The pre-dawn search of Rep. Ilhan Omar’s Washington, D.C., home on Monday should have prompted a searching national outcry about presidential power and the weaponization of federal law enforcement for political purposes. Federal agents seized her phone and passport and searched her residence as part of an investigation into allegations dating back to her childhood. Authorities have also issued more than a dozen grand jury subpoenas, including to her relatives. But instead of treating this escalation as a major test of American democracy, the mainstream media’s editorial response to the breaking news has been sorely lacking. Rather than interrogating the fascistic implications of a president weaponizing federal immigration agencies to threaten political opponents with deportation, major media outlets platformed the administration’s narrative that something fishy must be occurring.

This is not how the American press normally reacts when armed agents of the federal government knock on the door of a prominent political figure. As media watchdog Adam Johnson noted at the Intercept, the very day of the FBI raid against former national security adviser John Bolton brought scathing editorials from the New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. Over the next week, each newspaper published opinion pieces opposing the raid and leveling outrage at the obvious power grab. The raid was explicitly condemned in POLITICO, The New Yorker and The Atlantic, which published four different indignant columns. 

The asymmetry in the mainstream media’s response to the Omar raid is the story. It is not simply the search itself but the absence of a sustained institutional response to the right’s yearslong campaign targeting the congresswoman that made it possible. For years, the press treated each escalation against Omar as a discrete political controversy rather than examining how the attacks were clearly building toward a confrontation with the federal government. The allegations appeared on right-wing television, circulated through MAGA podcasts and were repeated by administration officials. The investigation was discussed publicly before the search took place. By the time agents arrived at Omar’s home, the political narrative had been prepared. Yet the national conversation too often focused on whether there might be something suspicious about Omar rather than on how the administration had transformed longstanding partisan allegations into a federal investigation.

Right-wing media had agitated for this result for months, as Media Matters’ Matt Gertz has documented. In July, Fox News host Sean Hannity told a caller on his radio show that an investigation into Omar was underway. “I can tell you this: There is an investigation going on. I don’t know why it’s being slow-walked,” he said. In September, right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson said he had been hearing “rumblings” about Omar and that Vice President JD Vance had told him on the record that something was about to happen.

The administration was not subtle about what it wanted. In March, Vance said on Johnson’s podcast that “we think Ilhan Omar definitely committed immigration fraud against the United States of America,” and then described the project in plain terms: “That’s the thing that we’re trying to figure out is what are the legal remedies now that we know that she’s committed immigration fraud — how do you go after her, how do you investigate her, how do you actually do the thing, how do you build a case necessary to get some justice for the American people?” In September, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told Johnson there was an “ongoing investigation” into Omar and raised the possibility of deportation, declaring that “something’s going to happen” while stating as fact that Omar “married her brother to try to bring him to the United States.”

But not everyone in the MAGA coalition was satisfied. Laura Loomer, the conspiracy theorist and internet personality who once traveled to Minneapolis in her own fruitless attempt to prove that Omar had married her brother, fumed after the Mullin interview that the congresswoman was somehow being protected from deportation. Fox host Tomi Lahren was angrier still, devoting much of her Sept. 12 show to accusing Mullin of using Omar’s case as a sideshow to distract from the lack of larger-scale deportations. “If they want to do an investigation, do an investigation,” Lahren said, while also noting that whether Omar married her brother wouldn’t “get people out to vote.” What would, she said, was “promises made, promises kept” — mass deportations.

After Monday’s search, the celebration became even more explicit. Johnson opened his show by asking his audience whether they were excited to send Omar “back to her indigenous peoples” before announcing, “We were right. Forgive us. We’re going to gloat just a bit today.” He called the developments his “crowning achievement for life” and presented the investigation as a victory for his program. Katie Miller, the wife of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, reportedly posted “promises made, promises kept” above an article about the search before deleting the post. Even CNN anchor Jake Tapper’s questioning why Omar’s didn’t seek to make a deal with the Biden Justice Department was celebrated by MAGA influencers and right-wing outlets such as Breitbart as evidence that mainstream journalists shared their suspicions. 

The federal inquiry apparently reaches back to 1995, when Omar arrived in the United States as a Somali refugee, and to her naturalization in 2000. The warrant reportedly lists conspiracy, false statements on immigration paperwork and immigration fraud. Officials are examining allegations concerning Omar’s age and her late father’s records. Mullin has also discussed a possible racketeering case, suggesting that a conspiracy theory could connect alleged conduct across different periods. Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, has said that several investigations involving Omar are underway, including one concerning her financial disclosures.

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The scope of these inquiries makes independent scrutiny essential. A congressional watchdog previously cleared Omar of wrongdoing in connection with financial disclosures that are now reportedly under examination. The Washington Post has also reported that immigration officials scrutinized similar allegations during Trump’s first term and did not find citizenship-related issues. The administration has not publicly demonstrated why the earlier review was insufficient or what new evidence now justifies the extraordinary escalation. These are precisely the questions that a serious press corps should pursue relentlessly.

This pattern extends beyond Omar. Former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James faced indictments after Trump publicly pressured his attorney general to prosecute them. Both indictments were later dismissed because of a defect involving the appointment of the prosecutor, although the Justice Department subsequently pursued a new indictment against Comey. Former Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and Fed governor Lisa Cook have faced investigations or other government actions following sustained attacks by Trump. Their cases differ in important respects, but together they raise questions about the relationship between presidential hostility and the exercise of state power.

The consequences of this dynamic extend beyond Omar. When an administration can repeatedly identify enemies, encourage public speculation about their criminality and then launch investigations without facing sustained institutional scrutiny, the boundary between law enforcement and political retaliation becomes harder for the public to discern. The next target may be a different member of Congress, a public official or a naturalized citizen without Omar’s visibility or resources. The danger lies in normalizing a method of governance in which the president’s adversaries are continually placed under suspicion while the administration’s motives receive comparatively little examination.

The press cannot determine the outcome of Omar’s investigation, and it should not prejudge the evidence. But it can insist on transparency where legally possible, investigate the history of the allegations and examine whether officials are adhering to the standards that protect prosecutorial independence. It can also refuse to let the story disappear once the initial spectacle has passed.

Trump’s advantage lies in his ability to make extraordinary actions feel routine. Each failure to examine the cumulative pattern makes the next escalation easier to present as ordinary government business. That is how a media blind spot becomes a political opening. If the media can summon immediate outrage when federal power threatens one political figure but offer only procedural coverage when it threatens another, it risks helping normalize the very abuse it is supposed to expose.

The post The media’s Ilhan Omar blind spot handed Trump an opening appeared first on Salon.com.

Donald Trump’s new White House “pep secretary,” Katie Zacharia, introduced herself to America in the Brady Briefing Room this week, to anticipated criticism from Democrats and some unexpected criticism from Republicans.  

At first, the press pool acted like that was just business as usual. It didn’t last long. As of Friday afternoon, multiple news reports indicate that Trump has already seen enough, and has asked Zacharia to step down from her role at the White House after just five days on the job.

According to a post on X by reporter Aaron Rupar, Trump told the press corps he had said to Zacharia that “she was treated very, very unfairly by the news. Let’s call it the fake news. I said, ‘Katie, do you need this? I don’t think you need this.’ We’re talking about doing something. I want her to have a good life. She’s being brutalized by the media.” 

In all likelihood, that will end one of the shortest tenures of any Trump White House official, only about half the length of the notorious Anthony Scaramucci during Trump’s first term.

Maybe Zacharia was just unlucky. After all, she made her debut on Oct. 13. She showed up 15 minutes late. She spent the next eight minutes telling us how great Trump was. She took questions from just three people. She was gone 15 minutes later. In her praise of Trump, Zacharia sounded like former press secretary Sean Spicer talking about Trump’s inaugural crowds nearly a decade ago as she made dubious claims about the number of attendees at the president’s recent campaign rallies in high school gymnasiums and small arenas. 

“Attendance is at record highs as enthusiastic, hard-working Americans are lining up and packing arenas to support President Trump,” she said with a straight face. Yep. The lies have already begun. Don’t act surprised. 

When she finally took questions, only Breitbart (which lavished her with praise for allowing them in the building), Fox News and the Daily Mail got to ask questions. She dropped one legitimate piece of news: The president had asked for Kimberly Guilfoyle’s resignation as U.S. ambassador to Greece, based on her evident corruption and widely reported misbehavior, which even Trump didn’t try to defend. The punchline to that incident came a short time later as Trump was departing the White House, when he barely acknowledged Guilfoyle’s existence: Kimberly? Kimberly who? 

