Every summer, conservative television hosts and influencers suddenly discover women’s professional basketball, which they insist they don’t care about, and then they spend weeks explaining why it’s one of society’s greatest ills. This year, just like last, their attempts to turn the WNBA into a proxy war for cultural grievances is failing because it’s not really about the league. 

It is a content farm built using Caitlin Clark, her Indiana Fever teammate Sophie Cunningham and a nonexistent transgender player controversy to conceal old grievances about race and gender. But despite the attempts to sully the WNBA brand, the league is thriving — and the whole spectacle is now backfiring in ways even the people profiting from it can no longer hide. 

The right has attacked the WNBA since at least Brittney Griner’s 2022 imprisonment in Russia. In 2025, the Onion ran a spoof headline imagining the State Department designating the league a terrorist organization. It was funny because it wasn’t that far off from how conservative media actually treats the WNBA until football arrives to distract them. 

For three seasons, Clark has been the perfect vessel for this project. The former Iowa superstar entered the WNBA as the all-time leading scorer in women’s Division I basketball, and she arrived in Indianapolis with a massive audience already attached to her. That made her an irresistible figure for a right-wing media ecosystem constantly searching for a new culture war protagonist. Fox built out what it called a “hard contact timeline” for Clark, who is white in a league where 70% of the players are Black. This helped lay the groundwork for MAGA media’s narrative: that the WNBA is being handed a gift by a white star, and it is responding with ingratitude. 

This year they have taken that myth further than ever, and Media Matters for America put a number on exactly how far. Since June 25, when Phoenix Mercury forward Alyssa Thomas, who is Black, picked up a flagrant foul on Clark, Fox News has aired at least 206 segments and devoted more than 13 and a half hours of programming to the WNBA, sprawled across “The Five,” “The Ingraham Angle,” “Hannity” and “Gutfeld!” More than eight of those hours, according to the analysis, have gone specifically to relitigating the issue of trans athletes in a league that has none.

This inconvenient reality has turned the right-wing media circus into an absurd performance art piece. Pundits have resorted to inventing entirely fictional scenarios to keep their audiences angry. Outkick founder Clay Travis offered to bankroll a completely fake expansion team in Nashville just to stock it with a 100% transgender roster. Cunningham’s comments in an interview with ESPN opposing trans inclusion in women’s sports gave this machinery another opening. Fox’s coverage pivoted from hard fouls to trans panic, Clark got dragged into a fight she has spent three years trying to avoid and Cunningham’s follower count exploded. Former NBA players like Enes Kanter Freedom and Royce White are now engaged in publicity stunts declaring themselves eligible for future drafts under the cynical guise of identifying as women. 

The wall-to-wall outrage manufactured by Fox News and its allies has even appeared to tire the network’s host Jesse Watters, who is no stranger to being aggrieved by so-called wokeness. “This is week three of ‘The Five’ covering the WNBA,” he recently complained, “and I have to say, I’m done.” 

The on-the-ground consequences have not been abstract. When the Fever traveled to play Seattle Storm, two teenage fans wore shirts referencing XX and XY chromosomes and carried a sign thanking Cunningham for “speaking up for girls.” Storm co-owner Celeste Keaton confronted them, allegedly cursing at the girls and calling them “insane,” conduct serious enough that the league fined and suspended her for five home games, an extraordinarily rare disciplinary step against a team owner. The Storm apologized. Cunningham called Keaton’s behavior “truly embarrassing” while also attempting to distance herself from her previous anti-trans comments, stressing that trans women, trans men and everyone else are welcome “at her table.” Fox News Digital and Outkick turned the two teenagers into viral martyrs, while British novelist and anti-trans activist J.K. Rowling pronounced them “heroines” to her tens of millions of social media followers. Independent activist Jennifer Sey, whose XX-XY Athletics brand produced the shirts, and Riley Gaines, the former collegiate swimmer who has built a podcast career on her anti-LGBTQ+ advocacy and a fifth-place tie in a college championship, both showed up courtside for the Fever’s next game against the Minnesota Lynx.

