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Pulte DNI Appointment Dismays Fox News Pundits, But Steve Bannon Is Excited

Pulte DNI Appointment Dismays Fox News Pundits, But Steve Bannon Is Excited

President Donald Trump typically muscles through his unqualified selections with the help of Fox News. But early signs suggest that the propaganda network isn’t on board with Trump’s bid to install Bill Pulte, the administration’s director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, as acting director of national intelligence.

Fox devoted only 8 minutes of airtime to Pulte’s appointment in the first 24 hours following the president’s Truth Social post heralding it, almost all of which occurred on its “news side” programs. The network’s influential evening hosts and Fox & Friends co-hosts did not weigh in on the story at all, a conspicuous signal that they aren’t currently willing to disgrace themselves by claiming that the scion of a real estate construction empire with no national security experience whatsoever should be overseeing the nation’s intelligence agencies.

Indeed, contributor Byron York — the epitome of the replacement-level conservative pundit — went so far as to criticize the pick on Tuesday evening’s Special Report. “The only thing you can say for it is it's an acting appointment,” York said. Noting Pulte’s lack of qualifications for the post, he added: “It seems like a pretty poor choice here. So, I'm not sure exactly what explains it.”

Trump’s announcement is also drawing fire from Senate Republicans, several of whom expressed skepticism on Tuesday about Pulte’s obvious lack of relevant experience.

But Pulte’s selection is not entirely without support on the right — and the character of that support hammers home the purpose of installing someone like Pulte in that post.

War Room host Steve Bannon praised the Pulte pick on his show as a “wake up call” in which Trump is “signaling you what he feels he needs to execute on his plan for his second term” which is “action, action, action.”

And his guest, right-wing influencer Jack Posobiec, claimed that Pulte could “start digging in on the domestic side of terrorism” by using his authority over the intelligence community to target leftist groups and to “start pulling records” on Trump foes like Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA), former Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA), New York State Attorney General Letitia James, and Georgia prosecutor Fani Wills.

As Bannon and Posobiec indicated, what Pulte lacks in national security qualifications he makes up for in willingness to creatively deploy his authority to go after the president’s enemies. Pulte’s raison d'être at FHFA has been sifting through the mortgage records of officials Trump dislikes, like Schiff, James, and Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook, and pushing for their prosecutions on trumped-up charges.

As director of national intelligence, Pulte would likely oversee the same right-wing media chum cycle as his predecessor, former Fox contributor Tulsi Gabbard. In that role, Gabbard ginned up what she termed a “treasonous conspiracy” against Trump, allegedly overseen by former President Barack Obama, that she referred to the Justice Department for prosecution. She also oversaw the FBI seizure of 2020 election ballots from Fulton County, Georgia, as part of the administration’s “effort to re-examine the election and look for potential crimes.”

Pulte’s efforts at FHFA to criminalize the president’s enemies initially drew support from Fox and the rest of MAGA media — though even its dumbest and most sycophantic pundits could tell that the allegations he pushed were pretextual.

But the FHFA chair fell out of favor with the network as the Cook case fizzled last September. A regular presence on Fox in 2025, Pulte has appeared only once on the network’s weekday programming since mid-October, according to a Media Matters database tracking guest appearances on Fox.

Pulte’s pursuit of legal charges against then-Federal Reserve Board Chair Jerome Powell, who received Justice Department subpoenas threatening a criminal indictment amid Trump’s demands that Powell lower interest rates, drew harsh criticism from right-wing commentators in January.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board, in pinning the blame for the Powell probe on Pulte, described him as “an especially eager toady” and urged Trump to fire him. But “an especially eager toady” is apparently the type of person Trump wants running the intelligence community, and so instead, he’s promoting him.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters

Trump's Fox News Cabinet Fractures Over How (Or Whether) To End War

Trump's Fox News Cabinet Fractures Over How (Or Whether) To End War

With U.S.-Iranian negotiations stuck in purgatory, the hawkish hosts and contributors whom President Donald Trump listens to at Fox News have been weighing in on a potential peace deal. While the group was united in urging Trump to launch the war, it is now fracturing over whether or how to bring the conflict to an end.

Prime-time Fox star and full-time Trump propagandist Sean Hannity is ready to brand any agreement the president makes as a victory. But contributors Jack Keane and Marc Thiessen and Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade are all calling for further military escalation if Iran won’t agree to Trump’s maximalist demands in exchange for minimal returns. And host Mark Levin has suggested that any negotiation that leaves Iran’s regime in place is a failure for the U.S.

Axios reported Thursday on purported progress toward an agreement to end the three-month-old war between the U.S. and its ally Israel against Iran, the latest reiteration of a familiar pattern. “U.S. and Iranian negotiators have reached an agreement on a 60-day memorandum of understanding to extend the ceasefire and launch negotiations on Iran's nuclear program, but President Trump has yet to give his final approval,” the outlet’s Barak Ravid reported.

Trump subsequently met with top aides on Friday for a two-hour meeting in the Situation Room but “did not reach a decision on any new deal.” Since then, the U.S. and Iran have reportedly traded new negotiating points and military strikes.

The president regularly shapes national policy based on what he sees on Fox, and he leaned on the network in deciding to go to war in the first place and over the subsequent months. But a social media post Trump issued just after 1 a.m. ET on Monday may suggest some frustration with the Fox Cabinet members whose counsel he typically seeks.

Trump, in that post, promised that Iran would agree to a “good” deal and said that unnamed “political hacks” should “just sit back and relax” rather than telling him to “move faster, or move slower, or go to war, or not go to war, or whatever.”

(Iran’s state media reported hours later that “Iranian negotiators will stop exchanging messages with the U.S. through intermediaries in retaliation for ongoing ceasefire violations” and its forces would again fully close the Strait of Hormuz.)

Hannity predicts “a major geopolitical win”

Hannity has torn up every media ethics rule in the book as he pursues his dual role of Fox host and Trump political operative. A longtime friend and confidant of the president, he has at times been so influential White House aides described him as the “the ‘shadow’ chief of staff.” Trump reportedly cited commentary from “Sean” in internal deliberations with U.S. officials in the lead-up to the war.

The Fox propagandist is cheering on any prospective deal as a significant Trump victory — and preparing his audience to do the same.

Hannity opened his Friday show by announcing “terrible news for Democrats who are limping into the midterms: President Trump is now poised for a major geopolitical win in Iran. News of a significant deal is already driving down dramatically the price of oil while sending the stock market to one record high after another after another.”

Later in the program, Hannity touted the president’s negotiating abilities and Iran’s purportedly weak position.

“They're in desperate need of cash and one of the things the president is saying is you don't get any of your own money or to sell anything until we get the dust, the strait is open, the mines are removed, and if it doesn't work, I'm just going to blow you to smithereens,” he said, adding, “I don't think the president I would hesitate a moment if he felt the deal was falling apart.”

Keane, Kilmeade, Thiessen: “We can go back to military operations” if Iran doesn’t bend

Trump has consulted Keane, a retired Army general and Fox senior strategic analyst who sits on the boards of multiple defense contractors, and Thiessen, a Washington Post columnist and Fox contributor, about the Iran war, according to an April Axios report. Kilmeade, meanwhile, is the senior co-host on Fox & Friends, the Fox morning show that shapes Trump’s worldview.

Keane frequently calls for further military escalation against Iran in his Fox appearances, and he stressed last week the need to return to full-scale military operations rather than accepting an agreement that fails to meet the maximalist

“No matter what deal we put together, at the end of it, they are going to want to recover everything that they're losing and go back to their original goal,” he said on Friday’s Fox & Friends. “So, in the deal … we have got to have the provisions in there to prevent as much of that as possible from happening.”

He further suggested that “we can go back to military operations” if Iran did not agree to relinquish “fees” and “the implication” it controls the Strait of Hormuz, as well as “all” its uranium stockpile “regardless of the percentage” of enrichment, while receiving no “money upfront” in sanctions relief.

Likewise, when Kilmeade interviewed Thiessen on Monday, the pair touted Trump’s demands while mocking the Iranian responses as unrealistic.

Thiessen emphasized that providing Iran with access to money should be a nonstarter, saying that “the big problem with even a good deal” in which “we get the nuclear dust, we end their nuclear program, and possibly even get the Arab states to join the Abraham Accords” is that “if we give them money, it gives a lifeline to the regime.”

Each pointed to escalations the U.S. could take in place of accepting a negotiated settlement, with Thiessen saying that “we can open the strait by force if we want to” while Kilmeade suggested “we could stop them getting resupplied through land.”

Mark Levin: Iran won’t honor any “paper agreement,” and its regime “must be destroyed”

Levin reportedly helped bring about the June 2025 U.S. strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities by convincing the president over a lunch at the White House that the country was just days away from getting a nuclear weapon. Trump has urged the public to watch Levin’s program for the host’s commentary on the U.S.-Iran war.

Levin typically lavishes Trump with praise for his decision to attack Iran — but as the network’s most hawkish figure on the war, he wants it to end with Iranian regime change, not a deal.

“Our government needs to understand that no paper agreement, no matter how good the terms seem, will in the end be honored by this enemy,” he explained on Sunday night’s Fox show, which aired hours before Trump posted on social media.

“The Iranian regime is at war with us, whether we like it or not,” Levin later added. “They are at war with us whether we are at war with it, whether we sign agreements with it as we have in the past, and there is nothing that’s going to change it. Nothing!”

“Let me repeat, nothing — except its destruction,” he continued. “That’s it. This is why, in my view, it must be destroyed, where I feel it will never be destroyed, least not with some great, massive military operation, the kind of which we do seek to avoid.”

Levin concluded his monologue by describing Trump as “a courageous man, he's a moral man, and he cares passionately and compassionately about us, his fellow Americans. What I know is that he loves our country, and he will do the very best he can to safeguard it. That I do know, and that allows us to sleep at night.”

MAGA Propaganda: Trump's Fox News 'Cabinet' Urges Him To Escalate Iran War

MAGA Propaganda: Trump's Fox News 'Cabinet' Urges Him To Escalate Iran War

As President Donald Trump prepares to meet with top aides to discuss next steps in the Iran war, his Fox News Cabinet is advising him to escalate.

Influential pundits on the MAGA propaganda channel are telling the president that he currently holds “the cards” and are urging him to use U.S. military might to seize Iran’s uranium stockpile, force open the Strait of Hormuz, assassinate the country’s leaders, and overturn its regime.

Fox has played a key role in getting the U.S. into the quagmire in Iran, with the network’s hosts (who often double as off-the-books presidential advisers) counseling him to launch the campaign in February. They continued to cheer him on over the following weeks, even as Iran’s regime remained intact and in control of its nuclear stockpile, its seizure of the Strait of Hormuz sent fuel prices soaring, public support for the war cratered, and analysts issued dire warnings of U.S. strategic defeat.

With Trump’s ceasefire with Iran failing to produce a more permanent agreement to end the conflict, the president has returned to saber-rattling and reportedly plans to meet with “his top national security team in the Situation Room on Tuesday to discuss military options.” And Fox, which often plays an influential role in shaping Trump’s worldview through its coverage, is already banging the drums for a return to war, telling its viewers — which on any given day can include the president — that the war is a success and that Trump is in control of the situation and can easily escalate without risk.

