Election Day that only fraud could explain Democratic victories in races like the Pennsylvania campaign for U.S. Senate and the Arizona gubernatorial race.

Following the GOP’s lackluster showing that year, Carlson seemed chastened.

“Republicans swore they were going to sweep a red tsunami,” he said. “That's what they told us and we, to be honest, cautiously believed them, but they did not sweep, not even close to sweeping,” he complained. “How could there not be a massive Republican win nationally, wins everywhere? Well, there weren’t. … Joe Biden was not punished.”

But either Carlson didn’t actually learn anything from that experience, or he’s decided that projecting overweening confidence is strategically apt. The close Trump adviser and popular right-wing podcaster is again suggesting that the former president’s supporters shouldn’t accept the results if Trump loses.

“I think Donald Trump’s going to win, which is amazing,” he said at a pro-Trump rally in Georgia on Wednesday. “Donald Trump's victory will be a triumph of the human spirit. It will be a triumph of Americans over the machine that seeks to oppress them. It will be a middle finger wagging in the face of the worst people in the English-speaking world."

Carlson analogized a Trump victory to a scenario in which “Dad comes home” and tells a “hormone-addled” teenage daughter (standing in for American liberals), “You’ve been a bad girl. You’ve been a bad little girl and you’re getting a vigorous spanking, right now. … It’s going to hurt you a lot more than it hurts me.”

Later in the speech, he returned to the theme of Trump’s inevitable victory.

“I think Donald Trump’s going to win,” he said. "I think the vibe is so strong right now, I don’t think they can get away with pretending something else happened. I don’t think we can have another 2020 at this point. I just don’t.”

Carlson went on to suggest that “no matter what they pull,” “I don’t think they can get away with” saying that Vice President Kamala Harris won the election.

“I don’t think people are going to sit back and take it,” he added. “They need to lose, and at the end of all of that when they tell you they’ve won, no. You can look them straight in the face and say, ‘I’m sorry — dad’s home,’” he concluded.

Carlson isn’t alone in dismissing the possibility that Trump could still lose the election. Such sentiments are currently everywhere within the right-wing ecosystem.

Trump himself is reportedly “uncharacteristically buoyant, almost cavalier, convinced that victory is his,” and, bolstered by waves of favorable polls from GOP-linked firms, that belief is trickling down.

Loyal Trumpers are telling Fox’s audience that Trump’s victory is inevitable.

Host Jesse Watters has been predicting for months that Trump “is going to win” in a “landslide” and that evidence suggesting otherwise comes from “fake polls — Trump’s going to kill her.” His colleague Greg Gutfeld says, “The race is over, but the integrity of the election is still in question,” and “Donald Trump’s got this.” Contributor Joe Concha is also predicting a Trump “landslide,” telling viewers: “He wins this quite easily. Save the tape. Play it back if I'm wrong. This is how it's going to end.”

Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk likewise says his viewers should “expect desperation out of the Democrats right now” because Trump’s “early voting numbers are great, as his odds in the betting markets are ascendant.”

MAGA influencers are dubiously claiming that Harris’ messaging suggests her internal polling must be “very alarming” — or even making up sources that they claim have access to those dire figures.

Even right-wingers who are occasionally skeptical of the former president are saying he has the election in the bag.

“I really did think for a good portion of the year that I’d be spending the last month of this election slowly building my audience of readers and listeners to a place where they could accept Trump's loss without immediately descending into stolen election conspiracy theories,” Erick Erickson wrote on Wednesday. “Instead, I find myself having to rein myself in from explicitly saying he has won thirteen days before the election. This is rather wild.”

As Erickson’s missive makes clear, there are few if any voices on the right preparing their audience for the possibility of Trump’s defeat.

All this has happened before

By way of preparing my own audience: It is possible none of this will ultimately matter. With numerous swing states polling within the margin of error, and the chance of a systemic poll error in play, Trump could very well win legitimately in November.

But if the election returns show that Harris has triumphed, Trump has a backup plan ready to go: He can attempt to subvert the election, as he did in 2020.