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Beneath the surface of the fabricated trans panic lies an even uglier dynamic driven by racial resentment and the commodification of Clark and Cunningham. Right-wing media outlets have tried desperately to cast Clark as a conservative culture war martyr, claiming she is the helpless victim of a mass conspiracy and anti-white racism orchestrated by her peers. President Donald Trump weighed in on Thomas’ foul on Clark, saying the Fever guard was “treated rather rough.” Newsmax host Greg Kelly said the league should have “the cops” show up and start making arrests over the common basketball foul. Eleven House Republicans led by Texas Rep. August Pfluger wrote to Commissioner Cathy Engelbert speculating that rough play against Clark “may be racially motivated” and threatening federal investigation. Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, presiding over a state with no WNBA franchise, threatened to prosecute players for assault. On Fox News, the Federalist’s Brianna Lyman argued that “the bigger problem in the WNBA right now is anti-white racism,” while a recent Washington Examiner op-ed argued that “The WNBA has a black entitlement problem.”

Clark herself has repeatedly said she doesn’t want to be used this way, that harassment of any kind isn’t acceptable and that she stands with her Black colleagues in the league. It hasn’t mattered. Conservative commentators have attacked her from the other direction for refusing to take their side on trans athletes. The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh called her “the biggest coward in the history of sports.”

This is a classic MAGA media pattern: Elevate a woman as a brave truth-teller only until she exercises independent judgment. Fox News even tried to flip the whole thing on the left, writing in its Outkick vertical, “Now, they all want [Clark] to shut up and dribble.” The aggressive pushback against Black stars like Angel Reese and DiJonai Carrington, meanwhile, demonstrates that the conservative media apparatus views the surging popularity of women’s basketball primarily through a racialized lens.

And yet the plan is not working — at least not in the way its architects intended. Rather than capitulating to the relentless pressure from right-wing pundits and political actors, the broader WNBA community has mounted a fierce and inspiring defense of its players and values. The league issued strong statements making it abundantly clear that its players will not be used as political pawns for reactionary internet trolls. Fans have shown up waving Trans Pride flags. Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve wore a shirt reading “Trans kids belong” on an ESPN broadcast and told reporters plainly that “there is a faction of people in our country that are making this a massive issue.” Fans of the opposing Golden State Valkyries cheered Carrington’s return to Chase Center after the outrage over her Aug. 8 flagrant foul against Cunningham. 

Meanwhile, the business the right claims to be so worried about keeps expanding, regardless of how loudly Fox tries to poison it. The league signed an 11-year media rights agreement — worth roughly $2 billion — with Disney, Amazon and NBC that took effect in 2025. Viewership was up 23% that season and ticket sales increased by 26%, and the new collective bargaining agreement ratified this spring raised the team salary cap from roughly $1.5 to $7 million, the largest single jump in the history of American professional sports labor, with players now guaranteed a real share of league revenue for the first time. 

None of this happened because Fox News decided to help. It happened because millions of people, including plenty who have never watched a minute of Fox in their lives, decided the games were worth watching on their own terms.

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Donald Trump hates embarrassing failures even when they are, ultimately, his own fault. So when the sealant on his $13.1 million-turned-$16-million Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool renovation started peeling off in sheets days after the pool reopened and the water turned green with algae, he couldn’t simply say that a rushed, no-bid contract handed to his golfing buddy’s company produced shoddy work. Instead he demanded a villain, and the weaponized Justice Department complied.

On July 2, 2026, U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro held a triumphant press briefing to announce a felony indictment against former Olympic canoeist David Hearn. Pirro claimed her office possessed solid evidence of guilt proving beyond a reasonable doubt that the 67-year-old had committed a deliberate, forceful and violent act causing over $1,000 in damage to the pool liner when he stopped his bike in June, reached down and touched a loose piece of lining that had already come apart before he ever laid a hand on it. When pressed by journalists like NBC’s Ryan Reilly about photographic evidence showing the liner was already peeling long before Hearn ever stepped near the water, Pirro grew combative, waving off the question with the same on-air contempt she perfected across 14 years as a host at Fox News, and insisted her office would prove the damage in court with expert testimony.

Weeks later, the Justice Department acknowledged something dramatically different.