Brian Kilmeade, one of the network’s most prominent hawks and a co-host of the president’s favorite morning show, Fox & Friends, on Monday morning proposed a series of simultaneous U.S. strikes against Iranian targets.

He called for the U.S. military to “open up the strait,” “grab the uranium,” and “target these bad actors that have been insincerely negotiating with our group,” an apparent reference to assassinating Iran’s diplomatic team. Kilmeade added that “the best chance for no casualties is you open up four different fronts immediately, simultaneously.”

Fox correspondent Trey Yingst stressed on the same broadcast that Trump’s strategy has put him in control of the situation and left Iranian leaders desperate for a deal to avoid further U.S. strikes.

“President Trump holds the cards here, according to regional officials, who say that his strategic patience has given him not only the upper hand on the battlefield but also at the negotiating table,” Yingst said. “Now the Iranians … are grasping at straws. They are trying to find some path forward that would give them an agreement at least temporarily to enter into deeper negotiations to avoid such a bombing campaign.”

He added that Iran’s economic situation is “truly dire” and its officials “are having to try to sell a reality to the people that doesn’t exist. They were defeated militarily during Operation Epic Fury.”

And KT McFarland — a former Fox personality turned Trump national security adviser — even suggested during her Fox & Friends appearance that China would hesitate to engage the U.S. militarily because the U.S. success in Iran has shown them to be “no match for America militarily.”

“If you are the Chinese leader, you’ve got to look at what the United States is just pulling off in Iran,” she said. “The unbelievable precision, the capability, how everything seems to work together. We seem to have done the miraculous.”

Likewise, Mark Levin, the nasal-voiced Middle East hawk who Trump has urged supporters to watch for his Iran commentary, spent the weekend urging the president to push for regime change in Iran.

On Saturday night, Levin hosted retired Gen. Keith Kellogg, a former Fox contributor Trump named as a special envoy in 2024 who has called for “putting boots on the ground” in Iran and for the U.S. to seize its territory “like the Romans did” in Carthage.

After Levin called Trump “the only president that's put his foot down firmly and said no,” Kellogg added that “there's been eight presidents since the revolution in Iran, and only one, Donald Trump, has done something about it.” He then called for Trump to seize Iran’s Kharg Island and Qeshm Island to force open the strait.

“I would just say, go full in, get rid of this regime, whatever it’s going to take out there, because as long as you’ve got the theocratic leaders, as long you’ve got mullahs running that government, you’re going to have this problem, not just today, tomorrow, a month from now, but five or 10 years for the next presidency or our grandchildren, or children as well,” Kellogg added.

“All right, I appreciate that,” Levin replied. “I agree with that. And we’re there. Let’s get it over with already. And what do I mean by that? Destroy the regime, help the people, so they can help themselves.”

After a similar segment on Sunday night’s show featuring right-wing commentator Josh Hammer, Levin again said the U.S. needs to “eliminate that regime, because it’s the only way to prevent them once and for all from getting a nuclear weapon, tomorrow, 10 years from now, 20 years from now.”

Levin followed that up by interviewing right-wing commentator Jim Hanson, who served in the U.S. Army special forces, about how the U.S. could, as Hanson put it, “slow roll an internal unrest” in Iran “until the regime finally gets overthrown from within.” Levin suggested that this would be necessary because the Iranian regime could not be trusted to follow through on any deal Trump made.

“We have a deal, whatever the deal is, let's say it's the greatest deal since sliced bread,” Levin pontificated. “Are future presidents, future Congresses, the American people in the future, do you think we're going to be willing to enforce a deal if they break the deal, which I think they obviously will when the president leaves?”


While Trump Accuses News Outlets Of 'TREASON,' Fox Models MAGA War Coverage

While Trump Accuses News Outlets Of 'TREASON,' Fox Models MAGA War Coverage

While President Donald Trump accuses news outlets of committing “virtual TREASON” by producing reporting that suggests the United States is losing his war against Iran, the president’s loyal Fox News propagandists keep telling him that he’s doing a great job, saying he’s on the verge of victory, and suggesting he can fail only by backing down.

Ten weeks after U.S. and Israeli forces attacked Iran — and nine weeks after Trump demanded “unconditional surrender” of its leaders — Iran’s regime remains intact and in control of both its nuclear stockpile and the Strait of Hormuz, a crucial route for global trade whose closure has spiked domestic fuel prices. In The Atlantic, Brookings Institution senior fellow Robert Kagan wrote Sunday that Trump’s decisions have put the country on the brink of a “total defeat” whose consequences “can neither be repaired nor ignored,” and he noted that “any resolution other than America’s effective surrender holds enormous risks.”

With his war at a standstill and the Iranians rejecting his demands for a negotiated settlement, the president has repeatedly lashed out at the press for undermining the effort by producing “treasonous” reporting — an attack he resumed on Tuesday afternoon.

“When the Fake News says that the Iranian enemy is doing well, Militarily, against us, it’s virtual TREASON in that it is such a false, and even preposterous, statement,” he wrote on Truth Social. “They are aiding and abetting the enemy! All it does is give Iran false hope when none should exist. These are American cowards that are rooting against our Country."

Recent reporting suggests that Trump and his allies have been lying about how successful the war has been.

Minutes after he posted that remark, The New York Times published a report revealing that contrary to the Trump administration’s claims, classified intelligence analyses reveal that “Iran has regained access to most of its missile sites, launchers and underground facilities."

Earlier this month, The Washington Post determined that satellite imagery shows “Iranian airstrikes have damaged or destroyed at least 228 structures or pieces of equipment at U.S. military sites across the Middle East,” far more destruction than the administration has publicly acknowledged, while Reuters reported that U.S. intelligence indicates the war has not impacted Iran’s ability to develop a nuclear weapon, one of Trump’s putative rationales for starting it.

Meanwhile, NBC News reported that Trump abruptly canceled his “Project Freedom” plan to force the reopening of the Strait after Persian Gulf allies objected.

But on Fox this week, the hawkish sycophants who encouraged Trump to launch the war in the first place are still telling him he’s doing everything right.

Mark Levin: Trump’s war prevented a second Holocaust and a nuclear attack on America

Mark Levin, the nasal-voiced Fox host and sometime presidential adviser whose program Trump has urged the public to watch, devoted a lengthy and increasingly loud monologue on Sunday’s broadcast to lavishing the president with praise for launching the war and averting a second holocaust.

Levin denounced the Iranian regime and the war’s critics, claiming the latter “hate America and Israel so much they'd rather tens of thousands more Iranians die horrible deaths than see our country defeat this homicidal regime” and “care not at all, not one whit, that they are not only giving aid and comfort to this horrific enemy, but they are encouraging this enemy to slaughter, to execute, to rape, to torture, and to do what homicidal regimes do, because they know the enemy, that these people are in the bag.”

After urging the U.S. to arm and organize a Kurdish resistance to the regime, Levin praised the president, saying that while “humanity allowed the Holocaust to occur,” Trump and his administration had put “this Iranian Nazi regime … on its back."

“The only president with the courage, the wisdom, the fortitude to confront this Nazi-like regime, this mass-murdering, nuclear-obsessed Islamist enemy, the world’s enemy, is Donald Trump,” he said. “And unlike other such circumstances around the world where genocide is taking place — and as a practical matter, we can’t get involved in all of them — in Iran, we have the opportunity to do something about it,” he continued, calling Iran “the biggest concentration camp in human history right now.”

Levin went on to host Fox contributor Newt Gingrich, who said the Iranian regime was “fully as evil as Adolf Hitler was or Joseph Stalin was” and the war was necessary to prevent Iran from deploying a nuclear weapon “in your neighborhood,” and Fox senior strategic analyst and retired Gen. Jack Keane, who urged the president to revive Project Freedom, “return to combat operations,” “put Kharg Island on the table,” and implement an intelligence operation to overturn the Iranian regime.

Sean Hannity: Iran’s leaders should “get out while they can”

Sean Hannity, the president’s chief mouthpiece at Fox, said on Monday’s show that Iran’s leaders are on the verge of fleeing the country.

After parroting Trump’s statement earlier that day that the U.S.-Iranian ceasefire is “on life support,” Hannity cited unspecified “reports tonight that Iran's very fractured fourth-tier leadership, they may be planning an exit to Russia and Vladimir Putin.”

“Now, if you recall, on this program before Epic Fury, there were reports the supreme leader, other leaders were planning a move, that they had planes with cash and currency on a tarmac ready to go,” he continued. “I said multiple times, my advice to all of them is to get out while they can. The supreme leader, all his top leadership, and then the next tier and pretty much the third tier, they're all dead. They should have listened to me then. My same advice applies here.”

Hannity then brought on Fox correspondent Kevin Corke for a report on the war, telling him, “I think they're just lashing out in utter complete paranoia, but this report that they might be planning an exit is intriguing to me.”

“Yeah, intriguing indeed,” Corke replied. “And I salute you. You are spot-on. You gave him great advice. Of course, they didn't listen and it could cost all of them.”

Hannity was off the air on Tuesday night as he traveled with the president on his state visit to China.

Fox & Friends: “Are we on the five-yard line? Of course, but the president had to take this action.”

The co-hosts of Fox & Friends, Trump’s favorite morning show, have spent the week alternating between assuring their viewers that victory is at hand and pushing for risky escalations to the war.

Ainsley Earhart on Monday floated a military effort to seize Iran’s nuclear stockpile. “The question is do we go in and get the enriched uranium? … Do the Israelis do it? Do the Americans do it?” she asked.

Lawrence Jones casually responded that such a mission — which experts say would constitute an immensely complex and risky endeavor — could be a “joint operation,” before pivoting back to how successful the war has been.

He criticized retired Adm. William McRaven’s declaration the previous day that the U.S. is “not really that much better off” than it was before starting war with Iran. “There is no doubt in my mind, taking out the ayatollah, a lot of their leadership, has put us in a better position,” said Jones. “Are we on the five-yard line? Of course, but the president had to take this action.” (If the metaphorical language seems confusing, consider that Jones is operating within a worldview where it’s unfathomable that we’re farther from the war’s endzone than five yards.)

On Tuesday, the trio stressed how important launching the war had been and praised Trump for carrying it out.

In one segment, Jones said that “we’ve been dealing with this threat for 47 years,” criticized news coverage in the face of the “phenomenal” military operation, and concluded, “I'm glad that the president has the will to deal with this."

“Don't forget the purpose of this,” Earhardt chimed in. “It is to get the enriched uranium away from them because they are planning a nuclear -- they want to have a nuclear weapon. What would they do with that? Well, they yell in the streets, publicly, death to America and wipe Israel off the face of the map. That's their ideology. That's how they think."

“They are not thinking clearly like Americans do,” she added. “They hate us with a passion, with a vengeance. And they have the capability, possibly, of building this nuclear weapon. So the president — that was why the president decided to begin this conflict.”

Brian Kilmeade added that Iran causes “chaos in the region” before adding, “For those people who think the president is boxed in and frustrated, I’m telling you, he gets coolest under pressure. He does not feel it at all.”