While elements of that plan could be different, the broad strokes of declaring victory, presenting himself as the victim of election fraud, filing pretextual lawsuits, and ultimately leaning on Republican officials at the local, state, and federal levels to hand him the presidency remain unchanged.

This strategy rests on Trump being able to convince the Republican base that he won the election. In 2020, he had the support of a vast right-wing media ecosystem that, with few exceptions, had already prepped its audience to disbelieve the results of the election if Trump won. The result was a violent assault on the U.S. Capitol that threatened American democracy.

Since then, the right has purged media figures and Republican politicians who had stood in the way of the plot. And now, in 2024, the same players are again laying the groundwork for a Trumpian subversion effort.

In a few weeks, the country could once more be positioned on the edge of the abyss.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters

Right-Wing Media Once Lionized John Kelly For Restraining Trump

Prominent members of the right-wing media elite touted John Kelly’s ability as White House chief of staff to impose discipline on then-President Donald Trump and prevent the nation from falling into chaos.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board and commentators like National Review editor-in-chief Rich Lowry and Fox News contributor Newt Gingrich praised the retired four-star general as an “indispensable” and “unflinching” figure who “deserves the nation’s gratitude” for stopping Trump from exercising his worst impulses.

Now, Kelly is publicly describing the former president as a fascist bent on ruling the United States as a dictator if he returns to power — while Trump is making clear that he will not allow himself to be surrounded by similar figures who could act as guardrails in a second term — and the same figures are still backing his candidacy.

Elite right-wing commentators lauded Kelly for keeping Trump under control

For a segment of the right-wing press that likes Trump’s support for cutting taxes, banning abortion, dismantling the social safety net, and other traditional GOP positions — but dislikes the chaos he brings with them — Kelly’s July 2017 appointment as chief of staff was a godsend.

The conservative editorial board of Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journalwrote at the time that Trump, not Kelly’s predecessor Reince Priebus, had been “the problem” at the White House and expressed faint hope that Kelly might be able to “impose some order on the staff” — if Trump listened to him.

Their hopes were apparently vindicated; when Trump announced in December 2018 that Kelly would be stepping down, the board showered him with praise in an editorial titled “Thank You, John Kelly.”

“There are many unpleasant jobs in the world, but somebody has to do them,” the piece began. “One is being Donald Trump’s chief of staff, and so as he prepares to be liberated from White House bondage this month, John Kelly deserves the nation’s gratitude.”

“He tried to establish order in the President’s schedule and meetings, to the extent that is possible, as well as a regular process for policy deliberations,” it continued. “Mr. Kelly did that well enough, and long enough, that the White House could negotiate tax reform.”

The board went on to bemoan the potential candidates to replace Kelly, noting, “Mr. Trump’s chaotic style is so outside management norms that we hesitate to suggest any names.”

Lowry was even more fulsome in his praise in a February 2018 piece for National Review headlined “John Kelly Shouldn’t Go Anywhere; In short, it is Kelly or bust.”

Lowry wrote that Kelly “is as close as it gets to an indispensable man in the Trump White House,” touting his ability to “intimidate the White House staff into a semblance of order.”

“Kelly has indeed been a restraining influence on Trump, even if that is difficult to believe,” he added. “Just imagine a White House with all those who have now mostly been locked out — Corey Lewandowski and Co.— back on the inside to do their utmost to create the chaos and self-valorizing leaking sufficient for Fire and Fury: The Sequel.”

(Lewandowski, who Trump fired from his 2016 campaign, officially joined the 2024 effort in September, though the notoriously dishonest and violent political operative seems to have subsequently lost influence within its ranks.)

And Gingrich, discussing potential Kelly replacements on Fox in December 2018, similarly stressed Kelly’s ability to keep Trump under control and tell him when his desires could not be met.

“He needs somebody strong enough to say no,” Gingrich said of the then-president. “This is a very strong-willed personality. He will run over a weaker person and they will rapidly lose control of the building.”

“Gen. Kelly was terrific because he is a four-star Marine and they are pretty tough, they are pretty unflinching,” Gingrich continued. “No chief of staff is going to dominate President Trump, but he needs a chief of staff strong enough to look him in the eye and say, ‘That's not a very good idea.’ And I hope he will pick somebody who is that strong.”

