• After Donald Trump announced that the U.S. will take over Gaza, Newsmax’s Greg Kelly said the president is “allowed to think out loud.” 
• Fox’s Greg Gutfeld said George Soros is funneling money through USAID to fund pro-migrant protests. 
• A Fox Noticias guest said of Shakira’s Grammys performance: “There is more of a satanic tendency in general among artists.”

• The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh suggested that the military imprison mayors who disagree with the Trump administration on immigration: “These mayors are terrorists.” 
• Fox’s Harris Faulkner defended the deportation of pregnant women and children. 
• A Fox News contributor called for a criminal investigation into USAID workers.

• Daily Wire’s Andrew Klavan: “You have to find a woman who doesn’t need to be smacked around in order to behave in a civilized way.” 
• Fox’s Jesse Watters sarcastically mocked a potential “rash in teenage suicides.”
• A Fox host tells federal workers “Get a real job.” 
• Fox contributor Marc Siegel: “Essentially Medicaid is part of a nanny state.”  
• Fox’s Sean Hannity on the United Nations: “Let’s let China be in charge of all of it.”

President Donald Trump is wasting no time in carrying out his goal of throttling the free press. Over the first two weeks of Trump’s presidency, his appointees have wielded federal regulatory authority to punish outlets the president dislikes — and American media moguls are responding with submission. 

Trump has turned standard conservative attacks on journalists into one of the hallmarks of his political agenda. During his first term in office, Trump repeatedly leveraged state power against his despised “fake news,” and together with his Project 2025 allies he has developed a playbook to attack, defund, and delegitimize news outlets in his second. 

Major media companies began signaling before Trump took office that they were willing to play ball with his administration in order to preserve their business interests. But since Inauguration Day, as Trump’s appointees have begun showing their intentions, executives at several news outlets have gone into full retreat. 

Media Matters’ Matt Gertz wrote this piece detailing Trump’s assault on the free press and how media companies are surrendering to his will.

Since taking office, Trump has threatened to impose damaging tariffs on three close allies — Canada, Colombia, and Mexico — only to hurriedly back down from his bluster in exchange for relatively small policy concessions. Trump’s MAGA media sycophants rushed to praise his actions as a major “win,” but some critics have explained that it was Trump who backed down after fabricating a crisis. 

Right-wing media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s U.S. outlets, in particular, have been split in their coverage of Trump’s tariff war. The Wall Street Journal called the tariffs “the dumbest trade war” while Fox News praised Trump as a “master negotiator.” The New York Post has fallen somewhere in between, with some news-side stories relaying the economic consequences of the tariffs while its editorial board is praising Trump’s “high risk” move.

On Tuesday, during a joint press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Donald Trump said the United States “will take over” and take “ownership” of Gaza, displacing its population and redeveloping it into “the Riviera of the Middle East.” Right-wing media immediately justified — and, in some cases, outright endorsed — Trump’s statements. 

• The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles: “The strategic goal in Gaza is now and has always been ethnic cleansing.” 
• Fox’s Jesse Watters celebrated that Trump “can finally bring peace and prosperity and seaside condos” to Gaza. 
• Newsmax host Greg Kelly defended Trump as “just kind of floating an idea” to take over Gaza, adding, “He’s allowed to think out loud.”

• Fox’s Sean Hannity once celebrated the FBI “rank and file,” Now, he’s touting Trump’s purge of the agency. 
• Donald Trump issued four immigration-related executive orders on his first day in office that appear to be even more extreme than the policies proposed by Project 2025. 
• The right-wing disinformation transformed the banal reality that the federal government purchases subscriptions for news outlets into a “scandal.” This piece details how the right’s idiotic meltdown over Politico Pro subscriptions is a perfect case study for a broken information ecosystem. 
• Media Matters’ Matt Gertz wrote this op-ed for MSNBC detailing the ethical absurdity of Fox News hiring Lara Trump. 
• Trump keeps escalating his anti-trans policies and right-wing media still want more.
• Trump administration trade adviser Peter Navarro falsely claimed on Fox News that tariffs lead to lower prices. 
• Right-wing media figures rushed to defend Trump’s decision to issue pardons or commutations to over 1,500 people who participated in the January 6 insurrection, including those convicted of violence against police officers. 
• Years of falsehoods from Fox News helped solidify offshore wind energy as a prime target for the Trump administration.
•  Media Matters President Angelo Carusone explained that we’ve seen only the beginning of what Russ Vought and Project 2025 want to do to the country.