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters

Payoff: Duffy's 'Great American Road Trip' Show Funded By Firms He Regulates

Payoff: Duffy's 'Great American Road Trip' Show Funded By Firms He Regulates

President Donald Trump’s Fox News obsession frequently yields outcomes that are difficult to directly explain without sounding crazy. But even by those low standards, this one is a doozy.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, one of more than two dozen Fox alums Trump has nominated or appointed to senior administration posts, announced in a Friday appearance on the network that he had teamed up with his wife Rachel Campos-Duffy, a current Fox host, to produce The Great American Road Trip, a reality TV show that they had filmed driving across the country with their children.

Naturally, the Fox & Friends hosts helped roll it out, yukking it up with their current and former colleagues and telling them that “you’re inspiring us” to take road trips of their own.

The Duffys largely fielded questions like, “Sean, as transportation secretary, I assume this was your idea,” and “one of the coolest things [you did was] in Philadelphia, the Rocky steps, running up the Rocky steps,” and “what does the president say when you walk in with all nine of the children?”

At one point, though, Ainsley Earhardt accidentally committed journalism. When she jokingly asked, “Is this a taste of a possible reality show for y’all one day,” Campos-Duffy revealed that “reality TV people” often come to them asking to “do a show with your family,” and that they decided to “do this one for free.”

In other words, the show they shot while Sean Duffy was a public employee serves as a brand-building exercise for future for-profit endeavors.

Earhardt, Griff Jenkins, and Brian Kilmeade offered no suggestion that it was unusual or untoward for a cabinet secretary — one also assigned at times the duties of administrator of NASA — to spend extensive time shooting a reality TV show during what Duffy described as “over the course of seven months.”

The trio also offered no questions about who paid for the show. When actual journalists looked into it, they discovered that its production is funded via a nonprofit and that “several of the show’s sponsors — including Boeing, Toyota, Shell, Royal Caribbean Group and United Airlines — are companies that Duffy’s department oversees and regulates.”

And of course, no one at Fox cares that one of their hosts was shooting government propaganda films in her spare time.

Fox has apparently run out of journalistic norms to destroy — so they’re creating new ones.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters

President Retreats To 'Fox-Trump Feedback Loop' As His Approval Numbers Crash

President Retreats To 'Fox-Trump Feedback Loop' As His Approval Numbers Crash

With Donald Trump’s Iran war driving his public support to its lowest levels of his second term, the president retreated on Wednesday night to Fox News, the propaganda channel he can always count on to tell him that he’s a historic success.

Trump spent part of his evening live-posting about and posting video of segments on that night’s editions of Fox's The Ingraham Angle, Jesse Watters Primetime, and Hannity.

At 7:57 p.m. E.T.,Trump posted Laura Ingraham’s opening segment to his Truth Social feed.

In that segment, Ingraham, over an on-screen graphic describing the president as “Still the Champ,” denounced what she called media portrayals of Trump “losing influence,” calling them “just more wishful thinking.” She went on to say that Trump “vexes all of them because he doesn't play by their rules” and “never stopped fighting.”

Ingraham then interviewed GOP pollster Matt Towery, who called Trump “a force unequaled in the Republican Party” and claimed that “the polling that you're seeing come in on Trump is incorrect.” On-screen text during the interview read, “The MAGA Momentum Is Unstoppable.”

At 9:08 p.m. E.T., Trump posted, “Chuck Devore, Army Intelligence, was fantastic tonight on Jesse Watters. Thank you Chuck!!!”

Devore, during the segment Trump referenced, claimed:

  • Trump is negotiating a “strong” “deal” with Iran.
  • Trump’s foreign policy is “like clean up on aisles two, three and 11” and “anyone that doesn't trust President Trump or doesn't give him the respect or the consideration that I think is due, given his track record, I think that they would be sorely mistaken.”
  • “The economy is hitting on all cylinders now” and the spike in the price of gasoline will end soon.
  • “Voters are going to see” the impact of that “tremendous” economic boost by the midterm elections, giving Republicans “a pretty good chance” to hold the House and Senate.
  • “It's a complete wild card as to whether” the Iranian regime “survives the year.”

At 9:13 p.m. ET, Trump posted that “Washington D.C. CRIME is at its lowest point in 30 years, plus!” He was apparently responding to another segment on Watters’ show which used similar language.

Finally, at 10:59 p.m. ET, Trump posted Sean Hannity’s opening segment to his Truth Social feed.

Hannity’s monologue, citing President Barack Obama’s recent interview with CBS late-night host Stephen Colbert, alleged that “Barack Hussein Obama” is “refusing to ride off into the sunset with grace and something called dignity” because the former president is “desperate for validation.”

He went on to charge that Obama “wrote the book on weaponization and politicizing justice,” through his purported attacks on Trump, adding that he “is now forced to witness his entire legacy go completely down the drain, compliments of the man that he tried to destroy.”

The president often makes or calibrates his decisions based on the network’s programming and posts about it in close to real time, a phenomenon I call the Fox-Trump feedback loop. And right now, his loyal supplicants are providing him with an endless stream of happy talk.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters

Larry Kudlow

Fox Anchors' Nuclear Justification For Iran War -- And Its High Costs -- Is Collapsing

Fox pundits have repeatedly argued that the Iran war’s costs are “a small price to pay” for its supposed prevention of the imminent threat posed by Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon.

But a new U.S. intelligence assessment reportedly found that after two months of war, “the time Iran would need to build a nuclear weapon has not changed since last summer, when analysts estimated that a U.S.-Israeli attack had pushed back the timeline to up to a year,” according to exclusive reporting from Reuters.

Trump’s war of choice against Iran is now in its third month and headed for strategic defeat. While U.S. and Israeli strikes have killed Iranian leaders and severely damaged their military, the regime is intact and has established control over the Strait of Hormuz, a vital channel for global trade. Americans are seeing gas, diesel, and fertilizer prices soar as a result, and the direct cost of the war continues to grow.

Some Fox pundits, in the face of plummeting support for the war, have argued that these costs are relatively small compared to the benefit of preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon — but according to the new U.S. intelligence assessment, there was and remains no imminent threat of that happening.

Fox Business host Larry Kudlow, a former Trump economic adviser, argued in a Monday Fox appearance that skyrocketing fuel costs are “a small price to pay to stop the nuclear activity” from Iran, which he described as “the most gruesome regime we’ve seen in a hundred years” (note that this period includes Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, and Mao Tse-Tung’s China).

After Kudlow went on to say that “four and a half dollars gasoline — it's not a great idea, wouldn't want it forever, but it really isn't doing all that much harm,” Fox Business contributor Marcus Lemonis added, “I think you said it right, Larry. We don't want it forever, but this short-term pain has a big, big benefit to it.”

Fox host Sean Hannity, a close ally of the president and major supporter of his war, similarly claimed last week that skyrocking gas prices are merely “short-term pain” justified by preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear bomb.

“It certainly is short-term pain,” Hannity told a guest during his April 30 broadcast. “Nobody wants to pay more for gas. Diesel is even more expensive, as you point out.”

“However, in exchange for not giving our children and grandchildren nuclear weapons, again, in the short term, I think I’d take that deal every day of the week,” he added.

And Fox host Todd Piro, during a rare mention of the $25 billion estimate a Pentagon analyst gave last week for the early cost of the war, said of that price tag, “If we are dead because Iran strikes us with a nuke, all these economic discussions are moot.”

But as Reuters reported on May 4, U.S. intelligence agencies did not assess that Iran could quickly obtain a weapon before the 2026 war began — or even before striking nuclear facilities last year — much less that the country could deploy it on U.S. soil:

U.S. intelligence assessments indicate that the time Iran would need to build a nuclear weapon has not changed since last summer, when analysts estimated that a U.S.-Israeli attack had pushed back the timeline to up to a year, according to three sources familiar with the matter.
The assessments of Tehran's nuclear program remain broadly unchanged even after two months of a war that U.S. President Donald Trump launched in part to stop the Islamic Republic from developing a nuclear bomb.
…
U.S. intelligence agencies had concluded prior ⁠to June's 12-day war that Iran likely could produce enough bomb-grade uranium for a weapon and build a bomb in around three to six months, said two of the sources, all of whom requested anonymity to discuss U.S. intelligence.
Following the June strikes by the U.S. that hit the Natanz, Fordow and Isfahan nuclear complexes, U.S. intelligence estimates pushed that timeline back to about nine months to a year, said the two sources and a person familiar with the assessments.

This new assessment further demolishes arguments for the war that Fox propagandists like Hannity offered after U.S. strikes began in late February.

Trump envoy Steve Witkoff, who negotiated on behalf of the U.S. in talks with Iranian counterparts in the lead-up to the war, helped fuel those arguments by claiming on Hannity’s Fox show that Iranian negotiators had admitted possessing a uranium stockpile that could be weaponized “in roughly one week” and used to build 11 nuclear bombs. Witkoff lacks prior experience in nuclear diplomacy — but he does have sizable business interests in the Gulf region, at times partnering with Trump’s family business.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters


On Fox, Bartiromo Celebrates Eric Trump's Company Winning $24M Pentagon Contract

On Fox, Bartiromo Celebrates Eric Trump's Company Winning $24M Pentagon Contract

Fox Business anchor Maria Bartoromo — who was one of the most fervent participants in Fox’s effort to turn Hunter Biden’s business interests into a corruption scandal for his father, President Joe Biden — congratulated President Donald Trump’s son Eric on air on Thursday after his company landed a robotics contract from the Pentagon.

Bartiromo devoted more than 10 minutes of her program to a fawning joint interview with Foundation Future Industries CEO Sankaet Pathak and Eric Trump, the company’s “chief strategy adviser.”

After Bartiromo congratulated the pair on winning a $24 million Defense Department contract to test its “Phantom” robot for military applications, she gave them a platform to talk up their product, as well as what Bartiromo described as “these incredible goals that you've got,” including to “build life-sustaining technology on Earth and beyond.”

Bartiromo did not quiz Eric Trump on the obvious ethical problems involved in the Pentagon directing a contract to the president’s son’s company. Instead, she asked him the following questions:

  • “Eric, I know this is a lot about national security, but [Pathak’s] talking to us about other use cases. Tell us about that and how did you get involved — what attracted you to this company?”
  • “Eric, you're a master at hospitality. Tell us how you could see these uses play out with robots. I know that there are robots used right now, for example, in hospitals, but this is something that you — the robot goes to the dock, picks up medical equipment, puts it in a basket, and delivers it where it needs to go.”

Eric Trump and other members of the president’s family have apparently adopted Fox’s “Biden Crime Family” conspiracy theory as their business plan, as I detailed for MSNOW earlier this month:

Many of the network’s highest-rated hosts carried out a yearslong obsession with what Fox host Sean Hannity described as the “Biden Crime Family,” mentioning Biden’s son at least 13,440 times over a period of less than 16 months of Biden’s presidency. Their feverish conspiracy theory postulated that Hunter Biden had served as a “bag man” for his father, soaking up money funneled from foreign entities and kicking a share back to Joe Biden, who would then use his elected office to help his son’s business partners.
No substantive evidence ever emerged that Joe Biden profited from Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings. The dealings in question largely occurred when Joe Biden was a private citizen, and the primary instance the conspiracy theorists have cited as evidence of him taking state action on behalf of one of his son’s clients — that he, as vice president, pushed for the removal of Ukraine’s top prosecutor in order to benefit one of his son’s clients — was manifestly bogus.
But Trump and his family members appear to have adopted influence-dealing on a dramatically larger scale than the Biden family was ever accused of. And the Trumps’ sprawling set of business deals with Gulf state royals and the sovereign wealth funds they control cannot be disentangled from the president’s decision-making in launching and continuing a war of choice against Iran.

