• Newsmax host Chris Plante: “Who knew they had electricity in Sri Lanka?” 
• On Fox News, Trump adviser Peter Navarro baselessly claimed that new tariffs “will bring the golden age for steel and aluminum back.”
• Fox’s Greg Gutfeld said tariffs create higher food prices that “disincentivizes” eating.

• CNN’s Scott Jennings suggested Trump may need to “defy” judges who order his administration to comply with the law. 
• Dan Bongino argued that Trump “should ignore” a court order blocking his administration’s federal funding freeze. 
• Fox’s Jesse Watters said Palestinians “demographically, they are a threat.”

• Newsmax host Rob Schmitt whined about Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime show: “American culture used to not allow such gratuitous racism.” 
• The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh said, “You need to get over slavery,” and, “This country was in fact primarily built by white men.” This week, he also said Puerto Rico is “not American and it’ll never be.” 
• Fox’s Dana Perino called public sector unions a “new nemesis.” 
• Fox’s Brit Hume: “There is no doubt that tariffs in the short run, and perhaps very much so in the long as well, raise prices.”

Russ Vought, the new head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — and a top architect of Project 2025 — reportedly told its employees on February 10 to “not perform any work tasks this week,” at least temporarily shuttering an agency that has been the target of right-wing media attacks for years. 

The CFPB has saved working Americans tens of billions of dollars since it was founded in 2011. As the New York Times reported, the CFBP “clawed back $21 billion for consumers. It slashed overdraft fees, reformed the student loan servicing market, transformed mortgage lending rules and forced banks and money transmitters to compensate fraud victims.” All that work is now at risk.

Calling it “one of Wall Street’s most feared regulators,” The New York Times reported on February 9 that the bureau's success has put it “squarely in the Trump administration’s cross hairs.” 

Now, Vought appears to be fulfilling a Project 2025 promise — and a longtime right-wing media goal — by taking an axe to the CFPB. 

Media Matters’ John Knefel wrote this piece detailing the right’s long history of attacking CFPB. I invite you to read the piece here.

Right-wing media are focused on culture war battles as the Trump administration suspends lifesaving work from the U.S. Agency for International Development, cherry-picking USAID programs to dismiss the agency as “woke,” “radical,” and “overwhelmingly hard left.” In reality, USAID is responsible for providing health care and nutritional aid to thousands of the world’s vulnerable people, many living in war-torn regions. 

While the Trump administration’s antics have prevented USAID from providing critical aid, right-wing media are engaging in an absurd assault on the agency. 

• Podcast host Megyn Kelly dismissed USAID as an organization that seems to give money to “woke” projects like “LGBTQ and that kind of promotional stuff.” 
• Fox’s Sean Hannity said everything USAID does is “radical DEI, woke, transgender, you know, leftist, Green New Deal madness.” 
• Fox’s Jesse Watters claimed USAID is a “slush fund for social justice warriors and permanent Washington to bribe people, staff people at NGOs, and just create hell.”

The beginning of President Donald Trump’s second term has featured an aggressive and dubious expansion of executive power. While Fox News personalities have been celebrating Trump’s authoritarian impulses, they previously characterized executive actions during the terms of former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden as “fascistic” and “dictatorial.” 

In a 2014 blog post Media Matters unearthed, for example, Laura Ingraham implored Congress to use “traditional instruments of Congressional authority.” Echoing current criticisms of Trump’s unconstitutional barrage, Ingraham wrote: “Stop yielding more and more power to a man who evidently feels that there are no legal constraints on his authority to rewrite our laws and our Constitution.” 

In words that are more relevant today than they were in 2014, Ingraham also wrote that, “The issue now is whether Congressional Republicans will knuckle under to the President, or whether they will act to protect our freedoms, our sovereignty, and our system of government.” 

Don't hold your breath for her to hold Republican majorities in Congress responsible now. 

• Right-wing media and MAGA online influencers have called on the Trump administration to defy federal court orders, labelling judges issuing injunctions “unconstitutional” and “lawless,” and even calling for them to be impeached. 
• Social media users and far-right figures online have spread a baseless conspiracy theory from a supposed whistleblower claiming that Democratic Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro was involved in the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, last July. 
• Echoing right-wing media, Trump Education Department nominee Linda McMahon casts doubt on the legality of Black history courses. 
• Far-right activist Laura Loomer said that during the 2024 election, she consulted with Donald Trump on the Panama Canal, migration in Panama’s Darien Gap, and nongovernmental organizations. 
• Fox News has barely covered the Trump administration efforts to slash funding at the National Institutes of Health. 
• Fox News lashed out at a judge who ruled that the Trump administration lawlessly disregarded his order. 
• Trump’s anti-trans executive orders came straight out of Project 2025.