Kelly served at the highest levels of Trump's administration and says he is a fascist

The Journal editorial board, Lowry, and Gingrich were correct to worry about the prospect of an unhinged Trump unrestrained by a competent chief of staff. Mark Meadows, a former congressman who served in that role, oversaw the final chaotic months of Trump’s administration, during which Trump led a shambling response to the COVID-19 pandemic, threatened to use military force against protesters, and ultimately sought to subvert the results of the 2020 election and triggered the storming of the U.S. Capitol.

Now Kelly, who served Trump as chief of staff for a year and a half, is speaking out about what he saw in the White House and the urgent danger he says the former president poses to the country. In interviews with The New York Times, he said of Trump and his plans for a second term:

“Certainly the former president is in the far-right area, he’s certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators — he has said that. So he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure.”
“He certainly prefers the dictator approach to government.”
He “never accepted the fact that he wasn’t the most powerful man in the world — and by power, I mean an ability to do anything he wanted, anytime he wanted.”
“I think this issue of using the military on — to go after — American citizens is one of those things I think is a very, very bad thing — even to say it for political purposes to get elected — I think it’s a very, very bad thing, let alone actually doing it.”
“He’s certainly the only president that has all but rejected what America is all about, and what makes America America, in terms of our Constitution, in terms of our values, the way we look at everything, to include family and government — he’s certainly the only president that I know of, certainly in my lifetime, that was like that.”

Kelly is one of several high-ranking national security appointees in Trump’s administration who are warning the country that the former president is a fascist. Mark Milley, who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Trump, has described him as “fascist to the core” and “the most dangerous person ever,” remarks reportedly echoed by Jim Mattis, Trump’s former secretary of defense.

And on Wednesday, former Defense Secretary Mark Esper said on CNN that “it's hard to say that” Trump “doesn't” fit the definition of fascist, adding, “He certainly has those inclinations, and I think it's something we should be wary about.”

Trump would not be similarly restrained in a second term. They’re still on board.

Trump stresses on the campaign trail that the major difference between his presidency and a second term would be that he has learned to surround himself with loyalists who will not try to restrain him. His former aides spun up Project 2025, which aims to provide the former president with a vetted list of zealots to staff his administration and White House.

But none of this is giving pause to the people who praised Kelly’s ability to keep Trump in check.

The Journal’s editorial board is pooh-poohing the idea that Trump might be a fascist, claiming that “the evidence of Mr. Trump’s first term” purportedly shows that “whatever his intentions, the former President was hemmed in by American checks and balances” — but Trump is explicitly preparing to free himself from such checks in a second term.

Lowry is writing in The New York Times about how Trump could actually win the election “on character.”

And Gingrich is predicting that Trump would be “dramatically more managerial and practical” in a second term.

Meanwhile, the man they touted for keeping Trump under control is publicly warning that Trump could destroy the American system.

The defining feature of right-wing media during the Trump era has been that you either back the former president despite your better instincts and morality, or you get excommunicated from the movement. That incentive structure — and the right-wing commentariat’s craven responses to it — explains the resulting media ecosystem rallying behind a lying felonious racist and conman who launched an insurrection and whose own former top aides describe as a fascist.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Nonpartisan Study Shows Trump Would Bankrupt Social Security By 2031

Fox News host and Donald Trump adviser Sean Hannity claims that Vice President Kamala Harris is lying when she says Trump’s proposals would threaten the solvency of Social Security. But according to a new study, Trump’s tax plans would drain the Social Security Trust Fund in just six years, triggering devastating cuts to the payments seniors depend on if no further changes are made.

Trump’s “campaign proposals would dramatically worsen Social Security’s finances,” according to the analysis of the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB):

President Trump’s proposals to eliminate taxation of Social Security benefits, end taxes on tips and overtime, impose tariffs, and expand deportations would all widen Social Security’s cash deficits. Under our central estimate, we find that President Trump’s agenda would:

Increase Social Security’s ten-year cash shortfall by $2.3 trillion through FY 2035.
Advance insolvency by three years, from FY 2034 to FY 2031 – hastening the next President’s insolvency timeline by one-third.
Lead to a 33 percent across-the-board benefit cut in 2035, up from the 23 percent CBO projects under current law.
Increase Social Security’s annual shortfall by roughly 50 percent in FY 2035, from 3.6 to 4 percent of payroll.
Require the equivalent of reducing current law benefits by about one-third or increasing revenue by about one-half to restore 75-year solvency.