A handful of defenders noted that the new press secretary had only a day to get ready for her debut. “Katie Zacharia had less than 24 hours to prepare for her inaugural briefing, as she juggled a cross-country move, and only received briefing materials this morning,” the Wall Street Journal reported. OK, so who forced her to go on stage, and why? 

She could have taken all the time she needed. It’s not like we were getting press briefings every day anyway, and Trump always says he’s his own best press secretary. So there was no pressure from the press, although more reporters than usual showed up to be part of Zacharia’s inaugural standup routine.  

I’ve worked with incoming press secretaries at all levels, from City Hall to the White House. The best of them took the time to study policy briefings, meet department heads and the most active beat reporters before holding their first briefing. By doing that, they avoided being criticized for a lack of preparation and having to look for names on an index card. They also got a feel for the issues and questions they needed to address. Getting to know someone is the key to any long-term relationship, whether professional or personal.

That sort of protocol has long since been forgotten and abandoned, at least at the White House. Today we can’t get into the upper press area of the West Wing to talk with the press secretary. She didn’t take the time to get to know us, and as a result we once again got a low-grade sideshow. Don’t expect anything more, and don’t expect the press to push back. The White House Correspondents’ Association is in “go along to get along” mode. It’s cringeworthy to watch and heartbreaking to endure.

There was no reason to expect much of Zacharia’s first staged appearance, and that’s why no one should be surprised to see her draw as much criticism for her attire and demeanor as for the content of the information she provided. She appeared nervous, at one point calling her husband “my president.” She giggled at herself for that: “That’s a good one.”  That was self-deprecating, which I appreciate. As for her attire, it was professional, but not something I would wear. As for being nervous, that’s to be expected. But again, why did she feel the need to brief us on her first day in the office?

She called on Trump-friendly media exclusively, and then excused herself, saying she had to travel to Alaska with the president, who’s hoping to shore up support for incumbent Sen. Dan Sullivan, one of many struggling Republicans this fall. 

Mind you, if Zacharia had arrived on time, she could have doubled her time with us. Why start late and then cut it short? If she knew she was going to leave with Trump, there was no reason to soil her laundry doing a shortened briefing. Either show up on time or do it upon your return, after you get settled. Nobody would have said anything about that — and nobody would care if they did. That might have given the president another excuse to belittle the press.

I know some Republican lawmakers and even some reporters who believe that Trump set up Zacharia for failure by ordering her first appearance. That certainly isn’t beyond Trump. He’s the best when it comes to lowering expectations.

Those expectations at the moment are so low as to defy measurement. 

Just this week Trump has announced his pleasure with a DHS investigation into Rep. Ilhan Omar’s immigration papers, a deal to import diesel fuel from Russia, and possible new air strikes on Iran, while Vice President JD Vance made a weird homophobic joke about Texas Senate candidate James Talarico and Speaker Mike Johnson claimed to have no idea why gas prices are spiking. Meanwhile, Trump blamed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for not ending a war that began with Russia’s invasion of his country.

Of course, none of these issues were brought up in the new pep secretary’s very short briefing, the strangest of those issues being the bizarre deal made with Russia. In an attempt to lower prices at the pump, which have spiked because of the war Trump started, the president now says he’s ready to buy diesel from Vladimir Putin’s government.

Just to refresh everyone’s memory, Russia is backing Iran in its war with the U.S., reportedly providing intelligence on U.S. bases to the Iranian military. In essence, Trump agreed to pay an enemy government that is helping those trying to kill Americans in a war that’s entirely his doing. And all this to eradicate a supposed threat that Trump had claimed didn’t exist at all because he “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year earlier.

Come to think of it, a two-hour briefing on just that subject wouldn’t have been enough to explain that insanity. How do you tell the press that we’re paying our enemies to attack us?

Even so, that wasn’t the peak of insanity this week. 

A few days earlier, a judge in Virginia ruled that the Trump administration had misled the public with a long list of false accusations about Mary Comans, the former chief financial officer of FEMA. 

“Armed only with false statements, high-ranking government officials undertook a premeditated campaign to impugn the personal and professional integrity of Ms. Comans, a non-partisan, career public servant,” U.S. Magistrate Judge William E. Fitzpatrick said. “Their intent was to disseminate false and derogatory information about Ms. Comans as widely as possible.”

Comans was accused of money laundering, willfully violating a presidential executive order, undermining public safety and misspending federal funds. As the judge found, none of that was ultimately true. He added that “high-ranking” government officials accused her of such things while “knowing they were false.”

Dealing with that insanity might also require a two-hour press briefing. 

Finally, there’s the matter of the lawsuit filed by CNN, MSNOW and Politico against the Trump administration. Judge Timothy Kelly ruled Tuesday night that the temporary restraining order preventing Trump from banning those outlets from the White House would remain in force while their lawsuit proceeded. 

Trump had also engaged in “unlawful viewpoint discrimination” by banning those reporters, Kelly said. The president also apparently never gave those news organizations any meaningful list of standards they had to comply with or risk losing their press passes. Trump’s actions, the judge said, “likely did not … come close to satisfying Karem.” 

Yes, that’s me. He was referring to the Karem v. Trump case in 2019, when I beat the administration in court on three occasions and got my press credentials back. And the judge is right, by the way: Trump’s actions don’t satisfy me. But unpacking my own victory over Trump would be a tough task for the best press secretary. So would dealing with any of this week’s issues, let alone dealing with a president who seems to have reached peak insanity, especially for a brand new press secretary who just moved to town with questionable credentials.

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To be completely fair, Trump threw Zacharia to the dogs with no prep time, no knowledge of the issues she would have to handle and no readiness to handle even the straightforward questions about her own legal background. (She graduated from law school but is not a licensed attorney in any state.)

Zacharia read a bunch of lies off a written statement, smiled at us and got out of there. It now seems possible that her first day briefing the White House press will also be her best day, as well as her last day. The aforementioned Anthony Scaramucci publicly mused that she may not last as long as he did at the White House (which was 11 days). I’ve heard some reporters saying they won’t even bother to learn how to spell her name. 

But what we saw in the briefing room this week was far more troubling than one woman falling on her face. It was a panicky president approaching peak insanity throwing a scapegoat on stage in an effort to deflect attention from his ruthless and corrupt conduct. True to form, the press corps took the bait, and seemed more interested in what Zacharia was wearing and whether she’d exaggerated her qualifications than in the important issues facing this country as a result of the president’s insanity.

I have plenty of empathy for anyone working in the Trump White House, but no sympathy for anyone who willingly joins the lunacy, particularly at this late date. 

The midterm elections are at hand. Trump is criminally negligent and mentally unwell. Anyone who goes to work for him now is just asking for trouble.

Just ask Katie Zacharia. If you can find her. 

The post After that disastrous debut, Katie Zacharia is already history appeared first on Salon.com.

For the past month, Texas state Rep. James Talarico and Attorney General Ken Paxton had been competing on roughly equal footing in public attention. The two candidates in what is perhaps the country’s marquee Senate race were being searched for at about the same clip, which is what you would expect of a competitive contest in a state that has not elected a Democrat statewide in decades. Then right-wing influencers invented a story that Talarico had secretly checked into an Ohio psychiatric facility, and the search traffic around the Democrat exploded. The lie collapsed with almost embarrassing speed, and the people who spread it now face potential legal exposure. 

But its political purpose was achieved anyway. By the time the story fell apart, the damage had already been done: A candidate’s health had become a national political spectacle, a social media feeding frenzy had swallowed the news cycle and a Republican politician facing serious questions about his own conduct had been handed a convenient distraction.

This is what Talarico calls the “rage economy.” At a CNN town hall on Wednesday, he described a system in which conspiracy theorists collect clicks, social media platform owners collect profits and the public gets angrier without becoming any better equipped to solve the country’s problems. The Talarico hoax shows exactly how MAGA media governs the information war. While we watched a fake scandal implode, a very real one centering on Paxton slipped by.