Bartiromo was a key player in Fox’s fixation on Hunter Biden, regularly hosting Republican members of Congress like House Oversight Chairman James Comer (R-KY) to promote their overwrought investigations. The sum total of the money Comer tracked from international business sources to “the Bidens and their associates” — itself an inflated figure that includes money going to non-family members — was $20 million, less than the single Pentagon contract Eric’s company received.

Fox hosts who tore their garments over the Bidens typically just ignore the historic effort by President Trump and his family members to cash in on his second term in office. But Bartiromo is taking it one step further by openly celebrating Eric Trump’s business.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters

How Trump Is 'Celebrating First Amendment' In Weeks Before White House Press Gala

How Trump Is 'Celebrating First Amendment' In Weeks Before White House Press Gala

President Donald Trump has accused news outlets of deliberately producing fraudulent reporting -- often claiming they’re doing so to undermine his Iran war — on at least a dozen occasions in the weeks since the White House Correspondents’ Association invited him to attend its annual dinner. Trump blames “Anti-America” journalists who he claims are “rooting for Iran to win” for this reporting, and he has repeatedly described their behavior as “almost treasonous.”

When WHCA president and CBS News White House correspondent Weijia Jiang confirmed on March 2 that Trump had accepted the group’s invitation to participate in its annual soiree, she described the event as a traditional “evening with the president, a dinner that celebrates the First Amendment,” and added that the journalists of the WHCA “look forward to hosting him.”

But it is impossible to celebrate the First Amendment with the current president. When Trump enters the ballroom at D.C.’s Washington Hilton Hotel on Saturday night, he will come not as a defender of the free press, but amid the most hostile campaign against it by a president and administration in recent history..

Indeed, in a development that should surprise no one, Trump has spent the seven weeks since the announcement of his attendance at the dinner honoring the First Amendment by demeaning reporters and threatening their employers, many of which he is currently suing.

He urged Brendan Carr, his hand-picked chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, to review “the licenses of some of these Corrupt and Highly Unpatriotic ‘News’ Organizations” over their reporting.

He described New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman as a “Maggot” and “SLEAZEBAG” who “insists on writing false stories about me,” called ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl a “third rate ‘anchor’” who produces “Fictitious quotes,” and insinuated that he might sue both of them.

He gave a speech in which he claimed to be “extremely proud” of having “exposed” the press “for being fake news,” adding: “And we are gonna hopefully change that because I think you really need great news to be great, and they are not great, and they're not leading us to greatness, but we are gonna lead us to greatness.”

But the bulk of Trump’s rancor has focused on news outlets that he alleges have been deliberately lying in order to downplay the success of the Iran campaign, which is currently mired in its seventh week with the regime intact and in control of both its nuclear stockpile and the vital Strait of Hormuz.

Here’s a sampling of Trump’s most demagogic attacks on the press since the WHCA confirmed his attendance at the dinner, cribbed from his Truth Social account, interviews, and public appearances.

'Lowlife ‘Papers’ and Media actually want us to lose the War'

Trump posted to Truth Social on March 14:

Yet again, an intentionally misleading headline by the Fake News Media about the five tanker planes that were supposedly struck down at an Airport in Saudi Arabia, and of no further use. In actuality, the Base was hit a few days ago, but the planes were not “struck” or “destroyed.” Four of the five had virtually no damage, and are already back in service. One had slightly more damage, but will be in the air shortly. None were destroyed, or close to that, as the Fake News said in headlines. The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal (in particular), and other Lowlife “Papers” and Media actually want us to lose the War. Their terrible reporting is the exact opposite of the actual facts! They are truly sick and demented people that have no idea the damage they cause the United States of America. Fortunately, as proven by our Great and Conclusive Election Win in 2024, the People of our Country understand what is happening far better than the Fake News Media! President DONALD J. TRUMP

'The story was knowingly FAKE and you can say that those Media Outlets should be brought up on Charges for TREASON'

Trump posted to Truth Social on March 15:

Iran has long been known as a Master of Media Manipulation and Public Relations. They are Militarily ineffective and weak, but are really good at “feeding” the very appreciative Fake News Media false information. Now, A.I. has become another Disinformation weapon that Iran uses, quite well, considering they are being annihilated by the day. They showed phony “Kamikaze Boats,” shooting at various Ships at Sea, which looks wonderful, powerful, and vicious, but these Boats don’t exist — It’s all false information to show how “tough” their already defeated Military is! The five U.S. Refueling Planes that were supposedly struck down and badly damaged, according to The Wall Street Journal’s false reporting, and others, are all in service, with the exception of one, which will soon be flying the skies. Buildings and Ships that are shown to be on fire are not — It’s FAKE NEWS, generated by A.I. For instance, Iran, working in close coordination with the Fake News Media, shows our great USS Abraham Lincoln Aircraft Carrier, one of the largest and most prestigious Ships in the World, burning uncontrollably in the Ocean. Not only was it not burning, it was not even shot at — Iran knows better than to do that! The story was knowingly FAKE and, in a certain way, you can say that those Media Outlets that generated it should be brought up on Charges for TREASON for the dissemination of false information! The fact is, Iran is being decimated, and the only battles they “win” are those that they create through AI, and are distributed by Corrupt Media Outlets. The Radical Leftwing Press knows this full well, but continues to go forward with false stories and LIES. That’s why their Approval Rating is so low, and I can win a Presidential Election, IN A LANDSLIDE, getting only 5% positive Press — They have no credibility! I am so thrilled to see Brendan Carr, the Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), looking at the licenses of some of these Corrupt and Highly Unpatriotic “News” Organizations. They get Billions of Dollars of FREE American Airwaves, and use it to perpetuate LIES, both in News and almost all of their Shows, including the Late Night Morons, who get gigantic Salaries for horrible Ratings, and never get, as I used to say in The Apprentice, “FIRED.” Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP

'I think it's pretty criminal...Our media companies [publish news] they know is false'

Trump said at a press gaggle on March 15:

And what they tell the public, you know, I just put out a Truth about their disinformation. I assume most of you saw it. And they use A- -- AI. They said they attacked the USS Abraham Lincoln, one of the largest ships in the world, an aircraft carrier. And they showed pictures of it burning. It was never attacked.
It was never burning. The Wall Street Journal put out a false story that five of our big, beautiful tankers that we feed the planes with, the, we give the planes, uh, the gas, the jet fuel, uh, hundreds of thousands of gallons of gasoline, that they were all essentially destroyed. They weren't destroyed at all.
In fact, uh, four of them weren't, were not even, I mean, literally were not damaged. And one of them has slight damage and it'll be back in the air soon. But they, if you, if you read The Wall Street Journal, it's like they were totally decimated and destroyed like Iran has been. So they put out pho- -- phony stories.
The kamikaze boats. The kamikaze boats don't exist. They're fake. And you can almost see that when you look at them. It looks like y- -- because if they did exist, we'd hit them just like we hit other boats all over the place. But they don't exist. In fact, some of the people say, “Where are the boats?” Well, well, how come nobody seen the boats?
You know why? 'Cause it's AI generated. It's fake. And I found, I didn't realize this before tha- -- we started, but Iran is known for a lot of fake news and they deal with our fake news. And I, I actually think it's pretty criminal because our media companies who have no credibility whatsoever are putting out information that they know is false.
And it's a very dangerous thing for the country. I think it's, I think they could be in serious jeopardy, frankly.

'It's really criminal what they do'

Trump said at a bilateral meeting with Micheal Martin, taoiseach of Ireland, on March 17:

Their reporting of the war was unbelievable. We have decimated that country, and if you watch BBC, it's almost like they're fighting us to a draw. They're not fighting us to a draw. It was very inaccurate news. It was fake news. So, I'm very proud of the term fake news because it was my term, I came up with it. But it's no longer accurate.
It really is. It's corrupt, fraudulent news. It really is -- it's fraudulent. It's not just fake, it's beyond fake. It's really criminal what they do.

'It's almost treasonous, I have to be honest. It's almost treasonous.'

Trump said during a March 27 speech:

[The Iranians] have no air force, all wiped out. They have very few missiles left. Their drones are at a minimum. Their factories are gone. Their leaders are gone. The leaders are all dead. They're all dead. Nobody ever heard of the people that are left. And if you read The Times, you think we're doing poorly. It's so -- it's almost treasonous, I have to be honest.
It's almost treasonous. But fortunately, we have other media that's fair and honest and honorable. And you have to go out and do some of your own talking, because nobody else will. You know the expression, I have to sell myself because nobody else will.

'CNN is being ordered to immediately withdraw this Statement with full apologies'

Trump posted to Truth Social on April 7:

The alleged Statement put out by CNN World News is a FRAUD, as CNN well knows. The false Statement was linked to a Fake News site (from Nigeria) and, of course, immediately picked up by CNN, and blared out as a “legitimate” headline. The Official Statement by Iran was just released, and posted on TRUTH, below. Authorities are looking to determine whether or not a crime was committed on the issuance of the Fake CNN World Statement, or was it a sick rogue player? CNN is being ordered to immediately withdraw this Statement with full apologies for their, as usual, terrible “reporting.” Results of the investigation will be announced in the near future. President DONALD J. TRUMP

'The Fake News Media love saying that Iran is ‘winning’ when, in fact, everyone knows that they are LOSING, and LOSING BIG!'

Trump posted to Truth Social on April 11:

The Fake News Media has lost total credibility, not that they had any to begin with. Because of their massive Trump Derangement Syndrome (Sometimes referred to as TDS!), they love saying that Iran is “winning” when, in fact, everyone knows that they are LOSING, and LOSING BIG! Their Navy is gone, their Air Force is gone, their Anti Aircraft apparatus is nonexistent, Radar is dead, their Missile and Drone Factories have been largely obliterated along with the Missiles and Drones themselves and, most importantly, their longtime “Leaders” are no longer with us, praise be to Allah! The only thing they have going is the threat that a ship may “bunk” into one of their sea mines which, by the way, all 28 of their mine dropper boats are also lying at the bottom of the sea. We’re now starting the process of clearing out the Strait of Hormuz as a favor to Countries all over the World, including China, Japan, South Korea, France, Germany, and many others. Incredibly, they don’t have the Courage or Will to do this work themselves. Very interestingly, however, empty Oil carrying ships from many Nations are all heading to the United States of America to LOAD UP with Oil. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP

'The Fake News Media is CRAZY, or just plain CORRUPT!'

Trump posted to Truth Social on April 11:

The Fake News Media is CRAZY, or just plain CORRUPT! The United States has completely destroyed Iran’s Military, including their entire Navy and Air Force, and everything else. Their Leadership is DEAD! The Strait of Hormuz will soon be open, and the empty ships are rushing to the United States to “load up.” But, if you listen to the Fake News, we’re losing! President DONALD J. TRUMP

'They report things that they know are false. It's almost treasonous.'