— (@)

Trump adviser and Project 2025 contributor Stephen Moore has argued such changes are good policy because “we want people to keep working. We want to keep incentivizing people once they turn 65, or 66, or 70.”

Democrats, meanwhile, typically favor extending the solvency of Social Security by increasing taxes on wealthy Americans rather than cutting benefits for vulnerable seniors.

Fox News and its right-wing counterparts rarely discuss Social Security because they want Republicans to win elections and they recognize that the right’s proposals are generally politically toxic. When Trump suggested in a March interview that he would consider cutting Social Security benefits — a mainstay of right-wing punditry -- Fox ignored the remarks.

But when Trump’s propagandists talk about one of the most successful federal programs in history, which sustains tens of millions of American seniors, they stress that he and his party are committed to defending it, claiming suggestions otherwise are lies.

“At multiple rallies today in North Carolina, Harris also continued her long-running lie that Donald Trump wants to cut your Social Security,” Hannity complained last month. “But the official Republican Party platform and Donald Trump in his own words over and over again say just the opposite. As you can see on your screen, a complete and total lie from Kamala Harris.”

Hannity may be willing to take Trump at his word, but CRFB’s analysis shows Harris is correct that the former president’s plans would devastate Social Security.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Trump And Harris Events Again Prove Fox Network Has No 'News Side'

Fox News’ Wednesday programming encapsulated the transformation of the network’s once-vaunted “news side” into an extension of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

In the morning, Fox aired what it had touted as a town hall with Trump featuring an audience of women voters. In reality, the event was functionally a pep rally for the former president, who was guided by Fox anchor Harris Faulkner through questions from a crowd Fox stocked with his supporters.

Vice President Kamala Harris received a starkly different reception that night when she sat down with Fox anchor Bret Baier, at one point catching him using a deceptive clip to downplay Trump’s rants about “the enemy from within.”

Fox’s “news side” has been in steep decline since Trump took over the Republican Party and the network rebranded as his personal propaganda outlet. But even by those standards, the partisan divide it displayed on Wednesday was striking and would be catastrophically embarrassing to Fox’s employees if any of them were still capable of humiliation.

For Trump, a Fox-branded campaign event

Fox announced last week that it was planning a town hall with Trump that would be taped in Georgia and moderated by Faulkner. The network’s press release stressed that the event would feature an “audience entirely composed of women” and highlighted Faulkner’s journalistic credentials. Politico’s takeaway was that by taking questions from members of “a demographic that has been largely repulsed by his temperament and abortion-rights views,” the former president would be “venturing into more challenging territory.”

In reality, Fox had stocked the audience with Trump’s supporters by inviting local Republican groups, as The Independent’s Eric Garcia reported.

This quickly became apparent when the edited broadcast began airing on the Wednesday edition of Faulkner’s show and Trump entered to a standing ovation from the crowd. The first questioner, who identified herself as “Lisa,” is the president of a local Republican women’s group.

— (@)

Over the course of the broadcast, Trump fielded softball questions from people who were clearly voting for him; at least one was wearing branded Trump paraphernalia. He got help along the way from Faulkner, a committed shill for his campaign who has criticized journalists at other outlets for asking tough questions of the former president and avoided pushing back as he spread numerous falsehoods.

Notably, Fox deliberately deceived the public about the audience it hosted for Trump. While Faulkner described the crowd as coming from “every walk of life,” CNN subsequently reported that the network not only stocked the town hall with Trump’s supporters, the version it aired left out two key occurrences that exposed just how in-the-tank for Trump it had been.

A portion of one question “was edited by Fox News to remove her admission that she was voting for Trump,” CNN reported after comparing audio a reporter in the room recorded to the program Fox aired. “During another moment missing from Fox’s broadcast, Trump asked the crowd who they were voting for, leading to a chant of ‘Trump, Trump’ breaking out by the attendees.”