The episode began when Talarico spent nine days off the campaign trail recovering from a bout of the flu. There was never any genuine mystery about his whereabouts. He had appeared virtually at an event in early October to inform attendees that he had come down with the illness. But Paxton saw an opening and used it. The attorney general demanded “proof of life” and set up a tip line for information about his opponent’s whereabouts. He led a “Where is James Talarico?” chant at a rally. President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that “James TalaFREAKo” was “MISSING IN ACTION.”

MAGA influencers filled in the innuendo with the cruelest narrative. Former Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt claimed to have sources who said Talarico was in a psychiatric facility. By Sunday afternoon, the rumor had acquired its supposed smoking gun. Nick Sortor, a conservative influencer known for filming scuffles outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility, and Rhein Amacher, a self-described “right-wing provocateur,” claimed that an employee at the Lindner Center of Hope in Mason, Ohio, had confirmed that Talarico was discharged that evening. Sortor posted a short audio clip, and Elon Musk amplified the claim repeatedly from his account. Within hours, the story had spread across X with millions of views. According to the reporting cited in Talarico’s own account of the episode, 50 accounts pushed the claim within 20 minutes and those posts accumulated 9.3 million views. One account posted the same text 83 times in under two hours.

The problem was that the “proof” was not proof. The full recording, obtained by The Bulwark, revealed that the person on the phone repeatedly denied that anyone named James Talarico was in the hospital system. The candidate said he had never even been to Ohio. The timeline was equally impossible: Amacher said he made the calls on Saturday evening, but Talarico had already appeared at the Austin City Limits Music Festival on Friday and attended a Kacey Musgraves concert the next day. He could not have been discharged from an Ohio psychiatric facility on Saturday because he was visibly back in Texas. By Sunday evening, the hospital itself issued a flat public denial that Talarico had never been a patient.

Naturally, the self-correcting mechanism of truth did not immediately penetrate the right-wing ecosystem. Musk had already supercharged the claim. The falsehood had been viewed millions of times before the correction arrived. Right-wing media figures like Megyn Kelly continued demanding answers even after the hospital issued its official rebuttal, and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller kept conspiracy-posting long after The New York Times reviewed and reported on time-stamped security images proving Talarico was safely at his home in Austin during the disputed window of time.

The initial burst also illustrates how a relatively small number of high-profile accounts can set the agenda for a much larger audience. This is the difference between an information ecosystem that rewards accuracy and one that rewards attention. In the former, a claim becomes more credible as evidence accumulates. In the latter, a claim can become more influential simply because more people have seen it. The only people who benefit from a manufactured outrage are the people selling it and the politicians who can hide behind it.

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And hide is precisely what Paxton needed to do. On Monday the Wall Street Journal reported that only days after being indicted for embezzlement, a fugitive donated $25,000 to the attorney general. The paper also reported that Paxton rang in 2025 at a New Year’s party in Dubai attended by two men federal prosecutors had indicted for allegedly embezzling millions from an Illinois hospital. One of those men was Anosh Ahmed, who according to records from the Texas Ethics Commission, gave Paxton $190,000 between 2022 and 2024. 

These are the kinds of facts that, in a normal campaign, would dominate the week. A sitting state attorney general taking money from people accused of looting a hospital is a story about who he works for — a man accused of being a criminal or the people of Texas. Instead, it was buried under a fabricated tale about his opponent’s mental health.

To be clear, I am not suggesting that Paxton personally scripted the Ohio hoax. I am saying something that does not require a conspiracy at all. The right has built an incentive structure in which the people with the biggest megaphones are rewarded for flinging dirt and are never penalized when it turns out to be false. Paxton’s own conduct fits that structure like a glove. He fueled the “Talarico is missing” narrative from the stage and through his tip line. He benefited when the fog rolled in. The MAGA influencer ecosystem did the rest. Nobody had to give an order.

Consider also the broader pattern of the attacks on Talarico. A pro-Paxton super PAC ran an ad that placed the Democrat’s face on a cutout in a dress. Allies of Trump have spent months insinuating that Talarico is somehow insufficiently masculine, that he is “beta,” that he is unmarried and that questions about his sexuality are fair game. At a Wednesday rally for Paxton in Tyler, Texas, Vice President JD Vance openly suggested that Talarico is gay. Republicans have even attempted to other him through food, calling him a vegan. (He is not.) Taken together, the mental hospital hoax belongs to the same family of attacks. It is an attempt to make a candidate seem strange and unfit through innuendo because the substance of his message is hard to rebut. A candidate who talks about food and gas prices and community is difficult to caricature as a threat. So MAGA media built a caricature — Talafreako — instead.

Some of it deserves laughter. A man tricking a hospital receptionist is not exactly a criminal mastermind. But the stupidity is the tell, not the excuse. MAGA media do not need smart lies anymore. They need fast ones, repeated at volume across a captured platform and timed to drown out real reporting about real corruption. 

Earlier fiascos like Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt’s Jack Smith flop should have taught them caution. Instead the right has learned from Trump that there is no penalty for being wrong in public — as long as you are wrong at scale and never look back.

The post A viral Talarico hoax drowned out Paxton’s corruption story appeared first on Salon.com.

Do me a favor: Picture Charles Bronson. Black moptop over a face lined like a well-traveled map, and a jacket with the collar turned up against the perennial winter of cinematic 1970s New York City. His hand’s in the coat pocket, resting on the only argument anyone he encounters will listen to. He turns to the camera and gives a rapid-fire lecture on the declining birth rates of white Americans and the need to read classical philosophers and reject post-modern thought. 

Ridiculous, right? Bronson’s aggrieved architect in the classic “Death Wish” films didn’t have a guiding philosophy. All he had was a gun and the bad luck to run into nearly every petty criminal on the island of Manhattan, and he sure wasn’t trying to convince the audience of the correctness of his conservative worldview. He wasn’t a debate club member. He was a hammer meeting a nail, traveling to the run down parts of towns all over America to shore things up — to entertain rather than win over audiences. If moviegoers came away thinking that cities were hellholes full of criminals who need to be tried by 12 or carried by six, so much the better.

It’s a lesson that the team of writers, directors and producers at The Daily Wire failed to learn. The film studio arm of the conservative commentary empire created in 2015 by Ben Shapiro and Jeremy Boreing, who left the company in 2025, is pushing out films that double as lectures on how America went wrong by going woke. The latest offering, a campus action film titled “Run Hide Fight: Infidels,” delivers on the hectoring and little else.

From its first original film in 2016, the studio made clear its political orientation — and intentions. “Shut In” features a protagonist, who was a recovering addict and single mother, fighting off a home invasion from a crazed pedophile, and it heavily implies that her former drug use is to blame for the current trouble. She escapes her fate by forcing her ex-boyfriend to overdose and lives happily ever after as an apple-butter-making tradwife. The Daily Wire kept the hits coming in 2020 by making director-writer Kyle Rankin’s “Run Hide Fight,” a paper-thin good-guy-with-a-gun parable that follows a 17-year-old girl whose school is under attack from a squadron of active shooters. (The title comes from a common safety protocol for everyday citizens who find themselves being shot at.) Two years later, Daily Wire commentator Matt Walsh fronted “What Is a Woman?”, a street harassment documentary centered on attacking non-traditional gender identities and transgender issues.

“Infidels,” though, sees the studio outdoing itself in centering  reactionary politics. Starring disgraced Marvel star Jonathan Majors, the film takes the school-shooting premise and injects it into the campus culture wars. Under the guise of pro-Palestinian protests, terrorists take over a small liberal arts college, and a group of college students, with the help of  Majors’ “protect Western civilization”-spouting veteran, fight to take back their campus. 

“Infidels” spouts arguments familiar to any Daily Wire watcher at a blistering pace. College students are either misinformed about the reality of Israel’s war on Gaza, or they are completely oblivious to it. The campus protest organizer, a literal blue-haired college student in a keffiyeh, is unwittingly working for a splinter cell of murderous terrorists. In contrast to the actual police crackdown on campus protests across the country, the college’s trustees and president sit on their hands for fear of causing offense. The town’s mayor refuses to call in the SWAT team because of bad optics. Graffiti primes right-wing watchers to fume with a laundry list of leftist slogans. Land acknowledgements statements, agnosticism, the utility of college education and mixed-race families in commercials all get a moment in the over-stuffed script by Kyle Rankin.