Trump said during an April 12 interview on Maria Bartiromo’s Sunday Fox News show:

And [the Iranianians] go to the press. They're very good with public relations, much better with public relations than -- than they are at fighting. They go to the press. And they say, President Trump said it's OK for us to have a nuclear weapon, when I never even spoke to them. And, by the way, that would be the only thing I would never say to them.
…
And then The New York Times, which is a fake -- a fake paper -- it's just a fake. You just believe the opposite. It's so sad when you look at CNN, The New York Times, ABC fake news, NBC fake news. When you look at this stuff, it's so sad to see it. I mean, they report things that they know are false. It's almost treasonous, actually, if you want to really know the truth.
It's almost treasonous. But if you -- if you're reading The New York Times exclusively, and not -- and their circulation, by the way, is way down.
It's way down. I'm proud to report that. But if you're reading The New York Times exclusively, you would say that they are doing great in the war.

'The New York Times knows that it’s FAKE NEWS!'

Trump posted to Truth Social on April 13:

For those people that still read The Failing New York Times and, despite the fact that Iran has been totally OBLITERATED, Militarily, and otherwise, you would think that Iran is actually winning or, at the very least, doing quite well — But that’s not true, and The New York Times knows that it’s FAKE NEWS! When does this Corrupt Media Outlet apologize for their LIES and horrible actions against me, my supporters, and our Country itself! HAVE THEY NO SHAME? HAVE THEY NO SENSE OF DECENCY? President DONALD J. TRUMP

'Why don’t they just say, at the right time, JOB WELL DONE, MR. PRESIDENT...???'

Trump posted to Truth Social on April 17:

The Failing New York Times, FAKE NEWS CNN, and others, just don’t know what to do. They are desperately looking for a reason to criticize President Donald J. Trump on the Iran situation, but just can’t find it. Why don’t they just say, at the right time, JOB WELL DONE, MR. PRESIDENT, and start to gain back their credibility???

'The Anti-America Fake News Media is rooting for Iran to win.'

Trump posted to Truth Social on April 20:

I’m winning a War, BY A LOT, things are going very well, our Military has been amazing and, if you read the Fake News, like The Failing New York Times, the absolutely horrendous and disgusting Wall Street Journal, or the now almost defunct, fortunately, Washington Post, you would actually think we are losing the War. The enemy is confused, because they get these same Media “reports,” and yet they realize their Navy has been completely wiped out, their Air Force has gone onto darker runways, they have no Anti Missile or Anti Airplane Equipment, their former leaders are mostly gone (This has been, in addition to everything else, Regime Change!), and perhaps, most important of all, THE BLOCKADE, which we will not take off until there is a “DEAL,” is absolutely destroying Iran. They are losing $500 Million Dollars a day, an unsustainable number, even in the short run. The Anti-America Fake News Media is rooting for Iran to win, but it’s not going to happen, because I’m in charge! Just like these unpatriotic people used every ounce of their limited strength to fight me in the Election, they continue to do so with Iran. The result will be the same — It already is! President DONALD J. TRUMP


Reprinted with permission from Media Matters

Why Fox News Dumped Trump's 'Grand Conspiracy' Prosecutor In 2019

Why Fox News Dumped Trump's 'Grand Conspiracy' Prosecutor In 2019

While Newsmax hosts celebrate GOP lawyer and conspiracy theorist Joe diGenova’s appointment to a post overseeing investigations of President Donald Trump’s political foes, their counterparts at Fox News — which apparently banned diGenova from appearing years ago — have mentioned the news just one time, in passing, on Sunday afternoon.

News broke over the weekend that Trump’s former personal lawyer and acting Attorney General Todd Blanche had appointed diGenova, a figure in numerous right-wing pseudoscandals over the last three decades who represented Trump’s 2020 campaign in election fraud lawsuits, as his counselor and tasked him with overseeing the Justice Department’s “Grand Conspiracy” probe. That investigation unifies a hodgepodge of “deep state” conspiracy theories touted by right-wing media into a single framework seemingly intended to defeat statutes of limitations and target a vast swathe of Democratic politicians and former federal law enforcement officials.

Newsmax hosts celebrate as the DOJ hires Joe diGenova

On Newsmax, where diGenova has appeared regularly in recent years, hosts cheered the news.

“We have congratulations to share with Joe diGenova," Newsmax’s Greg Kelly said on the network’s flagship prime-time show. “Good luck, Joe. Did you hear? He's got a big gig at the Department of Justice. One of our favorite guests on this show will be counselor to the attorney general. That is a big-deal role.”

“He knows what they did to President Trump,” Kelly claimed. “And he wants justice. He has said it many, many times right here on this show. I think it's part of the reason why he may have the job now. It's so awesome.”

Kelly also praised diGenova as a “superstar” and someone who “thinks creatively, ethically, honestly, but creatively” and claimed the lawyer “is so fired up for this role."

On-screen text during the segment read, “A regular on the show gets a new job."

Newsmax’s Carl Higbie likewise touted the news, calling diGenova a “friend of this network” who will be overseeing what Higbie called “the DOJ probe into this Russian origin thing.” (Trump and his media allies argue that the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election was corrupt and its perpetrators should be prosecuted; previous attempts to turn their conspiracy theories into federal cases failed after a three-year special counsel probe by a Trump-appointed U.S. attorney.)

While Newsmax’s stars throw a parade over diGenova’s appointment, their Fox counterparts have been largely silent. Thus far, the entirety of the network’s coverage since the news broke late Friday has been a single passing mention on Sunday afternoon.

“The Trump administration is dismantling the deep state,” host Tomi Lahren said at the top of a segment on The Big Weekend Show. “The DOJ has now tapped former Trump attorney Joe diGenova to spearhead the probe into ex-CIA Director John Brennan and others over the Russian hoax."The news went unmentioned on Monday, including on the network’s flagship “straight-news” program, Special Report, and the scandal-happy programs hosted by Laura Ingraham, Jesse Watters, and Sean Hannity.

Why Fox may have trouble swallowing diGenova’s new post

Fox is in a strained position, because while the network spent years feverishly demanding and supporting the prosecutions of Trump’s enemies over dubious premises, its leaders are seemingly also aware that diGenova is not credible.

DiGenova made more than 100 appearances on Fox News weekday programs in 2018 and 2019, and dozens more on its sister channel, Fox Business — but both networks appear to have banned the GOP lawyer in late 2019. He has not appeared on Fox News weekday programs since October 8, 2019, according to our database.

DiGenova and his wife and legal partner, Victoria Toensing, disappeared from Fox News following a sequence of events that demonstrated their lack of credibility.

DiGenova used a Fox appearance to call then-Fox senior judicial analyst Andrew Napolitano “a fool” for suggesting earlier that day that Trump had committed a crime by soliciting campaign aid in a phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

A few days later, diGenova and Toensing lashed out at then-Fox anchor Chris Wallace for reporting that they had been working “off the books” with Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, on his effort to smear Joe Biden over Ukraine.

The day after diGenova’s final Fox interview, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman — who had been working alongside diGenova, Toensing, Giuliani, and conservative columnist John Solomon on the Ukraine disinformation plot — were arrested by federal law enforcement en route to Vienna, Austria, to reportedly help set up an interview between Hannity and Viktor Shokin, the corrupt former Ukrainian prosecutor at the heart of the disinformation campaign

Their appearances on Fox Business, however, continued for a few more weeks — until diGenova used one to utter a widely condemned antisemitic screed, at which point the couple stopped appearing there as well.

Then in February 2020, The Daily Beast reported on a 162-page internal Fox News research briefing book detailing the “unrelenting disinformation campaign originating from Ukraine.” “Notable are the roles of Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing in spreading disinformation and their parroting of beneficial narratives while employed by [pro-Russia Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry] Firtash,” the document noted. It also highlighted their “non-disclosure of financial motives and representation of Firtash while spreading false and misleading stories."

DiGenova and Toensing subsequently became Newsmax contributors.

Now someone Fox’s own research division panned for “spreading disinformation” will be running the Trump administration’s latest efforts to criminalize their opponents. The network has spent years feeding the flames of the conspiracy theories that diGenova will now be investigating — but highlighting his new role might force the network to confront what it means that someone it’s apparently deemed unreliable is leading that charge.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters

With Bondi Out, GOP Lawyer DiGenova Named To Run 'Grand Conspiracy' Probe

With Bondi Out, GOP Lawyer DiGenova Named To Run 'Grand Conspiracy' Probe

Joe diGenova, a GOP lawyer who represented President Donald Trump in his bogus election fraud cases in 2020 and a longtime fixture in right-wing media, complained in April that then-Attorney General Pam Bondi had “nixed” him from a role overseeing a planned investigation of Trump’s political enemies. Now, just weeks after her removal, he’s reportedly ensconced in that position.

The Trump Department of Justice, through grand juries in Florida, is targeting a wide array of Democratic political figures and law enforcement officials while sidestepping statutes of limitation by positing that the federal probes of Russian interference in the 2016 election, Trump’s theft of classified documents upon leaving office, and his attempt to overturn the 2020 election, are all manifestations of a single “Grand Conspiracy.”

This absurd conspiracy theory unifies a decade of wild right-wing media fantasies under a single banner, and its proponents claim that it could lead to convictions of everyone from former President Barack Obama to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to former special counsel Jack Smith.

DiGenova, asked about Bondi’s replacement by her deputy Todd Blanche during an April 2 Newsmax appearance, argued that the president fired her because “the weaponization investigation cases in Florida have basically come to a standstill because Bondi got in the way.”

“She should have been gone the minute she interfered in the Florida investigations,” he added. “And I know that for a fact, because I was involved in that. I was going to be a prosecutor in that case, I was all ready to be hired to be the chief lead counsel, and Pam Bondi nixed it because she didn't want anybody with a name in the case.”

But on Friday, Maria Medetis Long, who was overseeing a portion of the probe focused on former CIA Director John Brennan, became the latest career federal prosecutor ousted after expressing skepticism about the strength of a case against a Trump foe. Her replacement is reportedly diGenova, who will also be overseeing the broader “Grand Conspiracy” probe and has the title of counselor to the attorney general.

DiGenova has presumably been selected for the role for the very reasons that would disqualify him under any normal circumstances. He is a fierce Republican partisan with close ties to Trump who has been involved, as either a pundit or a lawyer, in GOP scandalmongering efforts dating back to Bill Clinton’s presidency.

A key player in the Ukraine-focused disinformation plot targeting Joe Biden that led to Trump’s first impeachment, diGenova regularly appeared on Fox News in 2019 to promote that conspiracy theory — even as he and his wife, Virginia Toensing, represented pro-Russian Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry Firtash, another participant in the scheme. An internal Fox research document, which The Daily Beast reported on in February 2020, questioned the credibility of diGenova and several other players in the effort.

DiGenova was apparently banned from Fox in late 2019 after smearing two Fox personalities on-air and then using a Fox Business appearance to deliver an antisemitic screed in which he argued that Jewish philanthropist George Soros “controls a very large part of the career foreign service of the United States State Department,” has “corrupted FBI officials,” and is seeking to “run Ukraine.” (He last appeared on Fox News’ weekday programming on October 8, 2019, according to a search of Media Matters’ database.)