It’s easy to see why Trump might prefer such a supportive environment, even as his campaign reportedly canceled recent interviews with CBS, NBC, and CNBC.

But it is unfathomable that Fox figures would host such an event for Harris — and if they did, Trump would probably threaten that his administration would retaliate against the network.

For Harris, a deceptive clip soft-pedaling Trump’s authoritarian rants

While Baier has long enjoyed a largely unearned reputation as a credible newsman, he lives in palpable fear of his viewers abandoning his network. He spent the day leading up to his Harris interview telling agitated social media followers that he wasn’t going to give her the questions and the interview wouldn’t be edited to make her look good.

His subsequent performance was what you might expect from someone worried primarily about letting down Fox’s pro-Trump audience. Harris faced a barrage of hostile questions and frequent interruptions when she tried to answer them. Baier devoted the first third of the interview to Trump’s preferred topic of immigration. He spent more time trying to grill Harris on surgeries for incarcerated trans people — a focal point of recent Trump ads — than he did abortion, which did not come up at all.

These tactics made for a combative interview, one that probably would have helped Baier with his audience without hurting his reputation.

But at one point, Baier tried to downplay Trump’s recent fascistic comments about “the enemy from within.” He asked Harris to respond to a clip from Trump’s town hall on the subject — but left out the part where he cited “the Pelosis” as an example of who he was talking about, and added, “These people, they are so sick and they are so evil.” Harris caught him red-handed.

— (@)

Baier’s attempted clean-up was blatant enough to draw criticism not only from his competitors at MSNBC and CNN, and from media critics like Poynter’s Tom Jones, but even from former Fox colleagues.

It is unfathomable that Fox personalities would do such a thing in an interview with Trump — and if they did, Trump would probably threaten that his administration would retaliate against the network.

For Fox’s “news side,” a years-long slide

Fox’s “news side” always functioned as a cog in the right-wing media machine that laundered its talking points into the mainstream press, and its claim to independence was demolished during Trump's presidency. But at this point the network seems to have all but given up on even pretending to employ a credible news apparatus.

The last few years have seen newsroom stalwarts with decades at the network leave and call their former employer a propaganda outlet.

Fox’s decision desk was neutered after the 2020 election, with top executives overruling and then firing its leaders.

The network has shortened its “news” hours and replaced newsroom staffers with GOP partisans.

Reporters who tried to tell viewers the truth about Trump’s election fraud claims were first chastised by their bosses and then took jobs at other outlets.

What remains are people like Baier and Faulkner who are comfortable with Fox — the whole network, “news” and “opinion” side alike — operating as an extension of Trump’s will.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters .

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The National Memo is a political newsletter and website that combines the spirit of investigative journalism with new technology and ideas. We cover campaigns, elections, the White House, Congress, and the world with a fresh outlook. Our own journalism — as well as our selections of the smartest stories available every day — reflects a clear and strong perspective, without the kind of propaganda, ultra-partisanship and overwrought ideology that burden so much of our political discourse.
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As SoCal burns, the right finds false scapegoats

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When the right said January 6 was “deplorable” and its participants were “criminals”

The Great Forgetting and what comes next

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The last pandemic — and the next one

Communications

Personnel

Policy

Tulsi Gabbard, Director of National Intelligence

Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Defense

Tom Homan, “border czar"

Mike Huckabee, Ambassador to Israel

Michael Waltz, National Security Adviser

Frequent Fox guests

Corporate media owners are vulnerable to Trump’s pressure — and some are already bending

Case study: How Trump could target CBS News in a second term

Right-wing media aren't acknowledging the possibility of defeat

All this has happened before

Elite right-wing commentators lauded Kelly for keeping Trump under control

Kelly served at the highest levels of Trump's administration and says he is a fascist

Trump would not be similarly restrained in a second term. They’re still on board.

For Trump, a Fox-branded campaign event

For Harris, a deceptive clip soft-pedaling Trump’s authoritarian rants

For Fox’s “news side,” a years-long slide

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