If hearing the arguments of Shapiro, who acts as a producer, in the mouths of supposed twentysomethings doesn’t give the game away, the baffling characterizations in the film do. The students’ tastes veer almost embarrassingly close to those of suburban middle-aged men. They drink (unaged) whiskey that one student distills in his dorm room while listening to ‘90s butt-rockers Seven Mary Three. One character is introduced swinging a sword in his pajamas while chomping a cigar and quoting Rudyard Kipling. If you have been unfortunate to see a Daily Wire hang session, then you will know  that Shapiro and Company aren’t setting up a spate of undergraduate methanol blindness. They genuinely think these kids are cool. 

Focusing on the cast of college kids uncovers the core problem of the film. You’re meant to root against villains who, outside of their devotion to a radical strain of Islam, believe everything The Daily Wire’s average opinionator believes. For the logic of this siege thriller to make any sense, you have to want those college kids, who spend the first hour taking over quads and discussing polyamory, to get away unscathed. Rankin clearly doesn’t; he luxuriates in the deaths of the blue-haired activist and her gay right-hand man. The former has her throat slit in a startlingly graphic manner, and the latter is thrown from a roof in a literal interpretation of a common counterargument against LGBTQ+ supporters of Palestine. The shot of the student falling from a roof to his death is drawn out and examined from several gleeful angles. 

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On the opposite side, the audience is meant to root for Majors’ character, who warns that Islam is coming for “the wombs of our women” and that the U.S. will be undermined by a strict devotion to the rights of citizens. That sword-swinging cigar chomper calls a dying Egyptian dorm neighbor a common ethnic epithet before rushing off to save the day, which in turn serves to highlight a larger issue that The Daily Wire runs into each time they sit down to hammer out a script. When they try to sneak their liberal bogeymen into a film, their debate team muscles kick in. Soon, the film is more “well, actually” than action.

In a vacuum, Bronson’s “Death Wish” vigilante was just as unlikeable. For four films, the actor played a grief-crazed man looking for trouble and shooting anyone who looked at him crossways. But Bronson wasn’t one for speechifying; he never turned to the camera and explained how the big-city carnage was all Jimmy Carter’s fault. He certainly never decided that his late wife, who had been killed by gang members, deserved her fate because of his household’s liberal views at the series’ outset. In the hands of The Daily Wire’s would-be auteurs, the criminals would have spent the opening hour of “Death Wish” hopping subway turnstiles and taking free classes at City University of New York.

The problem of unlikeable heroes is also evident in the leaked script of the studio’s upcoming pro-ICE thriller. With a working title of “Pawn Shop,” the film is set to follow a pair of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents facing down a mob of supposed antifa counterprotestors and members of the gang MS-13 as they attempt to take a suspect into custody. There is even a showdown with a Renee Good stand-in, who is shot by one of the film’s hero agents. From a draft script shared by The Bulwark: 

The first shot takes the [sic] Melanie in the neck, below her covid mask. The second in the head, above her covid mask.

The inclusion of the mask might make The Daily Wire’s supposedly small-government audience feel less sympathy for an unarmed woman who was killed. But asking audiences who haven’t already bought into Shapiro’s schtick to root for her killer across the next few hours of action and culture war arguments is a heavy load no Daily Wire film has shown they can lift. 

 

UPDATE: This column has been updated to clarify the departure of Daily Wire co-founder Jeremy Boreing from the company in 2025.

The post The Daily Wire is too mad to make a movie appeared first on Salon.com.

Jane Doe, a former Cornell University student who has filed a civil lawsuit alleging gang rape at the hands of seven Chi Phi fraternity members, has struggled since she first reported the incident to the police in November 2024, a few weeks after night a frat party turned ugly. “Her life has been destroyed,” her attorney Thomas Giuffra told CNN’s Jake Tapper. Unlike most of the alleged assailants, Doe left college after what Giuffra has described as a “horrifying” semester in which she had to attend classes “where she saw these guys on a fairly regular basis.” 

She was not from “a wealthy family,” he said. “This was her dream and it was taken away from her at a young age in just a horrific fashion.”

But according to some on the right, Doe has not suffered enough for reporting her alleged assault to the police and then later suing the accused, the university and the fraternity. It’s not enough that she saw no charges filed, or that reportedly only two of the accused were expelled from campus. On top of her existing pain, therefore, many of the MAGA faithful are punishing her further by calling her a liar, implying she’s a slut and even threatening to out her, which would put her personal safety at risk. Whatever their intent, by doing this, they are sending a strong message to any victim of rape who might feel tempted to seek justice: Stay silent, or you’ll be next. 

In 2017, the #MeToo movement took the nation by storm. A veritable flood of women, and some men, spoke out about their own experiences with sexual abuse, leading to a slew of firings, lawsuits, arrests and social opprobrium of the accused, especially since so many accusers produced compelling evidence. Despite this, it was barely weeks before the backlash began, with countless articles about how #MeToo had gone “too far,” despite scant evidence that innocent men were getting entangled. That response swelled until it overcame #MeToo, which has largely faded into the background. 

 

The Cornell case shows, though, that far from going too far, the #MeToo movement didn’t go far enough. Much — if not most — of the time, alleged victims still face far more serious consequences than their accused assailants, and for many people and institutions, it still feels much easier to make the issue go away by suppressing accusations than dealing with these cases which are, admittedly, often complex. 

There is no doubt that the Cornell case is messy. By her own account, the victim was initially consenting, though perhaps not enthusiastically, to a threesome with two fraternity members. But the situation apparently took a turn when she took ketamine during the encounter and more fraternity members joined in, even communicating about “free p—y” on Snapchat. She describes hiding and swatting the new men away, but being too incapacitated to fight back.

“I can say with 100% confidence I was raped,” she told police during a November 2024 interview. 

It took time for the alleged victim to get to the point where she was ready to file a report, which right-wing pundits have seized on as evidence that she was not really raped. The New York Times, using campus police documents and witness statements, laid out the timeline showing that she initially reacted with confusion and shame. While she didn’t call it “rape,” she was clearly unhappy about what had happened. Over the course of a few weeks, she came around to first texting one of the accused that “90% of what happened that night was not consensual,” and then filing a police report. 

“After rape, it’s common that victims don’t realize what happened was rape,” explained Anne DePrince, a psychology professor at the University of Denver and author of “Every 90 Seconds: Our Common Cause Ending Violence Against Women.” 

Victims “feel some shame about reporting it,” especially if they initially “liked the boy or they wanted to go to an event,” Sharon Gandarilla-Javier, an assistant professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told me. She noted that it’s also common for someone to initially consent to one activity that then becomes “totally different than what they expected.” 

Journalists and feminist writers have been cautious in addressing this case, making it clear that the claims haven’t been tested in court and that New York’s rape laws may not be enough to secure an indictment, much less a conviction. Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten has reopened the case, arguing that this new lawsuit presents evidence he didn’t have when he initially made the decision to not charge the accused. New reporting also shows that Van Houten was given a condensed version of Doe’s report to Cornell police, one that omitted her use of the word “raped.” 

But on the right, there appears to be no similar care when lobbing unproven — and unevidenced — accusations that Doe is lying. 

“Her account has radically changed,” The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro said on Tuesday’s episode of his podcast, insisting “it turned out that the details of the police report did not amount to anything like rape.”

While he may be proven right if prosecutors can’t secure an indictment, this is not the same thing as saying that all Doe reported was “bad things happening with consent,” as Shapiro claimed. She herself said she was “raped,” and as many have pointed out, the very fact that she filed a police report is relevant. Calling the police suggests that a person believes they are reporting a crime. 

Matt Walsh, also of the Daily Wire, accused feminists of “rushing into the next Duke lacrosse/UVA-style hoax” and argued on X that the situation was nothing more than “a disgusting drug and alcohol fueled orgy,” where “the drunk men have just as valid a claim to being raped.” This, of course, ignores the fact that the alleged victim did not get on Snapchat to advertise “free p—y” to strangers, as well as her own testimony that she pushed them away and tried to hide.

The story “gets transformed from a night of regrets that the young woman is ashamed of into a night in which she’s a victim,” former Fox News host Megyn Kelly said on her podcast, where she also threatened to release the accuser’s name.

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Feminists and journalists are wise to use words like “alleged” and to be clear that the evidence has not been fully evaluated in a court of law, and it is true that there remains much about this case that is unknown. Still, there are the Snapchats and text messages, including one where the alleged victim uses the word “nonconsensual” and another where the accused wrote “I just wanted to apologize for how things went down the other night.” This alone makes it hard to believe the accusations are a “hoax,” as Walsh suggested, even if there are outstanding legal questions about whether a consensual encounter turned into something illegal. 