By late July, as Hearn’s defense counsel moved for release of the grand jury transcripts to expose glaring prosecutorial irregularities, Pirro’s case collapsed. Facing the real possibility of judicial sanctions, an inspector general investigation and disbarment, her office filed a 20-page motion to dismiss the indictment. The filing threw the Interior Department under the bus, claiming Secretary Doug Burgum’s agency had withheld 695 megabytes of crucial documents revealing the damage was caused by contractor error during the rush to finish before the America 250 Independence Day festivities. The department’s own records described repeated installation failures and extensive peeling of the pool liner weeks before the alleged vandalism was ever said to have occurred. Prosecutors asked that the charges be dismissed because the evidence no longer supported Pirro’s claim, evidence that, it bears repeating, had been available to the government the entire time.

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The dismissal did not stop with Hearn. Within days, Pirro’s office also moved to drop misdemeanor charges against three more people accused of the same phantom vandalism. Justin Carreno, Sophie Dennison-Gibby and Cameron Thiers all faced lesser counts of destroying property worth less than a thousand dollars, and their attorneys told reporters the common thread was simple: The federal government had just spent millions repainting and relining the pool, and when the work failed, the Trump administration needed a scapegoat. The entire theory of the case — that ordinary citizens had descended on a national monument with knives to sabotage it out of political spite — evaporated once anyone with subpoena power actually looked at the evidence.

The saga of the Reflecting Pool is emblematic of everything amiss in America right now, a perfect diorama of how right-wing media turns Trump’s fantasies into public reality, and then tries to quietly conceal the wreckage once the facts catch up. Fox News was happy to amplify the vandalism narrative when it was useful. But once the case fell apart, the network gave it barely cursory treatment, a striking silence from an outlet that had spent weeks covering the alleged desecration of a national monument when the story served the White House.

That silence makes sense once you remember Pirro’s origins. She spent years at Fox telling viewers whatever the moment required. By her own network’s private assessment, she was a “reckless maniac” whose 2020 election fraud claims helped make Fox liable for one of the largest defamation settlements in American history: a $787.5 million payout to Dominion Voting Systems. 

Pirro’s appointment as U.S. attorney represented the full realization of the MAGA media pipeline, in which performative loyalty on television is treated as the primary qualification for federal law enforcement authority. What she is now discovering is that a courtroom does not run on the same rules as a cable television set. At Fox, Pirro could tell her audience whatever she wanted without personal consequence. Telling a federal judge the same kind of thing carries the threat of disbarment and perjury charges, and no amount of bravado previously reserved for on-air broadcasts could change that math.

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Predictably, the moment Pirro chose self-preservation over total subversion of the law, Trump turned on her. He spent days publicly berating her, complaining to reporters that she had “folded like an umbrella” and writing on Truth Social that he fully disagreed with his own Justice Department. In a rambling, incoherent stream of consciousness to reporters from the Oval Office on Monday, he continued to insist on the existence of security tapes showing mysterious figures cutting the pool lining with box cutters — tapes no one has ever produced — while simultaneously trying to shift blame for the pool’s historical leaks onto previous administrations. On Monday, Trump met privately with Pirro and Burgum while reports circulated that he was considering replacing her.

After her Senate confirmation in August 2025, Trump promised Pirro would be a powerful crusader, and she has spent the year since prosecuting his perceived enemies with a zeal that has not been matched at trial. Her record in court is poor, with her office winning only half of its first eight criminal trials in 2026 a rate CNN reported was far below the national average. Bloomberg Law’s reporting describes a string of similarly threadbare cases: a man charged with assaulting a federal officer using a Subway sandwich following Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops in the District, who was acquitted by a jury but forced to flee his home after receiving threats; a Maryland woman jailed nearly a week for spitting on an officer at the National Zoo before the charge was quietly reduced and then dropped; a man left with permanent injuries after being tased during a high-speed chase, and whose federal charge also collapsed into a misdemeanor plea. The latter was interviewed by a Bloomberg Law reporter about his ordeal and was, according to the outlet, found dead behind a Washington rowhouse a month later. 

As people swept up in this kind of prosecutorial overreach have noted, the goal is not really conviction. It is using state power to inflict maximum disruption on a person’s job, housing and relationships, and to send a chilling message to anyone else who might draw the government’s attention. A conviction, when one happens, is treated as a bonus. The process itself is the punishment.

