whisperer trump
see fox feedback effect
hannity?
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Written by Matt Gertz
:{Published 06/18/25 mma
President Donald Trump appears to be careening toward a U.S. military strike on Iran as current and former Fox News figures — from posts on the network’s airwaves, elsewhere in the right-wing media ecosystem, and within his administration — fight to influence his decision.
For years, Trump's obsession with the Fox universe has driven policy decisions, administration staffing, and countless stream-of-consciousness social media posts. Now, the network will have an outsized role in determining America's potential involvement in a spiraling regional military conflict.
The George W. Bush administration spent months “following a meticulously planned strategy to persuade the public, the Congress and the allies of the need to confront the threat from Saddam Hussein” before finally launching that war in March 2003. That strategy — based on cooked intelligence about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction dishonestly sold to American people — resulted in the deaths of more than 4,000 U.S. service members and more than 200,000 Iraqi civilians as well as a massive financial cost.
Two decades later, Trump seems poised to join Israel's attack on Iran, with the stated goal of preventing that country from acquiring nuclear weapons that the U.S. intelligence community says it is not seeking. The president on Tuesday threatened to assassinate Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, bragged that the U.S. is involved in securing the airspace over that country, and called for “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER,” all while the U.S. military is marshalling forces in the region. And that push has come with little effort to convince the public, which overwhelmingly opposes U.S. military involvement in Iran, of the necessity of such a course.
The Fox propaganda engine is driving this chaotic process. Trump reportedly became more interested in U.S. military action because he saw favorable Fox coverage of Israel’s initial attacks on Iran, while more recent segments have stressed the importance of U.S. involvement. Fox host Mark Levin and his former colleague Tucker Carlson are waging a scorched-earth battle for Trump’s ear, with Levin apparently gaining the advantage. And top administration officials with roles in a potential conflict — including Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth — are in their positions in the first place because Trump approved of their previous work at the network.
It remains unclear what the president will decide to do and how any of it will play out for the country and the world. What seems likely, however, is that the Trump administration will undertake its Iran policy with the same inconsistency that characterized his tariff policy; the same low quality of staff work that got a reporter added to a text chain where top officials shared info about a forthcoming U.S. strike; the same lack of care for the lives of foreigners that has already killed hundreds of thousands of people; and the same disinterest in following the law on display in his deportation plan.
And Trump’s action, regardless of what it is, will receive sycophantic cheers from his propagandists at Fox.
The Fox-Trump feedback loop is powering Iran policy
A June 17 New York Times story detailing how Trump had shifted from trying to restrain an Israeli attack on Iran while overseeing negotiations with its leaders to supporting Israel’s strike and considering U.S. involvement highlights the role of a key player: Fox.
“When he woke on Friday morning, his favorite TV channel, Fox News, was broadcasting wall-to-wall imagery of what it was portraying as Israel’s military genius,” the Times reported. “And Mr. Trump could not resist claiming some credit for himself.”
Under typical circumstances, a U.S. president shifting the nation’s military posture based on a few cable news segments would sound fantastical. But under Trump, major aspects of federal policy regularly turn on what he is hearing from his favored TV personalities. Fox hosts understand their influence and regularly seek to influence Trump’s decisions, both through their programs and in private conversations with the president.
Fox’s hosts thus wield incredible power over Trump’s actions. And in recent days, those figures have been using their platforms to tell the president that U.S. strikes on Iran are both important and likely to succeed with little cost. They know which buttons to push and are banging on them as hard as they can.
“Trump's favorite TV network has staked out the pro-war position – and it isn't making as much room for debate,” CNN’s Brian Stelter reported on June 18. “Guest after guest on Fox has played to Trump's ego — simultaneously praising the president and pushing for US intervention through his television screen.”
Carlson and Levin go to war
Carlson and Levin are waging a scorched-earth campaign against each other, with each presenting their own views as the true America First position as they seek to influence Trump’s decision-making.
Carlson, a proponent of the right’s white nationalist and Holocaust-denying wing who tends to oppose foreign military interventions in favor of attacks on domestic enemies, claims that bombing Iran would “shut down Trump’s three core promises.” Levin, a staunch advocate for deploying U.S. power in the Middle East, argues that American intervention would be consistent with Trump’s policy of “peace through strength.”
Levin currently appears to have the upper hand. Politico reported last week that Levin made his case to Trump directly at a June 4 meeting:
During a private lunch with the president at the White House last Wednesday, conservative talk show host Mark Levin told Trump that Iran was days away from building a nuclear weapon, an argument Trump’s own intelligence team has told the president is not accurate, according to an intelligence official as well as another Trump ally familiar with the matter. Levin urged Trump to allow the Israeli government to strike Iranian nuclear sites, which Trump has told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would torpedo the diplomacy.
