Donald Trump thought that if he could scare television executives badly enough, eventually the jokes would stop. Probably more than any other president, he understands television’s power because he was manufactured and insulated by it. So Trump thought that if Stephen Colbert could be pushed off his late-night perch at CBS and Jimmy Kimmel could be suspended by ABC, and Brendan Carr could dangle the Federal Communications Commission over ABC like a regulatory sword, the message would sink in across the television industry: Criticize the president at your own peril.

For a while, Trump’s gameplan seemed to be working. But it’s now clear that ABC and Disney, the network’s parent company, have decided they are done running.

That is what makes Rosie O’Donnell’s unlikely return to television so delicious. On the surface, it is just a bit of summer programming: Kimmel is taking a vacation, so O’Donnell is filling in for him this week. But Kimmel tapped O’Donnell for the gig deliberately, framing it as “a special treat” for Trump — a delicious nod to the president’s notoriously thin-skinned, two-decade-long vendetta against her for mocking his business failures back when she co-hosted “The View,” another ABC franchise. O’Donnell has been one of Trump’s most persistent celebrity antagonists since. And Trump has spent that same stretch periodically threatening to strip her of her American citizenship in Truth Social posts that read like ransom notes. (After he returned to the White House, she famously moved to Ireland.)

Now O’Donnell is back behind a network television desk and, by all appearances, is having a blast. There was a comforting nostalgia in watching her surrounded by tchotchkes, radiating the loose, warm confidence that made “The Rosie O’Donnell Show” such a phenomenon in the 1990s. She handed out copies of her longtime friend Madonna’s new album to the studio audience, told stories about ordinary life and looked completely at home.

Love her or not, seeing O’Donnell back in her element was a master class in unapologetic cultural resistance. She didn’t waste any time getting down to business. In Monday’s opening monologue, she tipped her hat to Trump by dubbing him the “Mango Mussolini” and offering a stark warning: “If you thought that the president hated ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live!’ when it was hosted by Jimmy Kimmel, buckle up, people!”

On Tuesday night, O’Donnell twisted the knife even further by referencing Trump’s humiliating, tightly guarded escape from Air Force One in a catering truck during a recent Turkey trip — quipping that he was currently watching the show from inside a mobile food cart. After calling him “President Oompa J. Loompa,” she thanked Trump sarcastically for making her “re-famous.” She looked directly into the camera and said, “Hi! I know you’re watching!” Then she moved on. Nothing enrages Trump quite like being ignored.

But while O’Donnell’s return provided the cultural fireworks, the real earthquake was happening inside a federal courtroom. On the very morning after her debut, ABC and Disney officially sued the FCC, marking a monumental escalation against an administration that has weaponized federal agencies to settle personal vendettas. The suit is one of the most muscular legal challenges mounted by a major media corporation against this administration, and it arrives after nearly a year of Disney choosing concession.

The lawsuit involves eight Disney-owned ABC stations whose license renewals were moved up years ahead of schedule. ABC claims that government pressure from the action has already affected programming decisions, including political coverage on “The View.” The long-running daytime talk show has reportedly gone months without booking a single political candidate and has quietly declined to air clips it otherwise would have used, out of fear that footage could be weaponized against the network in the FCC’s ongoing review. The lawsuit seeks emergency relief to stop the agency’s early renewal proceeding and any resulting threat against ABC’s station licenses.

The company also concedes, remarkably, that it aired one of Trump’s primetime speeches on its streaming platform — a speech that recycled thoroughly debunked claims about the 2020 election — specifically because it worried about the consequences of not airing it, something it says it normally would not have done. 

Sit with that for a second. A multinational conglomerate, worth an estimated $106 billion, that owns Marvel, Pixar, ESPN and a chunk of the American entertainment imagination, admitted in a federal court under oath that it is self-censoring its own airwaves out of fear of a government agency. 

The FCC, for its part, insists that its scrutiny concerns Disney’s diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) practices, not ABC’s speech. Carr has called the lawsuit “meritless” and said the commission is merely following facts and law. But this explanation has a glaring problem: The pattern is impossible to ignore.

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Carr, a Trump appointee, has publicly echoed Trump’s attacks on ABC. In September, he dangled a naked ultimatum: Either ABC “took action” against Kimmel, or the network would face severe regulatory consequences. In April, Carr ordered an early review of the network’s  broadcast licenses just after Kimmel used the White House Correspondents’ Dinner to needle the president. The move followed months of Trump publicly demanding, on Truth Social and in impromptu Air Force One gaggles, that ABC’s licenses be “taken away” because the network’s coverage of him is “almost 100% Negative.” Documents uncovered by the Guardian this week laid bare the cozy coordination between Carr, his top staffers and Trump’s inner circle — including nearly a dozen scheduled calls and White House meetings between senior officials and the supposedly “independent” regulator.

Disney, meanwhile, has not exactly distinguished itself as a fearless corporate warrior against Trump. The company previously chose accommodation over confrontation. In December 2024, ABC agreed to pay $15 million toward Trump’s presidential library and museum to settle a defamation lawsuit over comments made by anchor George Stephanopoulos.

Disney’s newfound spine did not appear out of nowhere, and it’s worth being honest about what actually moved it. The company’s current CEO, Josh D’Amaro, who took over from Bob Iger in March, has told business reporters that the company intends to stand on “journalistic integrity” and refuses to be told how to run its news operations — a fine sentiment, and one that would carry more weight if it had arrived before a federal regulator forced the company’s hand rather than after.

That is precisely why O’Donnell’s presence behind that desk this week functions as something closer to a renaissance than counterprogramming. O’Donnell has explicitly framed her Kimmel hosting role as solidarity with the late-night community and a defense of First Amendment rights. She is, in her own telling, guest-hosting partly to show support for Kimmel  and partly out of grief for Stephen Colbert, whose “Late Show” was canceled by Paramount amid its own merger maneuvering — and who, in O’Donnell’s estimation, never got the public defense he deserved. In interviews, she has been unsparing about what she sees as coming next in American media consolidation, warning that a CNN controlled by David Ellison — who purchased Paramount and CBS — would be “tragic.” O’Donnell has  compared the current wave of right-wing ownership takeovers to a future in which Fox News wouldn’t be one outlier conservative network among many, but the mainstay of the entire industry. 

Whatever you think of O’Donnell — and conservative media has spent the week insisting that her return to network television constitutes some sort of Trump Derangement Syndrome case study — she understood something Disney’s legal department only recently caught up to: Capitulation doesn’t buy safety. It buys an appetite for more capitulation. 

The post Rosie O’Donnell’s return shows ABC is done capitulating to Trump appeared first on Salon.com.

In the year the United States celebrates the 250th anniversary of its break with the British crown, there is something almost painfully ironic about a broadcaster from the kingdom that once ruled us now being more willing to stand up to Donald Trump than much of the American establishment. But the irony isn’t really the story. The story is that the president filed a $10 billion lawsuit to punish the BBC, and in doing so, he may have handed the corporation a legal instrument to drag his children Ivanka and Donald Jr., and his son-in-law Jared Kushner, into a Miami courtroom to answer for what happened on Jan. 6.