DiGenova has since been a fixture on Fox rival Newsmax, where he recently argued that Trump, as “chief law enforcement officer,” has every right to force the Justice Department to pay him hundreds of millions of dollars as compensation for its past efforts to prosecute him.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters

Between Hegseth And Fox News 'Cabinet,' No Constraint On Potential War Crimes

Between Hegseth And Fox News 'Cabinet,' No Constraint On Potential War Crimes

A crucial piece of context for President Donald Trump’s deranged threat to annihilate all of Iran’s power plants and its “whole civilization” is that both his senior administration adviser on the matter, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and his key outside advisers at Fox News champion the commission of brutal war crimes by the U.S. military.

The clock is ticking on Trump’s latest ultimatum to Iran’s leaders, who he has said must open the Strait of Hormuz by 8 p.m. ET or face a campaign of U.S. war crimes. The president, facing strategic defeat in Iran, is responding by using the threat of devastation to try to compel the Iranian regime to give him what he wants.

“If they don’t come through, if they want to keep it closed, they’re going to lose every power plant and every other plant they have in the whole country,” he said in a Monday interview.

The president added in a Tuesday morning post on Truth Social that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again” if Iran’s regime does not submit.

Trump post threatening Iran

Trump has repeatedly reset such timelines — but there’s no question that if he does finally give the order, his defense secretary will execute it with relish. And his Fox Cabinet is currently champing at the bit for him to launch the attacks.

But if Iran does not submit and the U.S. military does destroy its power plants, what will the next target set be if the regime still cannot be compelled to give in?

Secretary of War Crimes

Hegseth’s distinguishing characteristic in his prior role as weekend host of Fox’s morning show was his delight in the prospect of American service members engaging in brutality.

Indeed, Trump’s ultimatum seems cribbed from a strategy Hegseth urged him to undertake in January 2020, after the U.S. military assassinated Iranian Lt. Gen. Qasem Soleimani and Iran retaliated with strikes on U.S. military facilities in the region.

“I happen to believe that we can't kick the can down the road any longer in trying to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear bomb,” Hegseth said on the January 8, 2020, edition of Fox & Friends. “What better time than now to say, we're starting the clock, you've got a week, you've got X amount of time before we start taking out your energy production facilities? We take out key infrastructure. We take out your missile sites. We take out nuclear developments. … We take out port facilities.”

“Iran has been in endless war with us for 40 years,” he explained. “Either we put up and shut up now and stop it, or we kind of wait, go back to the table, and let them dither while they attempt to continue to develop the capabilities to do precisely what they said they want to do. So either we — we're honest about the nature of this regime, or I think we miss a moment.”

Hegseth repeatedly called during this period for the U.S. military to target Iran’s civilian infrastructure, specifically highlighting its “oil refineries,” “oil infrastructure,” “some ports,” “energy production facilities,” “political sites,” and “cultural sites.”

At the time, Defense Secretary Mark Esper acted as a brake on Trump’s bloodthirsty impulses. After the president floated attacking Iranian cultural sites, Esper publicly ruled out such strikes, which he explicitly described as violations of the “laws of armed conflict.”

But Hegseth notoriously does not believe such laws bind the U.S. military. Beyond his calls for attacking civilian energy and cultural sites, both unambiguous war crimes, he has championed U.S. service members accused or convicted of unlawful killings of civilians and enemy combatants. Indeed, during a 2019 Fox appearance, Hegseth said of a soldier charged with murdering a captured Afghan man who was allegedly a Taliban bombmaker, “If he committed premeditated murder … then I did as well. What do you think you do in war?” He added: “Put us all in jail.”

Hegseth also questioned whether the U.S. military should adhere to the Geneva Conventions, which govern the treatment of wounded combatants, prisoners of war, and civilians, in his 2024 book, The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free.

“Should we follow the Geneva Conventions?” Hegseth wrote. “What if we treated the enemy the way they treated us? Would that not be an incentive for the other side to reconsider their barbarism?”

“Makes me wonder, in 2024 — if you want to win — how can anyone write universal rules about killing other people in open conflict?” he continued. “Especially against enemies who fight like savages, disregarding human life in every single instance.”

In office, Hegseth has followed through on this contempt for the laws of war. He “has fired and reassigned uniformed lawyers and dismantled many of the offices set up to prevent the targeting of civilians and related sites,” focused his public statements on the need for “lethality,” and carried out operations in the Middle East, Indian Ocean, eastern Pacific Ocean, and Caribbean Sea that experts say could include war crimes, as The New York Times reported. And he’s remade the top ranks of the military, replacing senior leaders who won’t get with his program.

Now Trump is putting a new campaign of war crimes on the table, while repeatedly saying he is unconcerned with whether strikes on Iran’s power plants are illegal. And Hegseth, rather than trying to limit Trump’s options as Esper did, is publicly warning Iran’s leaders to “choose wisely, because this president does not play around."

The Fox Cabinet is all-in for war crimes

Trump often makes or calibrates his decisions based on the advice he receives in real time from his loyal propagandists at Fox. That Fox-Trump feedback loop played a key role in his decision to launch strikes on Iran in the first place, and ever since, many of his biggest supporters at the network have been urging him to respond to the war’s strategic failure with further escalation.

The Fox Cabinet, like the official one, could choose to act as a restraint on the president’s most psychotic plans. But the network’s stars seem fully bought in on the proposed attacks on Iran’s energy infrastructure.

“Tick tock,” Fox host and Trump operative Sean Hannity began Monday’s monologue. “In 23 hours, that will determine the fate of Iran's rogue regime. By this time tomorrow, the deadline will be over. They can hand over all of their nuclear material, open the Strait of Hormuz, and make a deal that will allow for their survival, or they will be bombed into oblivion.”

After airing comments from Trump about the plan, Hannity warned Iran’s leaders to “think carefully because President Trump has proven again and again he does not make empty threats.”

“That should be more than obvious to all of them by now,” he continued. “And I'm actually hoping and praying, cautiously, even optimistic that this remaining fourth or fifth tier of leadership chooses the negotiated settlement and Iran's infrastructure for its people can remain in place.”

Fox host Jesse Watters also defended the proposed strikes on Monday night.

“These targets are selected as humanely as possible, considering dual use systems and the law of proportionality,” he said. “But the goal of war is to win. We aren't hitting their water, hospitals, or hotels. That's what Iran is doing to our allies.”

“Remember, these aren't civilian power plants,” he added. “The Guard runs them and gets dibs on the power, so hitting that type of target hurts the military and their ability to fight back.”

“He talked about the power energy plants being targets, the rail stations as well,” Fox & Friends host Lawrence Jones said Tuesday in response to Trump’s “whole civilization” threat. “He does not want death and destruction but the deadline is the deadline, and it doesn't seem like he is going to move it.”

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters


Fox News Hosts Scapegoat NATO For Trump's Botching Of Iran War

Fox News Hosts Scapegoat NATO For Trump's Botching Of Iran War

Fox News’ MAGA stars, unable to acknowledge that the war in Iran that President Donald Trump launched with their support is spiralling into a strategic defeat, have landed on a scapegoat: NATO and its member states, which were not consulted by the United States before it joined Israel in starting the war and have since refused participation.

Laura Ingraham, Jesse Watters, and Sean Hannity respectively denounced NATO on Wednesday as “kind of a meaningless ally” that “we’ve had it with” for purportedly “abandoning us.” Hannity and Ingraham each suggested that Trump should withdraw the U.S. from the alliance (which he is barred from doing unilaterally under a bill Secretary of State Marco Rubio cosponsored in the Senate that became law in 2023).

Trump has spent the last several weeks raging over the refusal by U.S. allies to send their navies into the active war zone to escort oil tankers and other commercial ships after Iran, in an obvious strategic countermeasure to the U.S. attack, closed the Strait of Hormuz. Over the weekend, Spain, Italy, and France refused to allow their military bases or airspace to be used by U.S. or Israeli aircraft involved in the war, triggering a new wave of vitriol from the president and his top aides.

Trump claimed in a Wednesday interview to be “beyond reconsideration” of the U.S. role in NATO after “they weren’t there for us” in Iran. (NATO is a defensive alliance — in response to the 9/11 attacks, its members deployed forces alongside the U.S. military in Afghanistan but are not bound by the treaty to participate in offensive wars.) In an address from the White House that night, the president urged the “countries of the world” to “build up some delayed courage. … Go to the strait and just take it, protect it, use it for yourselves.”

The looming strategic failure of the U.S. war in Iran — its regime is intact and in control of its uranium stockpile and the strait, and altering those circumstances that would likely require a risky escalation involving American ground troops — has placed Fox’s hosts in a bind. They have assured their viewers that the war is an historic success and appear unable to break with Trump due to his support among their viewers. That makes our NATO allies an appealing target as the war grinds on.

The president regularly tunes in to Fox to guide his communication and policy decisions. If he was watching before or after his speech on Wednesday, he heard vigorous support for pivoting from his inability to defeat America’s foes to punishing its friends.

Hannity: NATO is “a one-sided alliance,” by leaving “we'll probably save a lot of money”

Hannity, of the network’s three major evening hosts, is the one most committed to the U.S. war in Iran (which he had demanded for decades), the closest personally to Trump, and the loudest voice currently denouncing NATO.

Following Trump’s speech, he panned NATO as “a one-sided alliance where we only go and protect Europe” and suggested its member states had become too culturally Muslim. In response, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) uncorked a screed in which he called for the redeployment of U.S. forces from Europe because “when we needed them the most and when the world needed them the most to stop a religious Nazi regime from having a nuclear breakout, they took a pass.”

“I think that there's going to be a reevaluation and I believe America's contribution just went down dramatically, and we'll know more in the weeks ahead as this now begins to wrap up,” Hannity replied.

Later in the broadcast, the host said it was “unimaginable to me that the NATO alliance would shatter” thanks to the purported refusal by its members to agree to what “should not be a controversial assist on their part.”

“I've got to imagine the ramifications of them abandoning us in this effort is going to — this is going to be deep, profound, and long-lasting,” he added.

Fox contributor Mike Pompeo, who served as secretary of state in Trump’s first administration, characterized NATO as “feckless, not to be able to convince their own people” of the importance of the Iran war, while retired Army Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, another former Trump administration figure, said the U.S. should withdraw from the alliance and form a new one.

“Yeah, I think you're right and we'll probably save a lot of money,” Hannity replied to Kellogg. “But the fact that they did not have a moral clarity when you're dealing with the No. 1 state sponsor of terror potentially this close to acquiring nuclear weapons is breathtaking to me. And this will have reverberations, I believe, going on for decades to come.”

Ingraham: NATO is “kind of a meaningless ally” due to “weakness in Europe”

Ingraham had recently warned about potential downsides of the war, but quickly pivoted back in line with her colleagues. While previewing Trump’s speech on Wednesday’s broadcast, she claimed that “NATO turned out, in this case at least, to be what Donald Trump had predicted: kind of a meaningless ally, if allies at all.”

Her guest, the Heritage Foundation’s James Carafano, responded with the evening’s most vigorous defense of the alliance. “I don't think NATO is the problem,” he said, instead pointing to “some very weak leaders inside NATO who have made some very cowardly decisions” and “look like complete yahoos.”

“What we're going to see is not NATO disbanded,” Carafano. “That's nuts. But what we're more likely to see is NATO step back up to the plate under pressure from Donald Trump, and countries throw out their own leaders because they’re weak-kneed yahoos.”

But Ingraham responded by saying that disbanding NATO should be on the table.