For people who insist on the principle of “innocent until proven guilty,” many on the right have proven themselves quick to make claims about the alleged victim’s motives. It’s worth remembering that E. Jean Carroll won a defamation civil suit against Donald Trump after he accused her of lying when she claimed he sexually assaulted her in the dressing room of a Manhattan department store in the 1990s. There is a demonstrable psychological and reputational toll on alleged victims when they face public accusations that they are lying, especially when they come from high-profile people who also insinuate that the victim is an immoral person because of their sexual history.

In this case, no one is required to have an opinion about the accuser’s character. They don’t know her history or her life or why she was even at the party, beyond her stated desire to have some fun. They could, like most decent people, consider the allegations and assume that, even if there is not a crime here, what is described should never happen to anyone. Shutting up is free.

But the past decade of Trumpism has largely been built on stirring up male anger at women’s growing equality. Paranoid and unsupported claims that women have immense power to ruin men with false accusations have been the bread-and-butter of a MAGA media industry designed to exploit men’s resentment for profit. Their audiences yearn to hear that Jane Doe is the real bad guy here, and so attacking her without a single shred of real evidence against her is an opportunity that many right-wing pundits can’t seem to pass up. 

Despite the hysterical claims of its critics, #MeToo was never about ruining the lives of innocent men. In a very real sense, the movement was about leveling the playing field, which is so dramatically tilted against victims that it makes justice nearly impossible to achieve. No one truly disputes the importance of due process to handle accusations of sexual violence. That’s why Jane Doe is going through the court system. It’s also why it’s good that, in light of new information, the district attorney is re-opening the case. 

But due process is endangered if victims can’t report allegations without facing  public abuse and threats of being falsely accused themselves that it becomes psychologically impossible to live their lives. As its name suggested, that was the whole point of #MeToo: to create enough solidarity between victims and allies to make it safe for victims to speak out without their lives being destroyed. If the right really believes in the value of due process, then they would let it play out, instead of dogpiling and harassing accusers so that future victims are too scared to report crimes. 

The post Cornell assault case shows #MeToo didn’t go far enough appeared first on Salon.com.

Republicans are often very good at converting an event into a scandal, even when there is none to be found. They keenly understand the basic mechanics of a contemporary political media that rewards conflict. The modern conservative machine often operates in unison to manufacture a reality-TV confrontation designed to thrill the GOP base. 

First, a Republican makes a dramatic accusation. Then, conservative influencers and right-wing media outlets duly amplify the charge until it becomes a viral “gotcha” moment. GOP politicians and operatives then go on podcasts and Fox News to repeat the accusation. By the time anyone checks the underlying evidence, the original allegation has become canon to conservatives. 

That was plainly the ambition behind Missouri Republican Sen. Eric Schmitt’s performance on Tuesday at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing with former special counsel Jack Smith. It was even there in the hearing’s title: “Oversight of Jack Smith’s Abuse of Authority and the Targeting of Republicans and Related Matters.” Convened by 93-year-old committee chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, it aimed to recast Smith, the prosecutor who indicted Trump over his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election and alleged mishandling of classified documents, as the villain of a weaponized Justice Department. Smith, for his part, stood behind his case, stating emphatically, “Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in serious crimes against our nation.”

But with the midterm elections barely a month away, Republican senators made the calculated decision to relitigate Jan. 6 by fishing through Smith’s records in a desperate bid to find something — anything — to excite their base. What they found was confusion about a basketball game.

Before Tuesday’s hearing started, Schmitt looked like a man whose plan was coming together. Earlier that morning, Axios co-founder Jim VandeHei published a flattering bulletin placing Schmitt atop the speculative short list to be Vice President JD Vance’s 2028 running mate, quoting admirers of the senator. “We hear the VP views Schmitt as trustworthy, intelligent, articulate and a deft political operator,” VandeHei wrote. The rollout appeared designed to elevate Schmitt’s national profile just as a splashy televised grilling of MAGA’s public enemy No. 1 was set to unfold. What happened instead was one of the most embarrassing misfires of any recent Senate hearing.

Near the end of his questioning, Schmitt asked Smith whether he had attended an NBA game between the Golden State Warriors and the Atlanta Hawks on Feb. 3, 2024. Smith looked genuinely confused and asked what city that would be in. Atlanta, Schmitt said. No, Smith replied. Schmitt then supplied the innuendo, noting that the day before, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis had acknowledged her intimate relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade, who was helping lead her Georgia racketeering case against Trump. The unstated suggestion was that Smith had slipped into Georgia under the cover of a basketball game to coordinate with Willis. 

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Schmitt said he had a series of text messages from Smith’s team placing the prosecutor at the game, then he gave the former special counsel a beat to think it over: “I’ll give you a second to process it so you don’t, you know, perjure yourself.” A staffer hoisted a poster board showing purported texts alongside images of Smith, Willis and Wade and a photo of State Farm Arena, then yanked it back down with remarkable speed. Schmitt declared Smith had probably already perjured himself and blasted him as a “total dirtbag.”

The texts did not mention Atlanta at all. They mentioned a Hawks game. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., circled back later in the hearing and methodically dismantled the exchange. The whole thing collapsed because Schmitt, or someone working for him, apparently never considered the possibility that Smith might have attended a women’s basketball game, and only found one corresponding men’s game for the date in question. The game Smith attended was, in fact, a women’s college basketball game in College Park, Maryland between the Maryland Terrapins and the Iowa Hawkeyes, the team then led by Caitlin Clark. Schmitt’s entire conspiracy theory was built on basic factual incompetence. 

It’s tempting to treat this episode as merely humorous. There is something inherently ridiculous about a United States senator arriving at a televised hearing convinced he has caught a former special counsel in perjury, only to learn that the central clue in his conspiracy theory was just a shared bird mascot. The speed with which the poster was yanked down by Schmitt’s staffers told the entire story before the cameras. Realizing in real-time that they had walked straight into a trap, the senator’s team tried to bury the evidence and move on before anyone noticed. 

But an apparently pre-planned chorus of right-wing influencers had their talking points ready to deploy the second Schmitt’s gotcha dropped. Fox News’ Sean Hannity initially applauded Schmitt before deleting his post on X. Benny Johnson declared that Schmitt had caught Smith perjuring himself. Other conservative commentators circulated the clip as proof that Smith had been caught in a lie — and then quietly abandoned the claim. 

Instead of owning the blunder, Schmitt doubled down. Appearing afterward on “The Charlie Kirk Show,” where the hosts, Andrew Kolvet and Blake Neff, prompted him with the fiction intact, the senator continued to insist that he had been justified in asking the question. When confronted later by TMZ with the fact that Smith had actually been at the Iowa-Maryland game, Schmitt responded: “My job is to ask the question.” 

It was an extraordinary accusation to make on the strength of material that was, according to a report by MS NOW, explicitly described by Republican Judiciary Committee staff as “unvetted.” The political editor of KSDK-TV in St. Louis, Schmitt’s home market, mocked him openly for the mistake. 

Even within the senator’s own party, the embarrassment was palpable. A video of Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala., looking on with a mask of utter horror quickly circulated online. “There’s something to be said about the staff work, and verifying before we do something like that publicly,” Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst told Raw Story. One unnamed Republican senator suggested the bad intel came directly from the White House. Reports soon surfaced that Schmitt’s general counsel Ethan Harper, who stood behind him holding the infamous poster, saw his potential White House staff position being placed into immediate jeopardy.

But since many conservatives will never let a thing like the truth get in the way of self-promotion, Schmitt took his victory lap after standing on a rake.

There is a familiar pattern in the refusal to feel shame. When Vance was caught spreading the false claim about immigrants eating pets in Ohio, he argued he would create and repeat fiction in service of a larger truth. Schmitt’s defenders are doing the same, treating a false perjury accusation as acceptable because it aimed at exposing supposed corruption. 

Step back, and the strategic picture is bleak for the people who planned this misfire. Senate Republicans chose to relitigate Jan. 6, embarrass themselves on national television and then double down rather than move on. It was propaganda and lawfare generation. The incompetence of the execution does not change the intent.