The lawsuit was supposed to be another exercise in the familiar Trumpian playbook: File a claim, demand an astronomical sum, bury the target in legal expenses, force a humiliating settlement that gets marketed as a political win. That strategy has worked before. In 2024, ABC News agreed to pay $15 million after network anchor George Stephanopoulos inaccurately said Trump had been found liable for rape. Paramount later paid more than $24 million over CBS News’ handling of an interview with Vice President Kamala Harris that took place during the 2024 presidential race. With that track record, Trump had every reason to expect the BBC to fold in the same way.

He miscalculated badly. As a public service corporation, the BBC operates under a royal charter that explicitly bars it from entering into out-of-court financial settlements to make litigation disappear. It cannot cut a check to sweep away Trump’s claims. The corporation is legally bound to fight until a verdict is reached — or until Trump himself gives up. And its defense team, anchored by the First Amendment firm Ballard Spahr, has used that obligation to go straight at the people closest to Trump on Jan. 6.

The underlying claim concerns a 2024 documentary about Trump’s candidacy that aired on “Panorama.” Titled “Trump, A Second Chance?”, the program edited together separate portions of Trump’s Jan. 6 speech so that it sounded as though he said, in immediate sequence, “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you,” followed by “we fight, we fight like hell.” Those lines were actually spoken nearly an hour apart, and the BBC has apologized for how the edit was constructed. But the corporation has not apologized for the underlying accusation — because the documentary’s producers and the BBC’s lawyers believe it is true. The BBC has also noted the documentary never aired in the U.S., including in Florida, which creates its own problem for Trump’s attempt to establish the legal connection between the broadcast and the injury he claims to have suffered.

But the discovery fight is where this stopped being a media dispute and became a family liability. Because the entire defamation claim hinges on Trump’s intent — on what he meant by the phrase “fight like hell” — the BBC’s lawyers moved to subpoena the people who helped draft that speech and who were closest to him as the Capitol riot unfolded. On Aug. 14, the BBC asked a federal court in Miami for permission to compel testimony and records from Kushner, Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump Jr. and Kushner concerning the drafting and meaning of the speech.

According to the BBC’s own filings, Donald Jr. and Ivanka were in the room while the speech was being revised and were present when it was delivered. Kushner drafted a statement condemning the Capitol violence that the White House never issued. He also reportedly told then-chief of staff Mark Meadows the situation was “getting really ugly” as it unfolded, while Trump Jr. texted Meadows begging him to get his father to “condemn this” immediately. 

These are not neutral bystanders being swept into a media spat. They are three people who watched the fire get lit and, by their own contemporaneous words, knew exactly what was burning. And if the case proceeds, they may have to say so under oath.

Trump’s own conduct made this exposure worse. The BBC also sought his financial records to test the legitimacy of the massive damages he claimed to have suffered — a maneuver that prompted him to quietly abandon his monetary claims rather than open his ledgers to public scrutiny. His lawyers had previously dismissed the request as a “fishing expedition.” But this is how discovery works: If you claim a broadcast inflicted extraordinary economic harm, the defendant gets to test that claim. Trump built the case that now threatens to expose his own children and son-in-law, and he built it because he assumed no one would ever call his bluff.

But the most revealing part of the BBC’s filing isn’t the subpoenas themselves — it’s the account of what happened when the network tried to serve them. Process servers attempting to deliver subpoenas to Ivanka and Kushner at their fortified Miami residence in May were physically blocked by local law enforcement, who directed them to coordinate through the Secret Service. When the BBC’s legal team did exactly that, Secret Service counsel Troy Epstein flatly declared the agency was neither authorized to accept service on the family’s behalf nor willing to help facilitate it. The BBC says it also could not serve Trump Jr. at Trump Tower. It has now asked the court for permission to use alternative methods — email or certified mail — because the ordinary machinery of American process service has been quietly closed off by a federal agency to a foreign broadcaster trying to hold the president’s family accountable.

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That is the part of this story that should trouble people well beyond press freedom circles. Taxpayer-funded federal security agencies are being used as a private shield for a political dynasty, deployed to physically block the basic mechanics of a civil lawsuit that Trump himself initiated. It echoes the darker pattern already established around this family and this date — the Secret Service’s unexplained failure to preserve text messages and call logs from around Jan. 6, and allegations that agents played a role in intimidating witnesses like former Trump aide Cassidy Hutchinson before her explosive congressional testimony. A protective detail meant to keep the first family safe is being repurposed to keep it unaccountable.

Trump has responded predictably, complaining that the BBC is “abusing the deposition process.” His projection is transparent. Nobody dragged his family into this. He is the plaintiff. He asked for $10 billion. He put his own reputation, his financial losses and the meaning of his own speech at the center of a case he chose to bring, and in doing so he opened the door to exactly the kind of scrutiny now aimed at Ivanka, Donald Jr. and Kushner. A defendant testing the plaintiff’s claims isn’t harassment. It’s the legal process working according to centuries of jurisprudence — just as the president intended.

None of this guarantees the subpoenas will be enforced, or that Ivanka, Donald Jr. or Kushner will ever sit for testimony. The court could still limit the subpoena’s scope, and the family’s lawyers will fight the serving of them on every available ground. But the posture itself matters. 

While the BBC absorbs real financial strain from international litigation against a sitting American president, it has refused to play the domestic game of corporate capitulation that has defined how ABC, CBS and so many other news outlets have handled Trump’s legal threats. It punched back in the fight Trump started and pushed it toward the people who were actually in the room on Jan. 6 — the same people the taxpayer-funded Secret Service is now, apparently, working to keep out of reach.

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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.

The post Fox News tried to dunk on the WNBA. It missed appeared first on Salon.com.

Amid weeks of compounding foreign policy failures and an economy that lost a revised 103,000 jobs across May and June, conservatives are grappling online with a brutal realization that the Republican Party as a whole is desperate to ignore: What do you tell working-class voters who are drowning under the weight of unrelenting inflation and sluggish job growth, when your entire economic platform is built on a foundation of gaslighting? 

The GOP has spent the better part of the last decade telling Americans it is the party of economic populism. Donald Trump was supposed to be the politician who understood the frustration of people who felt left behind by globalization and stagnant wages. But 18 months into the president’s second term, Republicans have arrived at a remarkable place: running the Biden administrations’ failed playbook on inflation. Now conservatives are fighting with one another over whether a $20 burrito is actually too expensive. 

The current food discourse is not about the price of avocado toast or organic eggs, but it is a similarly mundane symbol of a much larger problem confronting Trump and the Republican Party heading into the November midterms. It started, as these things do now, with a tweet. 

Last week, Daily Wire host Matt Walsh complained that grocery prices were “insane” and still rising. Then Turning Point USA spokesman Andrew Kolvet relayed a comment from one of the organization’s college students: “A burrito shouldn’t cost $20.” Kolvet added his own gloss — that it’s “a hangover from Covid and Biden-era inflation” — but he noted that “the lived experience is the same: It just feels like basic things cost too much.” 

Inflationary pressures on grocery prices and supply chains have caused the cost of a standard beef burrito to climb 50% since 2020. For workers at the 50th percentile — the middle class, in other words — wages have not kept pace with fast-food prices, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics price index for limited-service meals and snacks. Rather than reading the room, conservative politicians and pundits immediately rushed to echo the White House line that affordability concerns are a Democratic hoax, and then pivoted to calling young people lazy and irresponsible. This is a remix of the lecture supposedly spoiled millennials, who refused to sacrifice every small pleasure on the altar of homeownership, heard for years about $7 lattes. 