“Well, I'm not sure I agree with that,” she replied. “I think there's just a lot of weakness in Europe, period. Period, there's weakness. … We're so lucky we have Donald Trump as president of the United States.”

Watters: “We’ve had it with these people”

Watters joined in the NATO criticism on Wednesday, albeit in a somewhat less aggressive tone than his colleagues.

“The NATO allies, I put allies in quotes,” he said. “I mean, it's been a great alliance over the years. It's really kept the Russians off the continent until the Ukraine invasion. But it's been really one-sided, and now a lot of people are looking around at them saying no, you can't use the airspace. You can't use the base.”

“They've had it,” he added. “We've had it with these people. We love them, but we've had it.”

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters

Antisemitic Influencers Who Say They're 'J-Pilled' Know Exactly What It Means

Antisemitic Influencers Who Say They're 'J-Pilled' Know Exactly What It Means

A New York Times report on young attendees at last weekend’s Conservative Political Action Conference soft-peddled the movement’s antisemitism by describing some right-wingers as “J-pilled” and erroneously defining that term as “far-right slang for skepticism of Israeli influence.”

One indication that definition is inaccurate, as my former colleague Madeline Peltz pointed out in criticizing the article, is that “a few grafs later they quote a groyper who says ‘at least 60 percent of the young people here’ are fans of Nick Fuentes, who wants to deport all Jews from America.”

Another tell, of course, is that “Israel” doesn’t begin with a J — but “Jew” does. “J-pilled,” as should be extremely obvious from the name, is actually far-right slang for skepticism of Jewish influence. Those who claim to be “J-pilled” see the hidden hand of the Jewish people behind every social ill, an adaptation of the gutter antisemitism familiar from the blood-soaked anti-Jewish fraudulent tome, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

This strain of explicitly anti-Jewish sentiment is a growing problem on the right. Fuentes, a Holocaust-denying white nationalist once barred from the mainstream right, broke that containment in 2025 with a wave of appearances with popular podcasters like Tucker Carlson. He and his allies have tried to use the horrific scenes of devastation the Israeli military perpetrated against Palestinians in Gaza to make inroads with young Republicans and encourage them to adopt virulently antisemitic views — and polling suggests they are succeeding.

If you spend enough time watching the programs of Fuentes and his ilk, you will hear the cohort the Times describes make very clear that when they use the term “J-pilled,” they are talking about Jews, not Israel.

  • Here’s a viewer telling Fuentes that his “boomer family” is “being J-pilled” by Candace Owens talking “about the propaganda surrounding Hitler.”
  • Here’s one explaining to Hitler-praising manosphere streamer Myron Gaines (real name Amrou Fudl) that he “found out my mom is jew pilled” when he “brought up some things about the jews and she started talking about the red cows and temple.” (While reading this comment, Gaines shortened “jew pilled” to “J-pilled.”)
  • Here’s another one telling Gaines, “My sister who is J-pilled thinks the jews want Maduro dead because his politics outlaws jews! no porn, no abortion, no usury!” (When Gaines read the latter comment, he said “J’s” in both places where the text read “jews.”)

Some on the far-right, hoping to avoid being accurately tarred as antisemites, deliberately try to muddy the waters. Gaines, for example, often uses the term “J-pilled” when he is discussing Israel.

But the streamer has also made clear this is a smokescreen. During a March 2025 show, he read a viewer’s claim that “the Disney CEO (Bob Iger) the man who has been destroying movies with bs trans ideology and feminism ideology and funding shitty movies it all makes sense when you check WIKI” — a reference to Iger being Jewish.

In response, Gaines told his livestreaming audience to type “1” into the stream’s chat “if I've J-pilled you,” adding, “I gotta obviously use certain terminology here for obvious reasons, but you guys know what I'm talking about.”

“All right, sweet,” he said as the chat became a stream of people replying with 1s.

Some are less subtle about what they mean when they talk about “J-pilling.” Take Stew Peters, a prominent right-wing streamer and influencer known for bigoted commentary, violent ideation about his political foes, and deranged conspiracy theories.

“As everybody knows, The Stew Peters Show and this network broadly have been and still are to this day at the forefront of J-pilling the American people,” Peters said in November 2025. “Our people are waking up. Our people are rising up. They’re noticing, and the noticing will continue. If you think about it, it’s impossible not to notice.”

Peters then detailed who and what his supporters are “noticing” — the Jews responsible for all of society’s problems.

“Just think of everything that these walking, talking, interest-charging demons have been responsible for,” he said.

He continued: “If societal ills were a bunch of stones in the middle of a field somewhere and all of us got together walking around, turning up the stones to see what’s underneath them, under every single one of these stones, you would find a little Jew-man, grubbing his hands, smirking, wearing his tiny hat, trying to get over on the goyim. Trying to kill the goyim, when it really comes down to it.”

“Just think of all that these people are responsible for,” he added. “Usury, central banking, communism, Bolshevik communism, the Holodomor, the transatlantic slave trade, transgenderism, the normalization of homosexuality, the normalization of pedophilia, transgenderism for kids, open borders, white replacement, white genocide, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, AIPAC, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the assassination of Charlie Kirk, abortion, which is just a modern-day Malachian sacrifice ritual.”

Trump Says 'Watch Mark Levin' As Fox Host Urged US Troops To Seize Iran Uranium

Trump Says 'Watch Mark Levin' As Fox Host Urged US Troops To Seize Iran Uranium

Fox News host Mark Levin suggested the U.S. military should seize Iran’s uranium — a risky escalation experts say would place troops under fire on Iranian soil for days — during a Saturday night program that President Donald Trump had urged his supporters to watch for its discussion of “the importance of hitting Iran, HARD!!!"

Under normal circumstances, the nasal-voiced screeds a sycophantic Fox news host yells on his taped weekend program wouldn’t matter for much. But Trump is often persuaded by what the network’s MAGA propagandists tell him through his television, he’s previously leaned on council from Levin with regard to Iran in particular, and earlier on Saturday, the president urged his supporters to tune in to Levin’s show that evening.

“Watch Mark Levin interview of Brilliant Marc Thiessen tonight at 8:00 P.M., on FoxNews,” Trump posted to Truth Social. “Will discuss the importance of hitting Iran, HARD!!!”

Trump’s instruction for supporters to watch Fox discourse on the prospect of further escalations in Iran comes as the war approaches a flashpoint. Iran’s regime is intact and it has successfully closed the Strait of Hormuz, a strategic victory that threatens global trade. With Trump’s initial prediction of a four-to-five-week war in doubt, U.S. troops are streaming toward the region and preparing for weeks of ground operations. The Pentagon has reportedly prepared a list of purported “final blow” options that include seizing Iran’s Kharg Island oil terminal and extracting Iran’s uranium, even as Trump himself is reportedly “getting a little bored” and “wants to move on” from Iran, as a senior White House official told MS NOW.

Fox’s pro-Trump hosts are trying to influence the president’s next move. Laura Ingraham warned last week that further escalation could trigger “cascading problems for the region” and “political problems for the president,” while Sean Hannity suggested that the war is all but over and Jesse Watters said any further action would amount to a “knockout.”

Saturday’s broadcast illuminates Levin’s position among the network’s biggest hawks. And he appears to be showering Trump with praise in an effort to get the president on board with his latest escalation scheme. Levin touted Trump’s “enormous intelligence,” claimed his “victory” against Iran is “absolutely incredible,” and portrayed the war’s critics as merely Trump-haters.

The Fox-Trump feedback loop has in recent months played a role in the president’s decisions to send White House border czar Tom Homan to oversee immigration enforcement in Minnesota; prioritize the SAVE Act over all other legislation; order the deployment of ICE agents to airports; and start the war against Iran. Will it now help trigger an incredibly risky military operation?

Levin: We need ground troops in Iran because “we’ve got to get the uranium”

After spending the bulk of Saturday’s monologue praising Trump’s war and denouncing its critics (described below), Levin came to the point: He wants the president to deploy ground troops in Iran to seize Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile.

“Why would we need troops on the ground?” he explained. “Well, there's a lot of reasons, and we wouldn't need 300,000 of them.”

“We've got to get the uranium — if it cannot be destroyed, if it cannot be altered, we've got to get it,” Levin said. “That's why I am reading in the paper, we are talking about the 82nd Airborne, we're talking about these various special forces and the various military services and so forth.”

“He's not talking about sending regular Army and infantry in by the hundreds of thousands — the men he's talking about, the units he is talking about, they are specialized,” Levin continued. “And you know what else? I remember from my days in the Reagan administration, many of them are trained for a moment like this to try and secure enriched uranium. Many have been trained for moments like this.”

Thiessen, the Washington Post columnist and Fox contributor whom Trump described as “Brilliant,” likewise argued that “if we don't get that enriched uranium, and they want to get back at us for what we've done, the easiest way to do it would be to get it to al-Qaida and let them use it for a dirty bomb.”

“So we have got to get what Donald Trump correctly calls the nuclear dust before this operation is done,” Thiessen concluded.

The Wall Street Journal’s description of an operation to extract nearly 1,000 pounds of nuclear material buried in the middle of a hostile country during a shooting war does not sound as easy as Levin and Thiessen made it out to be. The paper reported:

Teams of U.S. forces would need to fly to the sites, likely under fire from Iranian surface-to-air missiles and drones. Once on site, combat troops would need to secure perimeters so that engineers with excavating equipment could search through debris and check for mines and booby traps.
The extraction of the material would likely need to be conducted by an elite special operations team specially trained to remove radioactive material from a conflict zone. The highly enriched uranium is likely contained in 40 to 50 special cylinders that resemble scuba tanks. They would need to be put into transportation casks to protect against accidents. That could fill several trucks, said Richard Nephew, a senior research scholar at Columbia University and a former nuclear negotiator with Iran.
Unless an airfield was available, a makeshift one would need to be set up to bring equipment in and take the nuclear material out. The entire operation would take days or even a week to complete, experts said.

Trump “hasn’t made a decision on whether to give the order” and is “considering the danger to U.S. troops,” but “remains generally open to the idea,” the Journal reports.

More open, perhaps, after hearing the pitch from Levin and Thiessen.

Levin: Trump has “enormous intelligence,” his Iran “victory” is “absolutely incredible”

Before urging Trump to send U.S. ground troops to invade Iran, Levin began his Saturday monologue by offering fulsome praise for the war of choice he had urged the president to start.

“I've been thinking about the war with Iran,” he began. “I like to call it a military operation. I actually like to call it a peace mission, because that's what it is, and how incredible it is, and the magnitude of this victory. It's not a final victory, but this victory up to this point is incredible, absolutely incredible.”

Levin meandered through his justification for the war, denouncing President Barack Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, which he described as “an agreement that would ensure they get a nuclear weapon,” and comparing U.S. military deaths during the Iran war with those during other U.S. conflicts dating back to the Korean War as well as fatalities from murder and fentanyl overdoses.

He ultimately claimed that Iran could have turned its enriched uranium for a “dirty bomb” and then employed terrorists to detonate it in a U.S. city. “So what the president is doing is monumental in terms of protecting the American people,” Levin explained.

The host concluded that “we're in good hands” with Trump “because he's a man with enormous intelligence, enormous common sense. He's not an ideologue. He doesn't run around with slogans. He is prudential. He looks at the facts, he looks at the challenge, and he's dealing with it.”