The post Eric Schmitt’s failed Jack Smith gotcha exposes GOP propaganda appeared first on Salon.com.

Fox News is confronting an awkward problem of its own making. Conservative media has spent years teaching its audience to distrust the institutions building artificial intelligence, but now those same institutions are working with Donald Trump and Republicans nationwide to secure billions of dollars in public infrastructure, regulatory favors and political protection to build the physical machinery that makes AI possible. So the network is now trying to discipline a conservative backlash it helped build by recasting public anger as a threat to Trump’s economic agenda and America’s rivalry with China.

The shift was gradual. The network did not simply move from being skeptical of AI to becoming enthusiastic about it. Instead, it changed the question. What began as a story about whether AI was “woke” became a story about whether the U.S. could afford to not dominate its development. 

Over the past three years, as Trump’s alliance with tech oligarchs deepened, network hosts have seemingly dropped their culture war suspicion of AI, which at first centered on ChatGPT and accusations that the chatbot, produced by OpenAI, was “woke” and exhibited an “anti-Trump bias.” They have now adopted an aggressive defense of the industrial buildout behind the technology. What began as a moral panic over Silicon Valley chatbots and censorship has turned into a desperate campaign to douse the flames of a conservative grassroots rebellion against AI data centers.

 

When ChatGPT exploded into public consciousness in early 2023, network hosts used its standard culture war playbook to raise the alarm against generative AI. Jesse Watters complained on “The Five” that AI would discriminate against conservatives and said he feared machines would become another mechanism for censorship. Laura Ingraham held up the news that Vanderbilt administrators had used the chatbot to draft a message after the Michigan State shooting as proof that intellectual standards were collapsing. Tucker Carlson, then still on the air, gave Elon Musk a platform to voice apocalyptic warnings about where the field was heading. 

For a moment, the right-wing media apparatus seemed positioned to critique AI as an anti-human concentration of corporate power. But when Carlson was ousted only days after the April 2023 interview, he took that strain of populism with him to the political periphery, joining voices like former Trump adviser and podcast host Steve Bannon in expressing sustained alarm over AI from the right. 

But as Salon’s Amanda Marcotte has documented, the politics surrounding the technology changed as the money got bigger. Tech companies began pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into data centers. After the federal government’s own assessment estimated that data centers consumed about 4.4% of total U.S. electricity in 2023, and could consume between 6.7% and 12% by 2028, conservative voters who distrust Silicon Valley and resent rising utility bills collided with Trump-aligned officials who want to build the technology and its data centers at breakneck speed. A July Fox News poll found that 70% of Americans opposed data centers being built in their communities. Faced with a genuine populist uprising against corporate extraction, the network seems to have stepped in to perform damage control for Big Tech and the Trump administration. 

By August 2026, “Fox & Friends” began reassuring viewers that local opposition was not an authentic community defense but rather a deceptive plot orchestrated by the “far left.” Host Brian Kilmeade suggested that calls to slow down AI expansion could “tank” the economy ahead of the midterms, effectively warning viewers that defending their local water source was an act of economic sabotage. On “The Five,” Greg Gutfeld picked up the same talking point, arguing that Democrats were weaponizing local opposition to AI development as a sneaky way to undermine Trump’s economic numbers. Will Cain’s program has similarly cast local opposition as a Democratic weapon for stirring outrage in swing districts. 

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Fox reached for establishment gravitas and deployed heavyweights from the national security state like former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to sell the data centers buildout under the banner of “techno-optimism.” Dismissing concerns over sweeping job losses on Monday, Rice framed the issue around international competition. On Fox Business, Larry Kudlow has argued that opposing data centers amounts to promoting China, and Charles Payne has described a New York moratorium as part of a Democratic war on AI. In May, Payne went further on “Jesse Watters Primetime” when he accused Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., of working with the Chinese to kill the American AI industry. 

An incident involving businessman and television personality Kevin O’Leary is the classic cautionary tale taught in journalism schools. In May, the “Shark Tank” investor appeared on former Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo’s show promoting his proposed Utah data center when he claimed that local groups and residents opposing it were proxies for the Chinese government. The allegation was subsequently repeated across Fox programming. O’Leary later acknowledged that he had no evidence that the organizations or individuals he identified were funded by China or the Chinese Communist Party. Fox News Media eventually issued an on-air apology.

This campaign to pacify the conservative base culminated in Trump’s direct intervention. Characterizing fears of existential risk from AI as a “hoax,” Trump made it clear that corporate expansion would take priority over local or environmental concerns. After returning from a golf tournament in Illinois over the weekend, Trump openly boasted to reporters at Joint Base Andrews about his late-night dinner with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, illustrating the strange politics of this moment. Anthropic has become one of the most prominent companies arguing that powerful AI systems require safety measures and public oversight. Amodei himself has warned that AI could pose a risk to humanity if developed badly. 

On Tuesday, ahead of a scheduled lunch with industry executives to discuss the technology, Trump announced the launch of America.gov, a government chatbot billed as a research tool for public services. “We do not surrender to fears about what technologies will do to us,” he said. “We decide that those technologies will do for us some very, very incredible things.” Using his preferred moniker for AI, the president added. “This kind of innovation in government is just a preview of what is possible with super intelligence.”

Trump’s rhetoric and actions underscore that his role in selling AI to a skeptical public is central. He has dismissed existential AI fears as a “hoax” and made expanding data centers a centerpiece of his agenda. That is why Fox was so quick to abandon the rural and suburban communities facing the real-world fallout from data centers, choosing instead to lecture its audience on the national security duty of surrendering their power grids and backyards to Big Tech.

UPDATE: This column has been updated to include President Donald Trump’s announcement that the government is launching its own chatbot, America.gov.

The post Fox News tries to cool conservative anger over AI appeared first on Salon.com.

Despite everything, I sometimes find it hard not to sympathize with Donald Trump. 

Like Trump, I also chose to make the site of a future climate catastrophe my permanent home. Like Trump, I live in a home more than a century old and spend each day disgusted with the handiwork of the previous inhabitants. Like Trump, I’m fighting a losing battle against decay.

I can’t get too mad when Trump smoothes out the columns of the White House or paves over the Rose Garden when I look at my closet shelves shoved through  drywall or my mirrors held in place with blue-tack putty. When I see the sloppily applied makeup on his hands or the AI edits that transform his doughy octogenarian body into a superhero physique, I try not to think about the cobwebs of spliced knob-and-tube wiring in my attic that became outmoded around the time of Thomas Edison’s death.    

Trump’s poll numbers are in free fall, presaging a brutal midterm election that might make him a premature lame duck. The Big Lie of 2020 has gone stale. His promise to keep America out of new wars has fallen apart in the dumbest and most expensive way imaginable. His foundation is cracking, with at least some longtime MAGA boosters turning on him. His public rambling and late-night Truth Social screeds suggest there may be termites in the rafters. Overwhelmed with the sheer amount of work he’d have to do to actually set things right, Trump has opted for a fresh coat of paint.

The president launched Trump TV on YouTube earlier this week, and once again I can see the logic. The 24-hour propaganda stream allows him to crow about his accomplishments while avoiding the pesky questions that even sympathetic news networks have started tossing at him lately. At a moment when former supporters are visibly backing away from Trump’s moldy message and trying to seal themselves off from the toxic reputational effects of his second term, Trump is creating a safe space for his lead-poisoned die-hards. It’s almost an act of love, or about as close as someone as self-obsessed as the president can get. 

There’s no tension on Trump TV and precious little in the way of explanation. The streaming channel acts as a firehose of Trump news, meant to be met with unquestioning applause from the most devoted members of Trump’s shrinking and increasingly elderly  base. It’s an endless stream of nothing, meant to fill time more than entertain, like the brainrotted AI slop that pollutes TikTok streams, except many leagues less interesting. The lack of conflict that might have been created on a conventional news channel renders his impromptu network interminably boring. 

As the Bulwark puts it,  the channel has “no purpose.”

“It’s simply Trump’s staff trying to fix a problem Trump created — all in an ad hoc way but while trying to give the misimpression that there’s a plan.” the outlet’s Brendan Hartnett wrote. “It’s political ephemera — the sort of content that arguably isn’t even meant to be watched the first time, let alone replayed later.”

Salon’s Sophia Tesfaye agrees, calling  the self-evident desperation “excruciating”:

When a clown’s only trick is shouting into a live microphone, the absolute worst thing that can happen is for the cameras to simply turn off. It’s clear by this week’s spectacle that Trump cannot survive the possibility that America has finally changed the channel.