In response to what he called the “burrito debate,” Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Texas, told people to “get a job” and “eat Ramen.” Ben Shapiro responded as if the student had demanded that the federal government provide what he curiously described as gourmet burritos. Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen reminisced about working two jobs, living with roommates and eating ramen after college. When he reminded college students that burritos are covered by their meal plans, he got fat shamed by Vice President JD Vance. Fox Business blamed the commotion on young people and their supposed addiction to “little treats.”

What these responses revealed is that a large segment of right-wing media would rather lecture struggling families — cook at home, get a roommate, eat ramen, skip Starbucks — and condemn their lifestyles than acknowledge the obvious reality about out of control prices. Babylon Bee editor Joel Berry generated a pile on after he suggested in a viral post that he could feed a family of eight for under $20, only to admit he was entirely skimping on meat and loading up on beans. 

Trump has called affordability concerns a Democratic “con job” and “hoax,” and a meaningful chunk of MAGA media’s older guard will not, under any circumstances, hear a complaint about the cost of living. But by engaging in the burrito debate, many of them unintentionally exposed the fact that despite their comments on the youth, they have not actually spoken to a young person in years. The pushback they experienced from Trump’s younger supporters was swift — and remarkable.

Far-right activist and conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec questioned how Trump could claim this is a “Golden Age” with the disappearance of McDonald’s Dollar Menu. “Let’s be frank about it,” Fox News host Tomi Lahren wrote on X, “some Americans are turning to socialism because Republicans have failed us so dismally that even the most destructive economic model imaginable feels palatable to people who are struggling to make ends meet and buy groceries.” 

Even as Trump’s own base was arguing about burritos, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent went on CNBC and announced he was “sick” of hearing about the so-called K-shaped economy, the idea that gains are flowing overwhelmingly to the wealthy while everyone else stagnates or falls behind, and declared it flatly over. In its place, Bessent said, America now has a “C economy,” in which lower wage earners are, in his telling, finally clawing their way back. 

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The secretary cited a 2% wage gain for the bottom quarter of earners as proof. But the Atlanta Fed’s own wage tracker showed the bottom quarter of earners had the lowest median wage growth of any income group, a pattern that has held every month since October 2024. Bessent, in other words, picked the one statistic that told a happy story and built a press appearance around it, while the broader data he was being asked about pointed the other way. 

But if Chipotle has genuinely become a luxury good in just a couple of years, the administration’s economic policy is a complete and utter failure. A reliable indicator of economic health is real disposable income, which tracks how much extra money people actually have after essentials are paid for. Since February 2025, the month after Trump returned to office, it has remained completely flat. Every other time in modern history that real disposable income has flattened out for that long, the nation has been stuck in a recession. 

Pocketbook issues have always been the single strongest motivator for the electorate. During a 1980 debate against the incumbent Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan famously asked voters if they were better off now than they were four years ago. Trump can obfuscate, lie or blame the media for only so long before even his most ardent supporters look at the empty space in their wallets after a trip to the grocery store and realize the truth. While they aren’t suddenly going to vote for Democrats, many of his MAGA followers will simply sit on their hands and stay home in November after concluding they are definitively worse off.

The split in MAGAland is not really over burritos. It is over whether MAGA can admit that the economic anger which carried Trump back to power was real, whether it persists under his administration and whether working people deserve anything better than a lecture on personal responsibility. The conservative scolds are not offering a solution because they do not believe there is a social problem to solve. In their worldview, a family’s shrinking purchasing power is primarily evidence of bad character. 

The structural depression is looming large, and as the administration prepares to slash welfare programs further, the online rhetoric from the right will inevitably paint anyone hurt by safety net cuts as a lazy loser. Already, an estimated four million people have lost critical food assistance through SNAP benefits. In any normal political climate, mocking average Americans for being anxious about the economy by calling them lazy or entitled would be immediate political suicide. Imagine Republicans trying that stunt in August 2006 when they were already facing a brewing blue wave in November. But in today’s hyperpartisan and media-fragmented ecosystem, millions of voters are expected to fall in line and vote for the ruling party — regardless of how badly they are squeezed at the checkout counter.

The post MAGA’s burrito brawl shows cracks in Trump’s economy appeared first on Salon.com.

The spectacle of Laura Loomer touching down in a Kyiv bomb shelter to announce her sudden conversion to supporting Ukraine in its war against Russia has been covered by much of the media as a sort of a political awakening. In a series of recent interviews with America’s most prominent news outlets, the MAGA influencer and conspiracy theorist took a victory lap for discovering — nearly four-and-a-half years after Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine — that Vladimir Putin is a liar. But what looks to be a surprising shift away from Russia is not a moral reckoning. It is a petty turf war amongst MAGA media — and Ukraine stands to benefit. 

Our unfortunate reality is that the shallow personal ambitions and petty feuds of MAGA influencers can dictate foreign policy. Loomer holds no elected office and possesses no genuine policy expertise, yet because she knows how to flatter the vulnerabilities of Donald Trump, she wields terrifying influence on the administration and its agenda. After years of parroting Kremlin talking points and even calling on Putin to swallow Ukraine whole, Loomer recently took a tour of Ukraine, arranged and paid for by unnamed handlers, and had an epiphany. She has suddenly rebranded herself as Kyiv’s most unlikely defender, telling the New York Times that Ukrainian officials now “view me as an extension of the Trump administration.” She recorded a glowing, highly produced interview with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the gardens of the presidential palace, dined with the chief rabbi of Ukraine and declared that she had been “bamboozled” by Russian propaganda. 

“You don’t need to listen to a podcaster and let them influence your opinion about a country. You can look at those facts yourself,” she told the Associated Press, blaming American social media platforms for banning her in the aftermath of Trump’s 2020 election loss, which led her to try Telegram, where Russian media is widely shared. “The Russians are very good at capitalizing on people’s rage. And I was very angry.” 

She elaborated six days later in an interview with NewsNation’s Batya Ungar-Sargon: “I really have come to understand that everything that I was led to believe while living in this echo chamber, a very toxic echo chamber, that is supported by foreign governments.

The whiplash is breathtaking, but it requires profound gullibility to take her transformation at face value. There is no ideological conversion here. Loomer’s evolution comes at precisely the moment when the Republican coalition is undergoing a bitter fight over what “America First” is supposed to mean. The old MAGA formula — distrust Ukraine, NATO and GOP hawks, and view Putin as a potentially useful counterweight to American liberalism — is colliding with a newer reality related to Trump’s ongoing and unpopular war of choice against Iran. Russia is increasingly difficult to portray as a friendly or even neutral power while it cooperates with the Islamic Republic. Ukraine’s resilience and effective drone campaigns, meanwhile, have made it impossible for even the most hardened cynics to paint Moscow as the inevitable victor. 

Loomer’s reversal is also inseparable from her rivalry with fellow podcasters Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Megyn Kelly and other right-wing media figures who have become increasingly hostile to Trump over Israel, Iran and the use of American military power. Loomer herself has said the right-wing split over Iran prompted her to reconsider Ukraine, and she claimed to have noticed that people she regarded as opponents of Trump were simultaneously advancing Russia-friendly arguments. Now she worries those pro-Russian voices inside the MAGA coalition have become “the biggest detriment to social cohesion” heading into what, by all credible predictions, will be a brutal midterm cycle for Republicans.

