Welcome back to Media Matters’ weekly newsletter. This week:
With the Iran war collapsing into a quagmire, MAGA media figures are pulling back from their demand for complete victory.
Right-wing media's crusade against diverse judges, including racist attacks, calls for banning, and even calls for deportation.
Right-wing media’s unhinged response to Anthony Fauci’s diary and congressional testimony.
Steve Bannon predicted that Trump will issue a national emergency declaration on election integrity at the end of August.
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Right-wing moment
The growing MAGA media despondency over the Iran war quagmire
As President Donald Trump’s war on Iran extends into its sixth month, some figures on the right are recalibrating their messaging from an original demand for maximalist victory to something much more modest.
The war has created some fractures in right-wing media, but at the outset of the conflict there was no shortage of boosters — either Iran hawks or MAGA hacks. But now that the Iranian government has survived months of bombing and operationalized its previously unrealized control of the Strait of Hormuz, some of those pundits are scaling back their ambitions.
For example, Trump toady Benny Johnson on March 12 asked, “Can we rename the Straits of Hormuz the Straits of America, please?” Fast forward to July 26, and Johnson said, “If Iran oversees the boats in the Strait of Hormuz, that doesn’t bother me one bit.”
Over on Newsmax, Carl Higbie has recently changed his tune from endorsing bombing Iran “back to the stone age” in late February to now questioning the Trump administration's larger strategy. Following the deaths of U.S. service members, Higbie said, “For God’s sakes, give those families on the tarmac today a reason their children died.”
The shifting rhetoric shows the delicate balancing act right-wing media are engaged in: The hawks want to escalate and the hacks want to continue to ingratiate themselves with the administration, while even Trump voters are growing more opposed to another forever war.
Excuse me?
Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon told his War Room podcast audience on July 29 that Trump will issue a national emergency declaration on election integrity at the end of August. This is part of a larger plot to undermine the midterm elections by manufacturing claims of foreign interference in the 2020 election.
According to a Media Matters analysis, Fox News spent considerably more time covering gas prices falling below $4 a gallon than it did covering prices rising again. From June 18 to June 21, the network spent 42 minutes covering the decline — nearly three times the 15 minutes it devoted to prices climbing back above $4 during a comparable four-day period from July 20 through July 23.
Right-wing media figures are doubling down on calls for mass deportations, despite multiple reports that some immigration officials believe the Trump administration’s pressure to make more arrests was to blame for recent fatal shootings by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Maine and Texas.
Fox Business anchor: “If it was 25 years ago,” New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani would “be probably supporting the attackers on the World Trade Center.”
Newsmax host: “If you people in DC don’t start hearing us, you’re going to foster a monsoon to water the tree of liberty. I am done sugarcoating this.”
Right-wing media's crusade against diverse judges, including racist attacks, calls for banning, and even calls for deportation
Citation
Andrea Austria / Media Matters
Right-wing media figures have spent years lobbing insults at judges who are naturalized U.S. citizens or people of color, including mocking their names, questioning their loyalties, and falsely identifying American-born judges as immigrants. Some have gone so far as to demand that immigrants and Muslim Americans be barred from serving as judges, while others have pushed for naturalized and even some American-born judges to be stripped of their citizenship and deported.
This yearslong campaign has now gained support from some congressional Republicans, who recently introduced both a bill and a constitutional amendment that would require all American judges “to be natural-born citizens.”
If you would like to read more about this disgusting crusade, check out this great piece.
This week's infighting
A Daily Wire host said Vice President JD Vance is “not doing as good a job as he should.”
Right-wing media’s unhinged response to Fauci's diary and congressional testimony
After Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) released Dr. Anthony Fauci’s private diary, right-wing media went into overdrive to denigrate the former directory of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a smear campaign which only intensified after Fauci testified before Congress this week.
Right-wing media’s obsession with Fauci was so extreme, that from Monday through noon on Thursday, Fox News mentioned him at least 687 times, Newsmax mentioned him 740 times, and podcaster Megyn Kelly brought him up at least 75 times during three episodes.
While Fox News spent over 9 hours covering Fauci, the network has barely covered the growing cases of measles, outbreaks of cyclospora and Ebola, or the Trump administration's cuts to Medicare subsidies.
Fauci has long been a scapegoat on right-wing media for all of their resentments and rage regarding the COVID-19 pandemic. The bloodthirsty nature of the rhetoric this week shows that Fauci remains a target for MAGA media.
Benny Johnson claimed Fauci’s “body count” is higher than Adolf Hitler’s.
Megyn Kelly: “Fauci hurt a lot more people than Epstein did.”
Steve Bannon claimed, “Fauci’s a mass murderer. A mass murderer.”
Newsmax host Carl Higbie argued that “Anthony Fauci should just be in jail, full stop.”
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