Away from his glorified YouTube playlist, a pro-Trump ad aired recently on Fox News, pushing back hard against the nonexistent danger of communism in America. Proudly displaying the probably-illegal fact that it was paid for the U.S. government, the commercial uses a visual language deeply familiar to denizens of the online right. A pulsing mix of photos of Trump looking maximally presidential flies past as slogans flash across the screen. UFC president Dana White crows about Trump’s toughness over phrases like “DEFEND LAW AND ORDER” and “AMERICA WILL NEVER BE A COMMUNIST COUNTRY.”

It’s the stuff of AI conserva-slop and gooner Discord channels. It’s unclear whether the TikTok-y style will land with the older, couch-bound Fox News audience, but the purpose is easy to discern. Like Trump TV, it’s meant to boost confidence in the president among an ever-diminishing group of supporters, to create belief in an alternate reality where the White House isn’t falling down around him. 

Let’s be clear that the rot didn’t start with Trump. He was ushered into office by a pre-existing coalition of racists, the tax-cut-seeking wealthy and millions of Americans who got left behind in the unequal recovery from the Great Financial Crisis.  If the whole experiment hadn’t been decaying in the first place, it never would have embraced a bigoted, silver-spoon game show host. Again, I can sympathize. If my own house weren’t in a state where examining anything too closely costs $200, if there weren’t cracks in the porcelain and popcorn shedding from the ceiling, I’d never have been able to buy it. 

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Like Trump, I’m no expert at the job I’ve been handed. I meet each new crisis with little more than a desire to muddle through, to patch it up well enough that I can forget about it. In that light, it’s easy to forgive Trump TV its shoddiness and his advertisements for their questionable legality. The right way to fix the holes in the floor is kind of abstract, while the screws and plates in my utility closet are right there. Trump can’t fix the core problems of an increasingly unequal America or stop the slide of the country’s global esteem. So, why not slather on another coat of bull and hope no one notices?  

Trump’s term will end soon. He will visibly grow older – pretty fast, I suspect — and then he’ll die. Trumpism just has to hold on until he can sell it off to some other sucker. 

The post Trump TV’s intentional brainrot appeared first on Salon.com.

There is a striking development buried inside the administration’s escalating confrontation with the press that’s turned a familiar Donald Trump-versus-the-media fight into a potentially consequential rupture inside the right-wing media ecosystem. By banning CNN, MS NOW and POLITICO, the president tried to extract a cost for challenging coverage. The move backfired. Instead, it united competitors behind a press-freedom principle, prompting Fox News — the biggest booster of Trump’s political ascent — to participate in an unprecedented pool-coverage stoppage. 

Fox’s own Washington bureau chief, Bryan Boughton, who happened to be chairing the pool this week, sent the note announcing the shutdown. Now Peter Navarro, one of the president’s most loyal foot soldiers, is on a crusade against “the back-stabbing Fox News Corporation” and pushing the White House toward a punitive boycott of the outlet. 

Navarro, the president’s senior counselor for trade and manufacturing, is actively orchestrating a campaign to persuade the White House to formally cut ties with Fox News and isolate the network, thereby dismantling its status as the supreme arbiter of conservative media. Calling it “CNN with better lighting, a fake slogan and a flag graphic,” he has accused the network of “helping the other side undermine the president.” In recent days Navarro has argued that Trump’s Cabinet secretaries and senior officials should stop appearing on Fox News and Fox Business. Not only has he attacked network executives, but he has also celebrated Real America’s Voice as a potential replacement for MAGA’s loyalties. 

The proximate cause of Navarro’s rage is Maria Bartiromo, the Fox Business and Fox News anchor whose sudden firing earlier this month is key to understanding everyone’s motives in this fight. The longtime business host had been preparing to interview Navarro following Trump’s July 16 primetime speech in which the president made unsubstantiated claims about foreign interference in the 2020, 2022 and 2024 elections. After a Fox executive subsequently instructed her not to cover Trump’s claims, Bartiromo canceled Navarro’s appearance and shared the executive’s message with him. He then passed the communication up the White House chain of command. Fox treated the disclosure as a fireable offense, cutting Bartiromo loose after over 12 years, isolating her from her own staff in her final weeks and firing her executive producer alongside her. Trump himself seemed blindsided, posting that he “can’t believe” Bartiromo no longer has her shows. 

Navarro has treated Bartiromo’s exit as proof of a wider “muzzling” of MAGA. He has spent the following weeks constructing an increasingly elaborate theory of Fox as captured territory, run by executives who he claims are secretly sabotaging the president. Writing in the Washington Times and The Daily Caller, he has laid out a rap sheet: Fox News Media CEO Suzanne Scott is, by his account, “the same executive responsible for the decapitation of three of the network’s most intelligent talk heads”: Lou Dobbs in 2021, Tucker Carlson in 2023 and now Bartiromo, all pro-Trump voices who were pushed out while “useful RINO idiots like Karl Rove” enjoy free rein to criticize Trump’s tariffs. Navarro accused Fox of joining the entire White House television pool — which consists of ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC and Fox — to form a “Five Network Cartel” exercising illegitimate “veto power” over what Americans see of their own president. In Navarro’s view, the only acceptable resolution would be a primetime apology from the network to Trump and its viewership.

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Before he ran for office, Trump built his national political relevance through cable television, especially with Fox appearances during his birther campaign against President Barack Obama. Fox has been the top-rated network in total day and primetime cable news viewership every year since January 2002, a 24-year winning streak built precisely on the grievance-driven conservative audience that provided Trump with his political foundation. He, in turn, drove up the ratings even more. 

Fox did not build Trump alone, and Trump did not cultivate Fox’s audience alone. But their feedback loop mattered enormously: Each gave the other cultural authority with conservative voters. Members of the president’s Cabinet — from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, a former “Fox & Friends Weekend” host, to U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro — were recruited directly from the network’s anchor desks. 

Yet as Trump’s second administration reaches a critical turning point, that historic alliance has devolved into open, bitter warfare. The president’s own personal frustration with Fox predates even Navarro’s critique, though it often manifests in petty grievances and public score-settling. On Truth Social, the president has repeatedly vented his annoyance with the network, publicly berating anchor Shannon Bream — and misspelling the insult as “Milktoast” — for using outdated visual graphics of White House ballroom construction and for challenging Attorney General Todd Blanche on legal impartiality. Trump has similarly attacked Bret Baier and the network’s polling unit for displaying “Fake Polls” that reflect his declining national approval ratings.

Trump’s anger at Fox highlights a fundamental vulnerability for both himself and the network. Fox finds itself caught in an unsustainable commercial position; the network’s historically dominant ratings are showing signs of erosion as Trump’s poll numbers decline. When Fox hosts attempt to reflect the changing mood of the public or question controversial policies, they face immediate backlash from both the White House and their core audience.

This friction has become acutely visible in recent months as prominent Fox personalities have openly broken with the administration on his war of choice in Iran. Anchors who are generally supportive of the president, including Laura Ingraham and Jesse Watters, have repeatedly questioned Trump’s handling of the ongoing war. The conflict has drawn strong disapproval from a large segment of Trump’s populist base, who are feeling economic pain at the fuel pumps and growing skeptical of the president’s repeated claims that the military engagement is drawing to a close. Former Fox stars like Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly have amplified this backlash from the outside, creating an unprecedented wave of right-wing dissent against the administration’s foreign policy.

Domestic economic policy has produced similar ideological fractures on air. Host Will Cain expressed visible frustration over Trump’s recent outreach to New York’s socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani. Pointing to lip-reading analysis of off-mic exchanges where Trump invited Mamdani to the White House and offered to look after his interests, Cain warned that MAGA and democratic socialism were beginning to blur, citing data showing that over half of young conservatives support government-run grocery stores and more than 40% would welcome a Democratic socialist presidency.

A week after his Oval Office temper tantrum, Trump’s press crackdown has succeeded only in exposing deep ideological fractures within the conservative movement and uniting historically fierce media competitors against his overreach. (On Thursday, a Trump-appointed judge issued a temporary order restoring access of the outlets to the White House for 14 days, while the legal challenge is ongoing.)

The president’s crackdown assumed Fox would play the compliant beneficiary, scooping up airtime and access that CNN and MS NOW no longer had. Instead Fox recognized, correctly, that a press pool that can be selectively gutted by presidential fiat today is also one that offers no institutional protection to others tomorrow, including Fox itself. In fact, after pool coverage resumed on Friday, the White House barred CNN from traveling with Trump on Air Force One. 

Instead of establishing Trump’s control over the media, the White House’s attempt at press suppression showed the limits of that control and, in the process, placed Fox News in the crosshairs of the very movement it helped build.

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Last week, Fox News seemed to be trying to give Donald Trump what he wanted. Network personalities went on air and recited, with all the enthusiasm of a sixth grader reading a book report he skimmed on the bus, the rosiest possible version of Trump’s economy. Will Cain stood in front of a big board and tried to force-feed viewers praise for an economy that much of the public sees as failing them and their families. Greg Gutfeld, in the familiar performance of a man discovering empathy only when the numbers flatter his side, acted surprised to care about falling poverty statistics. It all had the feel of a network reading from the same set of talking points, dispatched from somewhere on the C-suite level, hurrying to convince viewers that Trump’s economy is thriving.

But that synchronized propaganda blitz flopped. 

Whatever the assignment was supposed to accomplish, it did not appease the man it was designed to flatter. By the end of the week, the president who had just been handed hours of favorable spin by the most watched cable network in the nation let out a tantrum so large it swallowed three unrelated newsrooms. Facing a failing presidency, crashing poll numbers, the prospect of a Democratic wave in November’s midterms and zero sense of a second-term agenda, Trump just up and banned CNN, Politico and MS NOW from the White House for seemingly no reason. On Monday, they announced they were suing to reinstate their access.

“On Friday the press shop was blindsided,” Politico reported, as the directive happened while chief of staff Susie Wiles was out of town. Still, the latest retaliatory purge was as pathetic as it was predictable. Trump did not identify a specific false report or allege a security breach to justify his radical action. Instead, his stated offense was simply that these outlets had produced too many negative stories over too much time. By Saturday morning, reporters from all three outlets were turned away at the White House gates. 

Fox News barely let out a peep. And the rest of the White House press corps — the reporters who share vans and pool feeds and holiday parties with the people just banished — did what they have done for a decade now. Mostly nothing.

That appears to have changed Monday morning. Late Sunday night, the administration announced it was banning CNN from serving in its previously scheduled slot as the television pool representative for the White House press corps — a marked escalation of the situation. In response, major networks including ABC, CBS, NBC and, notably, Fox News — agreed to suspend their pool coverage of Trump in solidarity with CNN. In a joint statement, the four networks, along with CNN, said, “The public has a vital interest in receiving accurate, independent information about its government. No administration should restrict a news organization because it objects to its reporting.”

New York Times reporter Peter Baker pointed out the historic nature of this event: “For the first time in my 30 years of covering the White House, the president will not have a network TV camera covering his everyday official actions and travels.”

At least until this point, Trump knew the press corps’ dirty little secret: It was far too late for symbolic outrage to substitute for collective action. The press has spent years teaching Trump that it is possible to divide journalists from one another. He recognized that much of the Washington press corps will deplore his conduct in a statement, and then show up for the next photo-op, fight for the next pool slot and keep treating access to an increasingly authoritarian White House as a professional prize. He believed, with good reason, that outlets like Fox News will even frame the exclusion of their peers as a partisan squabble in an effort to appear balanced. 

But Fox News has been here before.

In 2009, when Barack Obama’s White House tried to marginalize Fox News by excluding the network from an interview with Treasury official Kenneth Feinberg, the other television networks pushed back. The attempt was temporary — exclusion from one specific interview, not an announced and potentially expanding ban on multiple major outlets from White House grounds because their reporting offended the president. But the other four major television networks — ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN — refused to participate if Fox was excluded.

The Washington bureau chiefs delivered a clear ultimatum that either Fox News is allowed in the room, or nobody goes in. Jake Tapper, then at ABC, confronted White House press secretary Robert Gibbs in the briefing room and asked him directly why it was appropriate for the government to declare a news organization illegitimate. (Fox lawyers later argued in court that hosts like Tucker Carlson cannot reasonably be considered legitimate sources of news.) Facing a unified front from a press corps that put constitutional principles ahead of commercial rivalries, the Obama administration backed down immediately. 

That moment demonstrated the power of absolute press solidarity. The networks did not defend Fox News because they agreed with its right-wing bias, but because they understood the precedent that would be set if a president were permitted to ban a critic from the room. Once the government establishes press facilities and admits credentialed journalists to gather news, it cannot hand access out according to ideological loyalty. 

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But that solidarity fractured in the years that followed. With Trump’s rise and his infamously leaky first term, White House reporters have seemingly surrendered to access journalism. When he descended his golden escalator at Trump Tower in 2015, major television networks traded journalistic rigor for spectacle. They broadcast his rallies uninterrupted, handing him billions of dollars in free airtime to normalize his attacks on democratic norms. In 2018, the administration pulled CNN White House correspondent Jim Acosta’s press credentials after he refused to hand back a microphone during a heated exchange. CNN sued, other outlets filed friend of the court briefs, and the administration eventually folded and restored his pass. Although imperfect, this response demonstrated that the old model still worked.

In 2025, Trump tried it again, this time against the Associated Press, after the wire service declined to rename the Gulf of Mexico on his say so. The AP sued. Fox News, NBC, the New York Times and the Washington Post all filed amicus briefs on the AP’s behalf, and a Trump appointed district court judge, Trevor McFadden, ordered the ban lifted from the broader White House grounds, even as an appeals court let Trump keep the AP out of the Oval Office, Air Force One and Mar-a-Lago while the case proceeds. All the while, the president held press avails in which he continued to attack the press. 

Trump understands how to exploit every weakness the media has cultivated, like its addiction to spectacle. He insults a reporter, and the clip runs all day. He threatens a network, and the network gets a bump in attention. He calls the press “the enemy of the people,” then calls individual reporters when he wants to plant a story or manipulate a news cycle. He denounces the New York Times as “fake news,” then sits for lengthy interviews with its reporters when they are writing books he hopes will immortalize his preferred version of events. At this year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Trump turned CNN’s Kaitlan Collins into a target of misogynistic ridicule while the assembled press corps remained seated. 

This breakdown of solidarity among the press corps has allowed Republicans to build a false narrative around media access. After Trump announced his ban on CNN, Politico and MS NOW, the conservative political machine rallied to defend the blatantly unconstitutional act with a familiar bait and switch. Trump allies like Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., absurdly claimed no president has been more open to the press than Trump and mocked the idea that press access requires actual access. Scalise repeatedly parroted the debunked claim that Joe Biden revoked the credentials of 400 reporters, a distortion fact-checked by ABC’s Jonathan Karl, who noted that only one reporter was ever denied a credential under Biden. The rest simply hadn’t reapplied and were let in anyway. United Nations Ambassador Mike Waltz told CNN’s own Dana Bash that he backs banning her network. Fox News contributor Joey Jones, whose colleague Jacqui Heinrich is the current White House Correspondents’ Association president, casually remarked that he would not “shed a tear” over the banned journalists. Heinrich, Fox’s White House correspondent, rightly condemned the ban as an unequivocal violation of the First Amendment.

Fox’s opinion side has spent a decade building an audience that treats CNN’s misfortune as content. In that time, Fox News paid $787.5 million to settle Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit after internal communications revealed how Trump’s false election claims were knowingly aired and promoted.

But Monday morning’s news that at least some of the past solidarity has returned is heartening — and it stands as a rebuke to an out-of-control president and administration that thinks they can bulldoze the media into submission. Still, the damage has been done. While a legal victory for CNN, Politico and MS NOW is probable, it will in all likelihood come months from now, after the outlets have been shut out of covering the president during the most consequential midterm season in a generation. That is not the same as winning. 

Executive power cannot be checked by the courts alone; it must be checked by real-time resistance from reporters. Monday’s collective action is a meaningful first step. Now there should be another: while the lawyers argue the case in federal court, the rest of the White House press corps should make sure the chairs in the briefing room are empty.

UPDATE: This story has been updated to reflect Monday morning’s news that ABC, CBS, Fox News and NBC are suspending pool coverage in solidarity with CNN, and that CNN, Politico and MS NOW are filing suit to regain access to the White House.

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