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Owens’ decision to travel to Putin’s marquee conference in St. Petersburg and Carlson’s ongoing pushing of lines amplified directly by Russian state media have provided Loomer with a tactical opening. She realized that her online nemeses had cornered the market on reflexive Kremlin apologetics. By pivoting to a pro-Ukraine posture wrapped in the language of America First security investments, she’s weaponizing patriotism against her rivals while positioning herself as the true guardian of the movement’s ideological purity. This evolving narrative frames support for Ukraine not as an act of charity or foreign aid, but as a hard-headed business transaction, one Trump appears to have welcomed. He publicly endorsed her meeting with Zelenskyy, and Loomer has said she spoke twice with Trump while in Ukraine.

None of this happens in a vacuum. In September 2024, the Justice Department indicted two Russian state media employees for funneling nearly $10 million into Tenet Media, a Tennessee outfit whose talent roster included right-wing podcasters Tim Pool, Benny Johnson and Dave Rubin, all of whom produced content the indictment says was crafted to inflame American divisions and tilt coverage toward candidates the Kremlin found useful. Pool was allegedly pulling in a $100,000 an episode while insisting he had no idea where the cash originated, a claim that got considerably shakier once reporters noted he’d made major real estate purchases the same month Tenet launched. After Loomer arrived in Kyiv last month, Pool experienced his own conversion and posted that Ukraine had been “fighting for their very existence against an evil dictator” and hoped Trump would “lend their support.”

Republican voters have also been moving in this direction. In January 2026, Pew Research Center found that 47% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents described Russia as an enemy of the U.S, up from 40% the year before. Republican confidence in Zelenskyy also rose four points to 34%.

While Loomer works to convert MAGA to the Ukrainian cause, the press should stop treating her reversal as a heroic story about one brave influencer seeing the light. They should instead frame it for what it actually is: a split in MAGA media over Ukraine and Russia that is ultimately a domestic turf war disguised as statecraft.

The post The petty loyalty beef behind the MAGA Ukraine revolt appeared first on Salon.com.

For 58 seasons, through wars, impeachments and the corporate dismantling of the network news business around it, “60 Minutes” remained America’s highest-rated newsmagazine. Viewership of the CBS News program was up 9% during the 2025-2026 season and generated more than 2.5 billion social-media video views, according to the network. Yet in a bizarre case of fixing something that does not need fixing, the program became the one CBS property executives chose to radically remake. 

David Ellison, the network’s new owner, appears determined to test whether the rare commercial-news institution that persuaded millions of Americans to spend an hour with investigative reporting can survive the removal of the very people who made it matter. In barely a year, under the ownership of Ellison’s Skydance and the editorial stewardship of Bari Weiss, that legacy has been stripped down, gutted and reassembled as an instrument of political appeasement. By sacrificing seasoned investigative reporters and filling the vacuum with anti-woke contrarians, Ellison and Weiss have defanged a national treasure. 

“60 Minutes” was imperfect, sometimes badly so. Every institution with a half-century of history is. But the program retained an essential public purpose. And in its zeal to purge the newsroom of dissent, CBS and Weiss may have inadvertently triggered the creation of their most dangerous future competitor — and accidentally set the stage for its own undoing.

The journalists Weiss pushed out did not simply disappear. Bill Owens, the former “60 Minutes” executive producer who resigned in 2025 over corporate interference before Weiss even arrived, has reportedly been assembling a business plan and pitch deck for a rival investigative newsmagazine, seeking something in the neighborhood of $50 million to fund two years of programming. The names attached to it read like a “60 Minutes” reunion special. Such a group — joined potentially by Anderson Cooper and the former producers who resigned in protest — could sell itself as carrying the true DNA of gold-standard television news. 

There is a reason Ellison spent billions acquiring a legendary news brand. His $8 billion purchase of Paramount and his aggressive right-wing revamp of CBS News is an overt attempt to smooth the waters for an infinitely larger prize — a $111 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, which includes cable news giant CNN. With Donald Trump long signaling his disdain for traditional media, Ellison’s moves at CBS functioned as a high-stakes litmus test. When the Department of Justice cleared the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger in June, Ellison passed.

But after 12 state attorneys general and the Writers Guild of America filed anti-trust lawsuits to block the merger ahead of a trial next March, Ellison took to the opinion pages of The New York Times on Tuesday to defend his growing empire. Pushing back against speculation regarding his political loyalties, Ellison pledged “independence” for his newsrooms and argued that the combined entity would control only a fraction of the streaming market. But his pleas for personal trust ring hollow. You do not demonstrate a commitment to objective journalism by spending $150 million to acquire The Free Press and handing the keys of a legacy news division to Weiss — an opinion columnist with zero television management experience and a well-documented history of tendentious reporting.

Now, at CBS News, her editorial interference has been disguised as routine management. At her infamous first staff meeting, Weiss vowed to “do the f**king news,” but what followed instead suggests a systematic effort to reshape reality.

When veteran correspondent Cecilia Vega reported on the fatal shootings of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti by federal agents in Minneapolis, network executives pressed her, she claims, to include footage of protesters assaulting undercover officers, despite Vega finding no credible examples of such altercations. She said they also urged her to feature Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey declaring he wanted law enforcement to target Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, a statement that was never made. When covering the conflict in Iran, Vega said she was instructed to open her segment by declaring the nation “totally outgunned by the United States and Israel” — framing that skewed favorably toward the Trump administration’s telling of events. (CBS News has disputed the broader claim that it sought to inject bias, saying its editorial process reflects ordinary review.) 

Elsewhere, Weiss personally blocked a deeply reported piece by Sharyn Alfonsi on El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison, where the Trump administration has deported hundreds of individuals into conditions marked by horrific human rights abuses. Though the story eventually leaked in Canada and later aired on CBS in its original form, the message Weiss sent to the newsroom was unmistakable. The effect was to launder censorship in the language of journalistic standards.

Producers say Weiss was also involved in choosing which correspondent got to interview Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu, sidelining “60 Minutes” stalwart Lesley Stahl, who is famous for decades of forensic interviews with presidents and world leaders, in favor of Major Garrett. Most recently, it was revealed that Alfonsi had been sitting on a major scoop regarding Jeffrey Epstein’s financial ties to Wall Street giants like Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America — complete with an on-camera interview filmed in March 2026 with Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., who was heading his own investigation into Epstein’s finances — before being fired by Weiss in May. CBS claimed the piece simply was not finished by the end of last season, and has not said whether it intends to air it this fall. Wyden is now pushing legislation to hold individual bankers personally accountable for exactly this kind of institutional silence.

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The optics are damning regardless of the internal timeline: The network fired the reporter chasing one of the biggest financial accountability stories of the year in the middle of a purge explicitly aimed at correspondents who resisted political pressure, and the story broke three months later, just not on CBS.

This should be the central concern about the Ellison era at CBS. Not whether Ellison privately considers himself a conservative, a liberal or a man above ideology, nor whether Weiss thinks of herself as a dissident or a reformer. The question is whether their actions are creating the practical conditions under which reporters can hold power to account.

The upheaval has been extraordinary. Tanya Simon, the executive producer who oversaw the program’s recent success, was removed alongside correspondents Alfonsi and Vega, as well as senior editors and producers. Scott Pelley was fired shortly after publicly challenging the appointment of Nick Bilton as executive producer and accusing Weiss of “murdering” the broadcast. Cooper had already departed. The result is a “60 Minutes” with a drastically depleted bench heading into a new season.

In place of these decorated investigative journalists, Bilton and Weiss have assembled what the former reportedly referred to as “the Avengers of news.” But, as longtime media critic Eric Deggans pointed out, a look at the roster reveals a strategy straight out of the old Fox News playbook: Hire a token investigative journalist to construct a thin facade of balance while filling the remaining ranks with anti-woke contrarians. 

Bringing on “The Perfect Storm” author Sebastian Junger provides comfortable camouflage for stocking the rest of the newsroom with figures like Times opinion columnist Ross Douthat and former Free Press staffer Tanya Lukyanova, whose primary qualification appears to be an eagerness to challenge progressive consensus. When an organization hires a conservative columnist known for asking whether liberal feminism ruined the workplace, or a producer whose major contributions include reframing starvation in Gaza through the lens of pre-existing health conditions, it signals a troubling shift in focus. 

Yet in their rush to destroy the old guard, Weiss and Ellison have overlooked the fact that they left behind an elite corps of unemployed, highly motivated investigative journalists with nothing left to lose. Whether this exiled team finds a home as the investigative video arm of an outlet like ProPublica, launches a streaming-native newsmagazine or partners with an independent distributor, the potential is staggering. Pelley and Alfonsi are now set to serve as journalists in residence at Columbia Journalism School during the 2026-27 academic year. While that is not a launch announcement, it is evidence that their careers and credibility did not disappear when CBS took away their airtime. 

Somewhere out there, a rival show called “Stop Watch” is writing itself, and CBS built the pitch deck for it, one firing at a time.

The post The ghost of “60 Minutes” is about to haunt Bari Weiss appeared first on Salon.com.

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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Can #JeaninePirro survive the Reflecting Pool debacle?

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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.

The post Jeanine Pirro’s Reflecting Pool reckoning appeared first on Salon.com.

Right-wing media looks to have made a profound miscalculation. They put Hunter Biden through an unrelenting public pressure cooker, convinced that by turning a private citizen’s darkest personal rock bottom into a daily political circus, they could break both the man and his family. Now, seven years into his sobriety, Biden has picked up a podcast mic and won’t stop talking. The man whom the right spent years trying to destroy is now walking into rooms they open up for him — and setting them on fire from the inside.

For the better part of the past decade, conservative media made a concerted effort to turn Biden into the ultimate avatar of political corruption: the degenerate failson as a symbol of Democratic rot. During his father Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign, the right devoted extensive attention to Hunter’s overseas business dealings, particularly his role on the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma and allegations stemming from a laptop Hunter owned that surfaced in GOP hands shortly before the election. The laptop story became a defining example of modern media dynamics after the major social media companies temporarily limited distribution of an October 2020 New York Post article that included information taken from the laptop, a decision that conservatives still cite as evidence of a massive, multi-institution coverup. Republican lawmakers spent endless congressional hours investigating his digital footprint, but were ultimately unable to establish that the elder Biden had engaged in a criminal bribery scheme tied to his son’s business activities. 

The meandering story is what makes the current public rehabilitation of Hunter Biden one of the stranger spectacles in American politics. Right-wing media turned him into a household name to hurt his father, and now that notoriety is precisely what gives him leverage. 

Having emerged from severe addiction, public humiliation and federal prosecution, Biden is now truth-telling about his past and single-handedly roasting the right wing’s bad-faith outrage ecosystem on its own home turf. This year alone Biden has sat for hours-long interviews with independent outlets that cater to the very audience the GOP spent a decade cultivating against his family. He talked to Andrew Callaghan’s Channel 5, whose YouTube following runs past three million and skews toward people who trust almost nothing coming out of U.S. institutions. He talked to Shawn Ryan, a former Navy SEAL and CIA contractor who spent years amplifying allegations against him. Ryan then hooked him up with MAGA podcaster Candace Owens, who once called him a degenerate who belonged in prison. 

Biden’s media strategy is dangerous and fascinating. He has described his media blitz as partly about addiction recovery and partly about strategy. Independent podcasts and YouTube channels have replaced the legacy media gatekeepers that used to referee these fights, and Biden figured out faster than most Democratic operatives that the audience he needed to reach was sitting in exactly the media ecosystem built to hate him. “No one gives a shit with what anybody says on CNN,” he told one interviewer, arguing that years of investigations and public scrutiny had lowered expectations to the point where audiences were surprised simply to hear him speak coherently at length. His approach appears designed to replace years of secondhand portrayals with direct exposure. 

Biden’s rapid growth on X further underscores this tactical evolution. Joining Elon Musk’s platform just days before his interview with Owens dropped, Biden began tweeting with relentless energy, sometimes authoring over 100 posts a day. Commentators quickly dubbed him a “MAGA whisperer” as he systematically dismantled right-wing talking points and exposed media figures he accused of building careers off bad-faith attacks. When CNN anchor Jake Tapper published a scathing review of Jill Biden’s memoir — which defended the former president’s fitness for office — Hunter immediately went on the offensive, blasting Tapper and corporate media for what he viewed as complicity in weaponizing personal family dynamics for television ratings.

Biden’s new approach mixes vulnerability with nuclear-grade anger. Instead of avoiding controversy, he frequently addresses it head on. On a Barstool Sports podcast this week, he joked about signing a laptop and openly discussed his struggles with crack cocaine addiction. For a movement that has invested years in hyping “Hunter’s laptop” as a civilization-ending scandal, seeing the man himself turn it into a potential merchandising opportunity should be humiliating.

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On that same Barstool appearance, he delivered an expletive-filled rant about Donald Trump’s entire family: “F**k him. F**k his sons. F**k his daughter. I mean it, all of them, the whole family, down to the grandchildren. I hope for the rest of time that I am on this earth, that their names live in ignominy.” Biden backed that rage up with a substantive critique, pointing out that the Trump sons received $3.2 billion in Defense Department contracts in just 18 months and that son-in-law Jared Kushner, despite holding no government position, is reportedly receiving more than $110 million from the Saudis, tied to nuclear enrichment authorization and billions in investment funds. 

But Biden is also reaching out beyond the right-wing media ecosystem. He has appeared on NPR’s “Newsmakers,” podcasts hosted by California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Don Lemon, and the “I’ve Had It” podcast with hosts Jennifer Welch and Angie “Pumps” Sullivan. Yet his aggressive, unapologetic posture does not spare Democrats. He has openly torched party leaders who pressured his father to abandon his 2024 reelection bid following the president’s disastrous debate performance, specifically calling out Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer as a “piece of s**t” for his role in pushing his father aside. “I’m not running for anything, so I can say whatever the f**k I want,” Hunter Biden declared, giving voice to millions of frustrated progressives who are sick and tired of watching Democratic leaders play by polite, outdated rules while right-wing extremists burn down democratic norms. 

It makes you wonder: Had the party embraced Biden’s willingness to fight back early on, perhaps they could have deployed one of the most effective anti-MAGA communicators in the country to stop Trump’s return.

To be certain, Biden’s media strategy has generated intense criticism, especially his decision to sit down with the extreme, far-right activist Nick Fuentes. The interview, filmed in a Philadelphia studio dressed up to resemble a seedy motel in a wink at the laptop scandal, quickly became a viral sensation, generating millions of views. During the interview, which reportedly nearly escalated into a physical confrontation, the two found common ground, trading skepticism about American support for Israel, with Fuentes framing his objections as political rather than religious, a distinction that will comfort no one who has watched what he actually says about Jews. When discussing their public reputations, Biden joked, “I’m a crackhead,” to which Fuentes replied, “I’m a racist,” prompting Biden to shoot back, “Mine is true!”

Biden defended the pairing on social media in terms that sound almost reasonable — until you remember who he is talking about. He argued that people who profit from keeping Americans separated have built a business model on it, and that he would sit down with anyone who sees Trump as an enemy, regardless of what else they believe. He was explicit that Fuentes’ views on race and women are indefensible, and that what Fuentes has said about the Holocaust and Nazism cannot be defended. But he argued that one issue — stopping Trump — mattered more than any daylight between him and a man who leads an online movement built substantially on racial grievance. 

This is a coherent argument. It is also the argument every troll counts on succeeding, because it leads and allows audiences to conclude that platforming extremist speech and views like Fuentes’ is a savvy tactical maneuver rather than what it actually is: a laundering operation. In this particular wash cycle, Fuentes needed laundering a great deal more than Biden needed an outlet. 

The instinct to give Fuentes and people like him a bigger microphone under the banner of anti-Trump unity deserves more skepticism. There is no common ground with someone whose political project is ethno-nationalist authoritarianism, and treating a two-hour conversation as evidence that the “enemy of my enemy is my friend” echoes the bad faith politics that lets extremists claim they were misunderstood or “just joking” the whole time. It’s just whitewashing bigotry for clicks. 

But Hunter Biden’s choice to sit with Fuentes exposes something crucial about our current media environment. At a moment when fascism is organizing through podcasts and X feeds, he has stumbled into a role Democrats should have desperately filled: that of a loud, media-savvy fighter who doesn’t care about decorum. By owning his flaws and speaking directly to the public, Biden has stripped the right-wing outrage machine of its primary power source.

The post Right-wing media can’t quit Hunter Biden appeared first on Salon.com.

For an hour and four minutes on Friday night, the president stood at a podium in a hotel he used to own and used the White House press corps as a prop. The irony of staging a White House Correspondents’ Dinner in the presence of a man actively working to dismantle the First Amendment protections of the very press he was ostensibly there to honor is almost too thick. To no one’s surprise, Donald Trump used the event as a campaign rally and personal vendetta, targeting CNN’s chief White House correspondent and anchor Kaitlan Collins with misogynistic, transphobic “jokes,” and capping the night with a “Trump 2028” hat — an authoritarian flourish masquerading as humor. 

The press stayed seated and silent. 

A press corps with any genuine values would have walked out. They would have recognized that attention is what fuels Trump’s authoritarian political strategy. Instead, reporters sat in their black-tie attire and behaved like sycophants. For an institution that loves to preen about its courage, the WHCD was a profile in cowardice. The people in that ballroom knew that Trump and administration officials have barred reporters from briefings, pursued subpoenas against journalists and threatened outlets with legal action, and that he routinely labels unfavorable coverage “fake news” to discredit any check on his power. It would have been absurdly simple for the White House Correspondents’ Association to issue a straightforward, principled declaration: “We cannot in good conscience allow a president who does not believe in the First Amendment protections this night celebrates to attend this event. Accordingly, we have rescinded our invitation.” But they refused to make a stand, apparently terrified of losing their access.

Even some of the president’s usual sympathizers on television couldn’t pretend the choice made sense. The hosts of MS NOW’s “Morning Joe,” who once sprinted to Mar‑a‑Lago in the early days of Trump’s presidency, called the decision to host him “tone‑deaf,” saying the event should never have been held in its current form and highlighting the absurdity of platforming him while his Justice Department subpoenas New York Times journalists for doing their jobs. (On July 23, the department rescinded the subpoenas after a federal judge said it hadn’t followed appropriate procedures in its investigation of how reporters obtained information on the new Air Force One’s security capabilities.) The television hosts were right about the tone‑deafness, but wrong about the scale. This wasn’t merely tone‑deaf; it was a dereliction of duty.

CNN’s Kaitlan Collins had won the WHCA’s Award for Excellence in Presidential News Coverage Under Deadline Pressure for her reporting on the tense February 2025 Oval Office confrontation between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. In his address, Trump could not let the opportunity pass. “I want to personally congratulate CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on receiving her award,” he told the room, then spent the next several minutes insisting the award was “fake,” that she “shouldn’t get” it, and that she “never smiles.” Trump told her to smile. Then he built to the joke he’d clearly been saving: that he thought Collins had landed a lucrative new endorsement deal with Bud Light, only to learn the face on the beer can actually belonged to Dylan Mulvaney, the transgender actress whose 2023 partnership with the brand triggered a right-wing boycott. 

It’s an old joke often shared by conservatives on X. The only problem is that there was no Bud Light commercial starring Mulvaney. But factual accuracy was never really the point. The point was to shame a reporter by misidentifying and weaponizing a person’s identity, using two women’s faces to deliver one insult: that neither of them is quite what she claims to be, and neither is pretty, feminine or smiley enough to matter. 

Multiple reports described the room’s reaction to that bit as silence. Even a post-event panel on CNN’s “State of the Union,” which featured a Republican congressman and a former Trump administration aide, unanimously agreed the president had bombed with his speech. It did not stop Trump. On Truth Social over the weekend, he had a second try at delivering his joke, using an image generated by artificial intelligence that placed Collins’ face onto Mulvaney’s body on a mock Bud Light can. 

Collins didn’t take the bait. On Instagram, she posted an Eleanor Roosevelt line about nobody being able to make you feel inferior without your consent, alongside a note thanking her mentor Wolf Blitzer for the award with a reminder of why asking uncomfortable questions matters. On Monday’s “Daily Show,” she told host Jon Stewart she’d rather keep the focus on the reporting than on her own reaction, because turning it into a personal feud with the president is exactly the trap he wants her to fall into.

Collins has long been known for getting under his skin. During his first term, Trump clashed with her on numerous occasions in the briefing room and on social media, almost always after she challenged him for dodging questions or making false statements. In 2018, Collins was famously barred from attending an open-press event in the Rose Garden after daring to ask pointed questions about Michael Cohen and Russian President Vladimir Putin while serving as the pool reporter.

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When Stewart pressed her on the president’s fixation, Collins defended her record, emphasizing that she refuses to serve only one political audience. “I want anyone, from my family in Alabama to people in the White House to people in Washington, to be able to hear that answer or hear that question and think, ‘What is the answer to that?’” she said. “In terms of my reaction . . . it’s really not about me. And I don’t want it to be about my reaction. If you let it become about that, then it becomes a back-and-forth between the two of us. Instead, I think it’s more effective to remind people in those moments, when he is insulting me or when he is criticizing me, about the question I asked or the reporting that I did that he was so angry about. And the fact that I got an award for it really bothered him, clearly.”

On one level, watching Collins navigate these attacks offers a masterclass in professional composure. Regardless of political perspective, one has to acknowledge she is remarkably unflappable. Yet beneath this narrative of journalistic fortitude lies a far more transactional reality that defines modern Washington media. Collins has profited quite handsomely from her singular access to and conflict with power. In the mutually beneficial ecosystem of outrage that has come to define Donald Trump’s Washington, one hand washes the other.

Collins did not enter the dinner unaware of what was coming. In truth, from a brand-building perspective, such attacks are pure gold. She emerged from the weekend with half the media world and a chorus of Hollywood celebrities wildly applauding her bravery. This dynamic highlights the core problem with the era of the celebrity reporter, one of the most paradoxical developments in modern political media. We have built an ecosystem where personal confrontation with authority is parlayed into network stardom and lucrative contracts, all while the systemic threat to democratic norms continues unabated.

Look no further than Megyn Kelly, who famously parlayed a high-profile clash with Trump in 2016 as a Fox News reporter into a massive, multi-million-dollar (and short-lived) NBC contract only months later. Now a right-wing podcaster, Kelly went on her podcast this week and rationalized the attacks on Collins while complaining that the CNN star is “never nice to the president.” Using Trumpian language, Kelly argued that Collins is “always nasty” and that her questions carry “the most negative bent you could possibly go into the questioning with,” dismissing the president’s vulgar insults as mere “jazz” that all leaders throw around. 

Then there is Collins’ own network. Semafor’s Max Tani reported that CNN leadership was “furious” over the president’s remarks and has discussed scaling back its footprint at next year’s dinner, or skipping it altogether — with one internal conversation reportedly framing the event as having become “a platform for making crude remarks at their employees’ expense.”

Such a move would be a step in the right direction. But where was that fury in the room, when it could have mattered? Where was the immediate pronouncement that they will not sit quietly while their journalists are demeaned in front of their colleagues?

Far from defending one of their own, they sat as participants.

The post Kaitlan Collins and CNN are complicit in the Trump circus appeared first on Salon.com.

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.

The post Pam Bondi has a Fox News problem appeared first on Salon.com.

The shift was as swift as it was cold. Standing before reporters in the briefing room on Thursday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked a direct question: Would President Donald Trump or his administration intervene to stop the extradition of Andrew and Tristan Tate to the United Kingdom on 59 charges of rape, sex trafficking, assault and extreme pornography? Her single-word response — “No” — denied the brothers, who have been championed by many MAGA media figures as examples of white male persecution, a lifeline. 

On Thursday, federal marshals in Miami took the Tates into custody. In addition to the charges they face in the U.K., the brothers remain embroiled in grave human-trafficking and minor-exploitation proceedings in Romania and investigations in Florida about new allegations.

In the days since their arrest, their attorney Joseph McBride — who has also represented Jan. 6 defendants — has insisted the arrest is political persecution, and he has been amplifying supportive commentary online from media figures with close ties to the Trump administration. MAGA influencer and white nationalist Nick Fuentes wrote that it would be a “national humiliation” if Trump agreed to extradite the brothers to Britain over what he called “trumped up ‘Me Too’ charges.” Other far-right influencers reportedly joined in, but to no avail.

Trump’s refusal to intervene in the Tates’ extradition fight is a much-delayed correction. For years, the brothers were treated by the MAGA ecosystem not as alleged traffickers facing serious criminal scrutiny, but as useful avatars of male grievance and anti-feminist rebellion. That bargain is now boomeranging in the direction of a different Trump: Barron.

The key to understanding how the Tate brothers rose to such political heights — and why their collapse now threatens to drag the president’s youngest son into a potentially damaging congressional spotlight — can be found in the conservative media ecosystem that laundered Andrew Tate into a right-wing icon. 

When mainstream platforms like YouTube, Meta and TikTok finally moved to deplatform the Tate brothers in 2022, the right-wing media apparatus stepped in to grant Tate a second —  and far more dangerous — life. Tucker Carlson first gave Tate a platform on Fox News back in 2022 and later hosted a long, sympathetic interview. Elon Musk reinstated Tate’s X account, restoring his reach to over 11 million followers while repeatedly tweeting defenses that hand-waved sex trafficking allegations as political distractions. The late Charlie Kirk chimed in on behalf of Tate: “What he says is so powerful. Our society is configured towards collapsing the American man.” MAGA podcaster Candace Owens dedicated hours of airtime to declaring the Tates’ innocence while launching vicious smear campaigns against their victims.

The brothers were indicted in Romania in 2023 on charges of rape and human trafficking, accused of running a criminal operation that lured women — including, prosecutors allege, a 17-year-old — into pornography and prostitution. But in February 2025, weeks after Trump’s second inauguration, Romanian authorities lifted the travel restrictions that had kept the Tates in the country, and the pair immediately boarded a private jet to Florida. At the time, the country’s foreign minister Emil Hurezeanu said that a U.S. official had expressed interest in the case. Trump, for his part, said he knew “nothing about” any pressure his administration might have applied.

The reporting since then has filled in the blanks. ProPublica reported that federal authorities were told to return electronic devices they had seized from the Tates during an investigation and chided by political appointees like Paul Ingrassia — a vocal Tate defender appointed to the General Services Administration. Heidi Blake, the New Yorker reporter who has covered the Tates more exhaustively than perhaps anyone else, has traced a direct line from a Munich Security Conference conversation between U.S. special envoy Richard Grenell and Hurezeanu to Romanian prosecutors reaching out to the Tates’ lawyers within days, asking what the Americans wanted. Experts labeled the political interference highly inappropriate, but it worked. The travel ban on the brothers was lifted. 

Within days of Andrew Tate landing back on U.S. soil, another woman came forward accusing him of assault and strangulation — the same pattern of abuse, Blake has said, described by victim after victim in this case.

This machinery surrounding was never a secret. What has been less investigated, at least until this week, is how deep the personal relationships ran — specifically, the friendship between Andrew Tate and the president’s 20-year-old son.

According to reporting in the New York Times, Tate spoke with Barron Trump over a Zoom call last year with a mutual friend present, and the two discussed their shared belief that the Romanian case against Tate was an effort to silence him. That claim — the idea that a rape and trafficking prosecution amounts to censorship — is the same framing Tate’s MAGA allies have pushed for years. Barron’s older brother, Donald Trump Jr., has called Tate’s 2023 detention “absolute insanity.” Tate publicly boasted about his access to MAGA’s top circles, bragging in 2024 that he was “very close with the Trump family” and that he was looking forward to reminding Donald Trump that he was a “bulletproof bada*s.”

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For Trump’s presidential campaign, the alliance delivered results. By leveraging the manosphere media network that Tate helped anchor, the campaign mobilized a wave of low-propensity young male voters in 2024. 

So why did the Trump White House suddenly cut the Tate brothers loose? The breakdown was not sparked by a sudden moral awakening regarding sex trafficking or rape. It was likely sparked by the cardinal sin of the MAGA media universe: political disloyalty.

In February, as the administration weighed military action in the Middle East, Andrew Tate took to his livestreaming platform to launch a furious, unhinged tirade against Trump’s strike on Iran.

“I do not support war with Iran for Israel,” Tate raged to his audience, accusing the administration of driving the country into disaster while ignoring domestic collapse. “If you’re at home in America right now and you feel like your country is f****d… and moral degeneracy is out of control . . . why would the U.S. going into a war with Iran benefit anybody in America at all? Give me one possible reason. NOBODY WANTS THIS WAR.”

When the British government authorized 38 new criminal charges against the Tates and submitted an updated extradition request to the Justice Department, the White House’s calculation was simple. The political cost of protecting two alleged serial rapists, one of whom was actively attacking the president on foreign policy, far outweighed any remaining value they brought to the youth-culture strategy. The administration threw them to the wolves.

While the administration may hope that cutting the Tates loose will close the book on this embarrassing chapter, the fallout from their tangled relationships with the first family and the wider MAGA sphere may just be beginning.

Rep.Yassamin Ansari, D-Ariz., has formally urged House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer to open a swift investigation into the Tate brothers’ relationships within Trump’s inner circle. In a searing letter, she highlighted grave diplomatic and ethical concerns regarding whether political networks leveraged their influence to shield accused human traffickers.

It doesn’t help the administration’s case that the Tate brothers were, by multiple accounts, still socializing with Trump-world figures in Washington in the days before their arrest. Ansari said she learned only this week that the brothers had traveled to D.C. for meetings, including one with Rep. Wesley Hunt, R-Texas. 

The Arizona congresswoman wants the committee to subpoena communications between the Tates and administration officials, and she wants Barron Trump to testify under oath about whether he “influenced official actions or administration policy” about the brothers.

There is no evidence that Barron engaged in criminal wrongdoing or played any role in the government’s decisions involving the Tates. But his choice to enthusiastically fraternize with a self-described misogynist facing dozens of horrific felony counts has exposed him to scrutiny. 

Barron Trump was not an unwitting bystander dragged into a media storm. He was an active participant in defending Andrew Tate, using his influence to validate an accused predator because it fit the edgy, anti-establishment aesthetic of the modern manosphere media. Now, as congressional scrutiny looms and the Tate brothers prepare to face trial in a U.S. federal court before being extradited to London, the president’s youngest son is left facing the stark consequences of his MAGA alliances.

The post Andrew Tate’s arrest causes trouble for Trump’s youngest son appeared first on Salon.com.

Despite his best efforts to govern like a tin-pot dictator, Donald Trump cannot control his own government. Now he is panicking. In the last week, his administration confirmed with its own actions that its problem with press leaks is not going away — no matter how many federal agents it sends to reporters’ front doors.

To be clear, Trump is not fighting leaks so much as trying to criminalize causing embarrassment. In a desperate, heavy-handed bid to plug the dam, on Friday night federal agents descended on the homes of several New York Times journalists. Their crime? Reporting about the president’s new, $400 million luxury Boeing 747-8 “gifted” to him by the Qatari royal family. 

From the moment the gift became public, national security experts immediately warned that the luxury liner used by a foreign royal family posed massive security risks and would require extensive, highly complex retrofitting — a process experts estimated would take at least two years. But Trump, impatient to show off his new “palace in the sky,” demanded the process be rushed, and when he flew the plane to a NATO summit in Turkey, the reality of his rush job caught up with him. The Secret Service intervened on the return trip because the Qatari plane lacked basic defensive countermeasures needed to protect the president amid escalating hostilities with Iran. So Trump boarded the old Air Force One for the flight home, leaving his $400 million foreign gift behind. 

Now Julian E. Barnes, Eric Lipton, Tyler Pager and Eric Schmitt find themselves facing the very real threat of being held in contempt of court and thrown behind bars if they refuse to hand over their sources for the information, a rare and consequential step that press-freedom advocates warn could have significant implications for investigative journalism.

Whenever the press exposes information that makes the administration look reckless, the response is increasingly subpoenas. This time, FBI Director Kash Patel was reportedly dragged into the White House for an eight-hour Friday strategy session to micromanage the leak investigation. The fact that this operation was conducted from the seat of executive power, rather than FBI headquarters, is an egregious violation of the post-Watergate norms meant to keep federal law enforcement free from partisan political interference. But norms mean nothing to Patel, who recently sued The Atlantic over its reporting.

The Times, for its part, called the subpoenas “an extraordinary escalation” and said the appearance of federal law enforcement at journalists’ homes should shock the conscience of any American who believes in the First Amendment. If the administration were sincerely worried about classified leaks, it would focus on the people who allegedly mishandled classified material, not on the journalists doing the work of reporting. Instead, the government is demanding testimony that could make every insider think twice before telling the press something the public needs to know. 

Notably, nobody in this saga has claimed the reporting is false. The White House isn’t accusing the Times of fabricating a story about the plane’s vulnerabilities. Instead the administration’s tactics echo the broader Trump-era pattern documented in earlier leak probes, including the Justice Department’s aggressive hunt for sources during Trump’s first term that swept up journalists and lawmakers’ records. Earlier this year, the DOJ issued similar grand jury subpoenas to reporters at the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, then quietly withdrew them after both outlets pushed back — a reminder that these campaigns are not immovable legal inevitabilities but tests of institutional nerve. 

Before the Times published its story on Trump’s new plane, a senior FBI official contacted a reporter and a senior editor at the newspaper and asked them to hold the article, framing it as a national security matter while declining to explain what the actual security issue was. The official also asked the paper to disclose its sources, but the Times refused. 

The guidelines for targeting journalists have been steadily eroded under this administration. In 2025, then-U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi issued new guidelines that drastically expanded the type of information that could trigger a federal media crackdown, lowering the bar from strictly “classified” information to anything deemed “sensitive” or “protected.” Armed with this loosened standard, the administration has weaponized the justice system through investigations of leaks. 

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On Monday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that the Pentagon and the DOJ are standing up a joint task force to hunt down and prosecute government leakers. In a video posted to X, Hegseth said he has delegated broad new authority to the Pentagon’s Office of General Counsel to gather “all information, records and support” related to media leak investigations, and warned that anyone who discloses sensitive information will be met with “the full force of the law.”

But an administration that had actually cowed the media into submission wouldn’t need a joint task force. 

Hegseth spent his first year at the Pentagon trying to strangle the press corps that covers him: evicting news organizations from their workspaces, imposing mandatory security escorts on reporters simply moving through the building and demanding journalists sign pledges that they would seek official pre-approval before publishing stories about his department. Reporters, to their credit, refused and walked out rather than sign away their independence. Lawsuits followed. Meanwhile, the information kept flowing. The embarrassing stories kept landing, and the man in charge of the Pentagon now needs the Justice Department’s help to plug a hole he cannot plug alone. 

Marty Baron, the former executive editor of the Washington Post, put it perfectly when he noted that the administration’s obsession with leaks is actually a testament to the resilience of the press. “Every day, there’s another story coming out about what’s happening in this administration,” Baron told The Guardian’s Jeremy Barr. “They crank up their efforts to stop leaks [in response], going to an extreme that we haven’t seen before.”

After the Times published its story about Trump’s flight out of Turkey, the president, attuned to any public perception of weakness, did what he always does: He went to Truth Social to spin a ridiculous lie. He claimed he took the original plane “for old time’s sake” — a ludicrous tale, considering his unsentimental nature and the volume of complaints he has leveled against the aircraft — and sent the new luxury jet to a U.K. airbase to “honor our brave men and women of the Military” by letting them tour it.

But his diversions won’t work. They never really do. The embarrassing stories keep coming because the sources keep talking. Trump’s administration is a chaotic, paranoid ecosystem where officials constantly leak to either protect themselves, damage their rivals or sound the alarm on the shocking incompetence they witness every day. Try as he might, Donald Trump cannot subpoena his way out of the truth.

The post Trump can’t stop White House leaks, so he’s coming for journalists appeared first on Salon.com.