Pirro will likely survive this particular episode. Trump did not fire her over the weekend, and by Monday he had already moved on to blaming the judge instead. But something has shifted. 

The former Fox star who built a television career on never conceding a point is now the first prominent member of this administration to publicly contradict Trump’s own account of a story he has told, in increasingly baroque detail, for weeks. It turns out that feeding Trump’s delusions is a great deal easier from behind a Fox News desk, where no one can hold you in contempt, than standing in front of a federal judge who can.

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From the Epstein files to gun rights to immigration enforcement, senior Justice Department officials keep running to Fox News to freelance policy and signal loyalty to Donald Trump. But in the process, they are also riling up the MAGA coalition. Each media appearance creates a new mess that career lawyers then have to clean up. At this point, the most responsible thing Attorney General Pam Bondi could do is confiscate the department’s television remotes and log everyone out of their social media accounts. But restraint has never been the MAGA brand.

Consider Jeanine Pirro, the former co-host of “The Five” on Fox News before she was confirmed as U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. Pirro recently returned to her old network and vowed to arrest gun owners who bring firearms into the District, even if they are licensed elsewhere. “You bring a gun into the District, you mark my words, you’re going to jail,” she told Fox’s Martha MacCallum on Monday. “I don’t care if you have a license in another district and I don’t care if you’re a law-abiding gun owner somewhere else.”

The reaction was swift and furious on the right.

“What is Pirro talking about here, and why is a Fox anchor cheering her on?” asked conservative firearms reporter Stephen Gutowski. The National Association for Gun Rights decried Pirro’s warning as “unacceptable and intolerable comments by a sitting US attorney.” Right-wing gun hero Kyle Rittenhouse concluded that “Pirro should be fired.” 

The U.S. attorney’s stance also angered several Republican members of Congress.

“I bring a gun into the district every week… I have a license in Florida and DC to carry. And I will continue to carry to protect myself and others. Come and Take it!” Florida Republican Rep. Greg Stuebe said. “Second Amendment rights are not extinguished just because an American visits DC,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis posted on X.

Pirro eventually tried to clean up the mess on X, clarifying that D.C. law requires firearms to be licensed locally and that her office is focused on unlawful carrying. But the damage was done. A senior federal prosecutor had used a Fox News appearance to issue what sounded like a blanket threat to gun owners, contradicting both conservative orthodoxy and the administration’s own efforts to promote permitless carry and national reciprocity. 

The Fox News habit shows up again in the handling of the Epstein files, where senior officials seem desperate to minimize embarrassment to the powerful. Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general and Trump’s former personal defense lawyer, went on the network this week to reassure viewers that partying with Jeffrey Epstein “is not a crime.” He offered this absolution in the context of revelations that CBS News’ new hire Peter Attia, a health and wellness influencer, appears more than 1,700 times in newly released Epstein documents. 

The Epstein files were supposed to be Trump’s transparency moment, a chance to finally reveal what powerful men knew about a serial sexual predator. Instead the president echoed Blanche’s sentiment from the Oval Office, declaring that it was “really time” for the country to move past Epstein. Podcast host Katie Miller, wife of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, dutifully dismissed the files as a “Democrat hoax.” FBI Director Kash Patel went even further, going on Fox News’ “Special Report” this week to declare that he was done with the Epstein matter entirely. This coordinated shrug comes as Trump’s inner circle keeps popping up in Epstein-adjacent reporting.

Meanwhile, Bondi’s Justice Department is hemorrhaging prosecutors, and nowhere is the crisis more visible than in Minnesota. The state’s U.S. Attorney’s office has been decimated, shrinking from 70 assistant federal prosecutors under Biden to as few as 17 now. The four prosecutors who spearheaded the $250 million Feeding Our Future fraud case all resigned within days of each other, joining more than a dozen others in resigning rather than defending an immigration enforcement campaign so aggressive and sloppy that federal judges are openly threatening contempt citations on a near-routine basis. 

The breaking point for many was the department’s refusal to open a civil rights investigation into the January killings of U.S. citizens Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, who were fatally shot by federal immigration agents. Prosecutors raised alarms internally about the administration’s efforts to block state and local authorities from investigating the shootings as potential homicides, as well as about orders to rush through charges against defendants accused of assaulting federal officers without full investigations. One retiring attorney described it plainly: “This was the ultimate example of selective prosecution.”

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More than 300 former Justice Department attorneys have now urged Bondi to allow local investigators to do their jobs, warning that blocking state and local probes into possible violations of state law “poses a threat to the rule of law.”

While prosecutors are drowning in habeas corpus petitions and judges are losing patience, Bondi herself is finding time to go on Fox News and threaten journalists. Discussing the recent arrest of Don Lemon, who was charged with federal civil rights violations for entering an evangelical church in St. Paul to report on an anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement protest, Bondi did not hedge or walk anything back. “We’re going to prosecute you, and you will be held accountable,” she said on “Hannity” this week. “Doesn’t matter if you’re a failed journalist with a camera in your hand, you can’t do it.” 

Chad Mizelle, a former top DOJ official, took to X to openly solicit “pro-Trump” lawyers for assistant U.S. attorney positions, asking applicants to support Trump’s “anti-crime agenda.” Stephen Miller amplified the call, declaring that “patriots” were needed. Jason Reding Quiñones, the U.S. attorney in Miami, shared Mizelle’s post with his own message: “We are hiring!” 

These messages amount to a public declaration that loyalty to Trump is now a hiring criterion for federal prosecutors. For her part, Bondi has just hired a new chief of staff after leaving the position vacant since September, but no staffing shuffle can solve a leadership problem this fundamental. 

The move triggered alarm even among conservatives, with the National Review warning about politicized prosecution. Andy McCarthy, a writer for the magazine and a Fox News contributor, said the Justice Department should be defunded if support for the incumbent president is a condition of enforcing the law. The department “should only exist if it’s nonpartisan,” the former federal prosecutor wrote, warning it would be “too dangerous to liberty otherwise.” Commentary editor and National Review contributor John Podhoretz agreed. 

The brain drain has been catastrophic at the department, which is engulfed in personnel chaos. Lindsey Halligan, a former Trump personal attorney with no prosecutorial experience, washed out of the Eastern District of Virginia after failing to deliver cases against Trump’s enemies and “masquerading” as a U.S. attorney, in the words of a federal judge. Alina Habba met a similar fate in New Jersey, disqualified after courts ruled she was unlawfully serving. Ed Martin, Trump’s interim U.S. attorney in D.C., was demoted and sidelined after a review found he had shared secret grand jury material related to mortgage fraud inquiries involving Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif. He is expected to leave the department after being demoted earlier this week, and Schiff would be well within his rights to file a bar complaint.

As loyalists flame out, career lawyers are fleeing. The Trump administration tried to offset the attrition in the Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s office by creating emergency jump teams, demanding that offices rapidly designate prosecutors for short-term surges in unspecified critical situations.

Judges, meanwhile, are openly complaining that filings are late, orders are ignored and basic constitutional requirements are being violated. Chief Judge Patrick Schiltz noted with barely concealed exasperation that the Trump administration decided to send thousands of agents to Minnesota without making any provision for dealing with the hundreds of habeas petitions that were certain to follow. One prosecutor, Julie Le, told a judge that the system was so broken she sometimes wished to be held in contempt just to get a full night’s sleep. She described begging ICE to comply with court orders, emailing in 24-point font and threatening to name names in filings. “I am not white, as you can see,” she told the judge, explaining that her own family was at risk of being swept up in the same dragnet she was being forced to defend.

The administration is carrying out more arrests than it has the capacity to process humanely or legally, and it’s doing so on purpose. At any moment, they could slow down, ensure people’s rights are respected and give their own attorneys time to prepare cases properly. They have refused. 

The Department of Justice used to be a career aspiration, a place where lawyers of all backgrounds believed they could serve the public and the law. Under Trump, it is increasingly becoming an agency of career suicide. Experienced attorneys are fleeing. The post-Watergate norms — that the Justice Department should operate with a degree of independence from political pressure, that it shouldn’t be used as a weapon against the president’s enemies and that the attorney general works for the American people and not as the president’s personal lawyer — is being incinerated. Bondi and her deputies are treating every legal crisis like an opportunity for a cable news hit, and turning our constitutional project into a plotline in their ongoing MAGA reality show.

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