• Newsmax guest Mark Kaye defended Donald Trump for golfing during a market crisis: “You don’t want people to see you stressed out.” 
• Daily Wire host Michael Knowles: “The tariffs and the market tanking are political winners for Trump.” 
• Daily Wire host Matt Walsh: “Men are generally not attracted to ambitious, career-driven women.”

• Newsmax host Rob Schmitt said U.S. elections are “a huge liability. It weakens our country in a lot of ways because we’re always thinking about the next election.” 
• Newsmax’s Greg Kelly said it’s “totally legitimate” for Trump to direct the Department of Justice to investigate specific individuals.

• Fox’s Jeanine Pirro attacked government benefits for orphaned babies. 
• Fox’s Jesse Watters: “We didn’t want to kill Barack Obama, we just didn’t think he was legally qualified to be president because of where he was born.” 
• Matt Walsh: “Our goal as a society should be fewer women in the workforce because a lot more of them are home raising their kids.” 
• Heritage Foundation economist Stephen Moore argued that Trump should get the Nobel Peace Prize for his tariffs. 
• Fox’s Will Cain told his audience that “what’s happened on Wall Street doesn’t necessarily hurt you.”

On Wednesday, President Donald Trump announced a 90-day pause on the massive tariffs he had proposed the previous week on dozens of countries. At the same time, he increased tariffs on China, the largest U.S. trading partner. Fox News’ propagandists cheered Trump’s climbdown as a “huge win” that shows he was playing “3D chess” and executing the “Art of the Deal.” Meanwhile, reporters at outlets including Fox pointed out that Trump had “capitulated” out of fear that his unilateral imposition of massive taxes on all of our trading partners was triggering a collapse in the bond market. 

As Media Matters’ Matt Gertz writes, “North Korean state TV anchors would blush at the fervor with which Fox’s hosts announced their support for the move on their programs” Wednesday night. Sean Hannity said, “We begin with the art of the deal — told you this was going to happen.” Laura Ingraham trumpeted the tariff shift as “Trump’s 3D chess move.” And Jesse Watters said, “Trump created maximum leverage for himself, and now his team’s sitting pretty.” 

Of course, their narrative that Trump is cooly executing a deliberate plan is total nonsense — he was responding to a “mass sale of bonds” the night before which indicated that “people are losing confidence in the U.S. economy” and could have triggered a financial crisis, as Fox Business’ own senior correspondent Charlie Gasparino reported earlier that day. 

In the lead up to Trump's capitulation, a pattern emerged on Fox and Fox Business in which network hosts vociferously defended Trump’s tariffs while experts and guests repeatedly criticized them. Media Matters found that at least 90 people across Fox News and Fox Business praised Trump's tariff pattern between April 2 and April 9. 

As it becomes increasingly obvious that the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign is indiscriminately targeting immigrants, including migrants without criminal records, Fox News has struggled to rally around a single narrative about the raids, detentions, and deportations, offering a variety of defenses and excuses. 

In the weeks after Trump took office, the network dutifully repeated the administration’s claim that it would focus on the “worst first” and denied that immigrants without criminal records were being targeted, even as reporting showed that they were. At the same time, some network faces were already suggesting that simply being undocumented “would make you a criminal by definition,” saying that crossing the border was “the first crime.” 

By March, Fox personalities were saying that deportees “don’t deserve” due process and suggesting that everyone being swept up in the raids was a gang member — despite reporting that many deportees and detainees had no criminal records, and that some even had legal protected status.

In their quest to undermine the scandal about key Trump administration national security officials discussing detailed military attack plans on Signal, Trump and his media propagandists repeatedly claimed that the uproar was a minor sideshow that paled in comparison to the fact that the mission had been a resounding military victory. 

But that defense of the administration has withered under scrutiny in the intervening weeks. Any tactical victory achieved during the initial March 15 attack has not fulfilled the intended U.S. goal of curbing Houthi attacks on shipping in the Red Sea, a major international trade route. 

If you’re interested in the full breakdown of this saga, I invite you to read Media Matters’ Matt Gertz’s piece here.

• Fox News personalities have continued to mislead their audience into thinking that Trump and congressional Republicans aren’t considering massive cuts to Medicaid, even as both chambers have advanced budget plans that would require billions in reductions to the program in order to offset tax cuts for the wealthy. 
• Some conservative pundits are attacking Trump’s adviser Peter Navarro. The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro said Navarro “should be nowhere near trade policy,” and Fox Business host Dagen McDowell ridiculed Navarro “and his reciprocal trade-girl math that’s kneecapping the United States.” 
• CBS News reporting on immigrants deported to a foreign megaprison blows up Fox’s “worst of the worst” spin. 
• Podcaster Benny Johnson called U.S. Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett (whom Trump nominated to the court) a “repulsive lizard” and a “sick witch.”