Thiessen likewise gushed over the president’s war.

“We're about halfway through this thing,” Thiessen claimed, “and when this is all over, this is going to go down in history as possibly the greatest military campaign the United States has waged since the American Revolution.”

Levin: War critics “aren’t serious people,” they “are people who just oppose Trump”

Levin finds his own arguments so compelling that he can’t imagine why anyone would disagree with them.

Pointing to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and recently resigned former Trump intelligence official Joe Kent, Levin commented, “These aren't serious people with serious disagreements. These aren't serious people with substantive knowledge that's different than it was before. No, no, no. These are people who just oppose Donald Trump. That's the truth.”

He later complained that Schumer, “the conga line of Democrats,” and “the woke Reich neofascist isolationists” were giving Iran “the benefit of the doubt.”

“Why would you give a terrorist regime that slaughtered Americans and is the biggest promoter of terrorism the benefit of the doubt?” he whined.

Thiessen likewise told Levin that the Democrats are “rooting for defeat,” adding, “There are people in this country who hate Donald Trump more than they hate the Iranian regime that just massacred 32,000 people in their streets.”

That’s what Trump wanted his followers to tune-in for: A totally one-sided dismissal of the Iran war’s critics in favor of continued escalation in an aimless conflict that's already spiraled out of control.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters

Laura Ingraham

Fox News' United Front Supporting Trump's Iran War May Be Breaking Down

Four weeks after President Donald Trump launched a poorly conceived war of choice against Iran, the lockstep support for the conflict that has characterized coverage from Fox News’ star hosts is beginning to fray. The power struggle is significant — it is not an exaggeration to suggest the course of the war might hinge on which Fox shows the president is watching.

Trump is clearly approaching a decision point over whether to further escalate the war. U.S. and Israeli forces have done a lot of damage to Iranian military targets, but its regime is intact, still controls its stockpiles of enriched uranium, and has closed the Strait of Hormuz, threatening the global trade in oil, natural gas, and fertilizer. The Pentagon is sending thousands of troops to the region and reportedly prepping options for a “final blow” — some of which would involve deploying U.S. forces on Iranian soil.

When Trump is considering policy options, he often takes guidance from his loyal propagandists at Fox. This Fox-Trump feedback loop has in recent months played a role in the president’s decisions to send White House border czar Tom Homan to oversee immigration enforcement in Minnesota; prioritize the SAVE Act over all other legislation; order the deployment of ICE agents to airports; and start the war against Iran.

Against that backdrop, Fox News host Laura Ingraham warned on Wednesday’s show that further U.S. action could produce devastating unintended consequences and suggested that Trump should refocus his attention on the domestic economy and political situation.

“Iran knows it cannot win militarily, so it's using the leverage it has by prolonging the conflict,” she said during her monologue at the top of the show. “Now, what do they want to do? They want to inflict maximum economic pain on the region, on the U.S., [on] the global economy as much as possible until they think Trump relents. But the White House doesn't seem to be blinking.”

The host then aired a clip of White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt warning at her press briefing that day that “President Trump does not bluff, and he is prepared to unleash hell” against Iran.

Ingraham did not seem impressed by Leavitt’s rhetoric.

“Well, the problem is obviously unleashing hell means destroying infrastructure, which itself causes a series of cascading problems for the region, including maybe outside the region — political problems for the president in a midterm election year,” she said.

Her air of skepticism continued throughout the show.

While interviewing Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), she noted Pentagon reports of thousands of successful missions but commented, “I mean, this is a devastating blow, yet you know, we're still there.”

“It's not even a month old, obviously,” she continued, before asking, “But are you concerned about the public and people? Again, very short attention spans, very impatient for victory, as is President Trump, I might add. But in an election year, it's easy to say politics don't matter, but at some point politics do come into play.”

And in a third segment, she highlighted the disastrous polling on the Iran war, commenting, “It looks like people are pretty impatient. The American people are sending a message to President Trump that it's time to put the focus back on the home front.”

Ingraham is inching toward the type of dissent that has been virtually absent from Fox’s coverage of the war, even as the broader right-wing media has split. Her colleagues have played key roles in convincing Trump to attack in the first place and are pushing for risky escalations. Ingraham herself briefly quibbled with Trump’s handling of an apparent U.S. strike that leveled an Iranian school, killing scores of children, but had supported the war itself, which she declared three weeks ago that Trump had already won.

But if Ingraham is getting cold feet and trying to convince Trump not to escalate a war the public has soured on, she remains an outlier at the network. Indeed, if the president tuned in for the two hours following Ingraham’s program, he saw her prime-time colleagues Jesse Watters and Sean Hannity argue not only that the war is going well and that Trump will inevitably lead the U.S. to victory, but that anyone who disagrees must want America to lose the war because they hate the president.

Watters began his show with a 10-minute monologue whose thesis was that “the Iranian regime is losing leverage fast as we continue to carry out thousands of sorties over enemy airspace.” After detailing various tactical victories, he touted a potential escalation.

“[President] 47 could be eyeing a knockout — Iran's crown jewel, Kharg Island,” he said. “The Republican Guard has been preparing for battle, laying mines, booby trapping, loading up on Stingers, but retired top brass says our military is ready to shock and seize the terrain by air, by sea. We don't know if it's going to happen, but if it does happen, the Iranians won't know it's coming.”

“Iran looks like this is their last gasp, but some people would rather America lose the war because they hate Trump,” Watters concluded. “So far, this is the cleanest, most surgical and one-sided operation in American military history. Now, anything could happen, war is hell, it's unpredictable, but people in the know in Washington think we're about to close it out with a pretty big blow.”

Hannity, in his opening monologue, likewise declared: “Many on the left are now rooting for America to lose. Others seem to be hoping for another Vietnam-style quagmire. Why? Because Democrats care more about their political ambition rather than the future, safety, and security of your children and your grandchildren.”

“But tonight, President Trump is ignoring all the hysteria and pushing for peace one way or the other,” he continued. “If Iran's obliterated regime will not agree to a lasting agreement, this president has pledged he will continue to decimate their resolve through force, but that's really going to be up to them. They might unleash hell, otherwise.”

After airing a clip from Leavitt’s press briefing, Hannity added, “The message from President Trump is clear: Work with the U.S. or you will be killed.”

To which Ingraham might reply — what if killing them creates “cascading problems for the region”? As of yet, Watters and Hannity aren’t expressing any such concerns. And who the president is watching may determine the shape of things to come.

Legacy News Outlets That Bent Knee To Trump Losing Their Credibility -- And Audience

Legacy News Outlets That Bent Knee To Trump Losing Their Credibility -- And Audience

It turns out that there isn’t a ratings bump for MAGA capitulation.

David Ellison, the son of President Donald Trump’s megabillionaire ally Larry Ellison, took control of CBS last year following a corrupt deal that saw its parent company settle a lawsuit with the president and agree to implement a new conservative ombudsman for CBS News. As part of that takeover, he also installed conservative journalist Bari Weiss at the helm, promising that her “entrepreneurial drive and editorial vision” would “invigorate” the network. But six months into Weiss’ rightward makeover of CBS, the fruits of her labors include cheers from Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for making the network more palatable to their aims, complaints from the CBS newsroom that she is dismantling its independence — and, it now appears, a viewer exodus.

Status’ Oliver Darcy got ahold of some CBS News ratings data from the first quarter of 2026, and it is brutal. CBS Evening News has lost seven percent of viewers year-over-year, placing it “on track for its lowest-rated first quarter of the 21st century in both total viewers and the advertiser-coveted 25-54 demographic,” while CBS Mornings plummeted 13 percent and “is pacing toward its lowest-rated quarter on record in both total audience and the key demo.” Meanwhile, the audiences of competitor shows at ABC News and NBC News grew over the same period.

The ratings collapse is a devastating indictment of the strategy Ellison and Weiss are executing at CBS — and a blaring warning for CNN if Ellison is able to complete his takeover of that network and let Weiss run the same playbook there.

Meanwhile, new data from the Alliance for Audited Media show that while average daily print circulation among major audited newspapers saw year-over-year declines across the board in the six months running through the end of September 2025, the biggest drops came at The Washington Post, which fell 21.2 percent followed by the Los Angeles Times, down 19.8 percent. Their billionaire owners — Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and biotech mogul Patrick Soon-Shiong, respectively — had responded to Trump’s return to the White House by trying to shift their papers to the right.

None of this should come as a surprise

Ellison and Weiss have suggested that the core problem for American media is that the public does not trust news outlets, and that the reason for this is that the public perceives those outlets as too far left and too critical of the right. They propose to win over a larger audience by deliberately course-correcting in the opposite direction.

“We are not producing a product that enough people want,” Weiss said at a CBS News staff town hall in January. Weiss attributed this to two factors. “First: Not enough people trust us. Not you. Us. As in: the mainstream media,” she said. “Second: We are not doing enough to meet audiences where they are. So they are leaving us.”

Weiss is correct that trust in traditional media has fallen dramatically in recent decades, particularly among conservatives — indeed, this is a banal truth that everyone remotely connected to the media knows. But her strategy of conceding that potential viewers are correct to distrust journalists and seeking to “meet audiences where they are” by signaling that coverage will now be deliberately shifted to the right has had the obvious result of driving away the existing audience without adding a new one.

CBS News’ viewers either liked what they were already watching or they liked what watching Edward R. Murrow’s old network said about them. When the network’s new ownership and management proposed taking its programming in a dramatically different direction in search of a different audience — as the wildly unpopular president cheered — the existing viewers could see that, and some decided that CBS is no longer worth their patronage.

Weiss’ theory of the case is that these losses could be made up by new viewers with more right-leaning views. But the decline in public trust for traditional media among Republicans stems at least in part from a decades-long strategy pursued deliberately by the GOP and conservative movement. That effort revolves around simultaneously denouncing news outlets as liberal propaganda while encouraging conservatives to instead patronize new, deliberately right-wing news sources. And it’s been taken to another level under Trump, who relentlessly attacks the press while using state power to reduce its influence and lift up the MAGA media operation.

That dynamic makes it wildly implausible that the shift Weiss enacted would win over a sizable new segment of viewers. Her version of CBS may garner praise from Trump, but people who might be swayed by his comments already have — and are likely already patronizing — a plethora of pro-Trump outlets. You could imagine a scenario where some slightly more right-wing viewers of the ABC and NBC news shows switched to watching the new CBS. But instead, the data Darcy cited suggests, CBS appears to be shedding viewers who are instead watching its competitors — or exiting broadcast television altogether as their news source.

As for Bezos’ Post and Soon-Shiong’s Times, when the owners similarly bet on trying to make their outlets more acceptable to Trump, their existing audiences looked for the exits and were not replaced. The efforts may win over the likes of Tucker Carlson or even the president himself, but MAGA isn’t rushing to buy subscriptions.

For Ellison, Bezos, and Soon-Shiong, the declines in their news outlets may be a small price to pay to win over Trump. Each owner has massive business holdings outside of the press and can afford the losses from tearing down their news outlets if it wins the Trump administration’s support for their desired mergers, contracts, or patents.

The journalists facing layoffs from their outlets — and the public who lose access to their reporting — are the ones who will actually suffer from this doomed strategy.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters