Welcome back to Media Matters’ weekly newsletter. This week:
Right-wing media react to Trump’s slush fund with unquestioning loyalty — and some vague skepticism.
Trump’s Fox News Cabinet urges escalation while he ponders a return to the war in Iran.
Millions are projected to lose healthcare coverage due to GOP rollbacks, but Fox News has barely acknowledged it.
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This week's infighting
MAHA and wellness advocates sound the alarm after the primary defeat of Rep. Thomas Massie.
Podcaster Tim Dillon said Trump’s intervention in Iran “feels like the biggest betrayal of a political movement I’ve ever seen in my life.”
Newsmax host Rob Finnerty on potential U.S. intervention in Cuba: “I think people struggle with how this is America First when gas is $4.55 a gallon right now.”
A caller on Megyn Kelly’s show said that they “feel abandoned” by Trump.
Right-wing media react to Trump’s slush fund for allies with unquestioning loyalty - and some vague skepticism
This week, the Department of Justice announced that President Donald Trump’s family had agreed to drop a legally questionable $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS in exchange for the reaction of a $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund.” Some right-wing media figures have been praising the fund (which critics are labelling a “slush fund”), calling it a great idea and complementing Trump for his “patriotic” use of the number 1776 while ignoring the more problematic details of the fund.
Newsmax’s Carl Higbie staunchly defended the fund, saying that “Trump and his family will get $0 in exchange for just simply an apology from the IRS and a fund set up for every other person who Biden targeted.”
Fox’s Sean Hannity said the Department of Justice "rightly agreed to set aside the patriotic amount of the $1.76 billion to settle other claims like this.”
Right-wing podcaster Vince Coglianese said the fund “sounds like justice” and said, “I think it’s perfectly wonderful.”
While the Department of Justice has received a lot of criticism for the creation of this slush fund from mainstream media outlets, some Republican lawmakers have also questioned the fund, including Senate Majority Leader John Thune. Some right-wing figures, such as Ben Shapiro and Megyn Kelly have likewise raised questions about it.
Already, January 6 rioters, election deniers, and Trump allies are lining up for a chance at the taxpayer money.
This week in stupid
Megyn Kelly on The Odyssey film: “Who decided it would be a good idea to make a movie out of the book no one wanted to read and no one enjoyed in high school?”
Before Trump’s war in Iran, Fox personalities and guests spread the narrative that lower prices was a winning message for Trump. But as gas prices and then inflation started to climb, Fox personalities downplayed the impact to consumers as temporary and a necessary sacrifice and even celebrated the benefit to U.S. oil companies.
Newsmax’s Greg Kellysaid the Iran war is “not really a big deal” and has only lasted 41 days “if you factor in the ceasefire.”
Fox’s Sean Hannitysaid there are medications that cost “a thousand times more than what you’d pay in Europe or Canada because they have a socialized healthcare system.”
Trump’s Fox Cabinet urges escalation as he ponders a return to war in Iran
Citation
Andrea Austria / Media Matters
As Donald Trump considers next steps in his war with Iran, his Fox News Cabinet is advising him to escalate. Influential pundits on the MAGA propaganda channel are telling the president that he currently holds “the cards” and urging him to use U.S. military might to seize Iran’s uranium stockpile, force open the Strait of Hormuz, assassinate the country’s leaders, and overturn its regime.
Fox has played a key role in getting the U.S. into the quagmire in Iran, with the network’s hosts counseling him to launch the campaign in February. They continued to cheer him on over the following weeks, even as Iran’s regime remained intact and in control of its nuclear stockpile, its seizure of the Strait of Hormuz sent fuel prices soaring, public support for the war cratered, and analysts issued dire warnings of U.S. strategic defeat.
The network’s personalities and guests have parroted the Trump administration’s assertions that Iran’s military has been severely decimated or destroyed. Yet last week, The New York Times reported that those assertions are “sharply at odds with what U.S. intelligence agencies are telling policymakers behind closed doors” and that Iran has “restored operational access to 30 of the 33 missile sites it maintains along the Strait of Hormuz.”
Media Matters’ Matt Gertz wrote this great piece for MS NOW explaining why Fox continues to support Trump’s war on Iran, despite its unpopularity. You can read it here.
Excuse me?
Following a deadly shooting at a San Diego mosque this week, Fox News speculated the two shooters may have been motivated by sectarian differences within Islam, questioned their immigration status, and demonized the mosque. In reality, police are investigating the shooting as an anti-Islamic hate crime — a fact that Fox has buried.
A Fox News guest told college students worried about AI taking their jobs to “get on board or get run over.”
Dana Loesch told Fox News viewers to travel to Los Angeles to vote for Spencer Pratt for mayor.
Millions of people will lose healthcare coverage following GOP rollback of ACA subsidies. Over four months, Fox News has barely acknowledged it.
On January 1, congressional Republicans allowed the Affordable Care Act’s enhanced premium tax credit — which lowered healthcare costs — to expire, rather than voting to extend it. According to data released on January 28, there were roughly 1.2 million fewer enrollees compared to the same open enrollment people in the prior year. Analysts and insurers estimate “overall declines of about 20 percent, dropping to around 19 million from the 24 million who were covered under the A.C.A. last year,” according to The New York Times.
While mainstream reporting repeatedly underscored the scale of losses, Fox News mentioned the blows to ACA enrollment only once in the months since January. That single mention occurred on April 21 after a House Democrat pressed Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on the drop in enrollment.
Fox’s silence on ACA enrollment comes as no surprise. The network has established a pattern throughout the second Trump administration of repeatedly ignoring, downplaying, and distracting from rising costs caused by Republicans and Trump’s destructive economic agenda.
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