Carlson subsequently lashed out at Levin and other Fox figures whom he (accurately) described as “warmongers.” He wrote on June 13:
The real divide isn’t between people who support Israel and people who support Iran or the Palestinians. The real divide is between those who casually encourage violence, and those who seek to prevent it — between warmongers and peacemakers. Who are the warmongers? They would include anyone who’s calling Donald Trump today to demand air strikes and other direct US military involvement in a war with Iran. On that list: Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, Rupert Murdoch, Ike Perlmutter and Miriam Adelson. At some point they will all have to answer for this, but you should know their names now.
Levin replied, calling Carlson “a reckless and deceitful propagandist” who “promote[s] antisemitism and conspiracy nuts” (all obviously true). He added: “It doesn’t occur to you that your supposed sources are disloyal to POTUS. You and they are undermining him and you just declared your break from the President.” In a series of subsequent posts, he denigrated his former colleague as “Chatsworth Qatarlson” and accused him of “rooting for Iran” and “trashing our president.”
Carlson responded in a June 16 appearance on his ally Stephen Bannon’s program in which he claimed that Levin is “terrible on TV” (true) with a screen presence reminiscent of “listening to your ex-wife scream about alimony payments” (sexist but at least directionally correct). He further claimed that Levin’s appearances on Fox demonstrate that what the network is “doing is what they always do, which is just turning up the propaganda hose to full blast and just trying to, you know, knock elderly Fox viewers off their feet and make them submit to where you want them to” (extremely accurate).
Trump, for his part, weighed in on Sunday, June 15, saying of Carlson’s critique of his Iran policy, “I don't know what Tucker Carlson is saying. Let him go get a television network and say it so that people listen.” In a Monday night post, he described Carlson as “kooky” (another accurate characterization), adding, “IRAN CAN NOT HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON!” Levin swiftly highlighted both comments on social media.
Levin took a curtain call on Hannity’s Fox show on Tuesday night, screaming, “You’re either a patriotic American who’s gonna get behind the president of the United States – the commander-in-chief, or you’re not!”
Many key administration roles are filled by former Foxers
Several senior administration officials who will play key roles in advising Trump on whether and how to conduct military strikes and then implement that policy are wildly unqualified people who got their jobs because the president liked their Fox appearances. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth are among the 23 former Fox employees Trump has appointed to his second administration.
Gabbard, a former Fox contributor from the Carlson wing of the MAGA movement who lacks “the typical intelligence experience of past officeholders,” said in congressional testimony earlier this year that it was the conclusion of the intelligence community that “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamanei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003.”
Trump, however, apparently preferred Levin’s lunchtime claim that Iran was actually days away from a bomb, telling reporters on June 17, “I don’t care what she said. I think they were very close to having a weapon.” The president, Politico reported Tuesday, “has increasingly mused about nixing Gabbard’s office completely” and, according to one source, “thinks she ‘doesn’t add anything to any conversation.’”
Trump promoted Hegseth from Fox & Friends Weekend co-host to the leadership of the Pentagon, and based on his past Fox commentary, he is likely a voice in favor of military action. His early leadership of the Defense Department is not encouraging for how such action might go — he has driven off his senior staff, discussed U.S. strikes in private texts that subsequently leaked, and oversaw a costly and ultimately ineffective campaign against Houthi rebels in Yemen.
Other relevant former Foxers include Mike Huckabee, the former network host Trump installed as U.S. ambassador to Israel, and Tammy Bruce, the former Fox contributor currently ensconced as the State Department spokesperson.
No matter what happens, this much is certain: A bunch of current and former Fox News employees are essentially deciding whether the U.S. is going to war.
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11/13/24 11:34 AM EST
11/19/24 7:30 AM EST
04/23/25
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/the-conservative-media-are-killing-trumps-campaign/
Even close allies of Donald Trump are flummoxed about why he hadn’t grasped earlier in the Covid-19 pandemic that it was in his own best interests to “at least pantomime[ a sense of command over the crisis or convey] compassion for the millions of Americans impacted by it,” according toThe Washington Post.
Part of the answer, per the report, was “his almost pathological unwillingness to admit error.” But another factor was the existence of “a positive feedback loop of overly rosy assessments and data from advisers and Fox News.” Trump, a malignant narcissist, is known to lash out at aides who provide him bad news so it appears that they’ve fed him a steady diet of the kind of Pollyannaish stories that are a mainstay of the conservative media’s coverage of the pandemic, and of his regime’s response to it.
Trump is running a historically awful campaign for re-election. At present, his twin pitches for a second term are his ability to pass a rudimentary test designed to diagnose dementia and a promise to deploy thousands of unidentifiable and poorly trained federal paramilitaries to American cities, against the protests of state and local officials, in the name of protecting statues and federal buildings from vandalism.
For anyone who consumes a balanced media diet, these strategic choices are inexplicable. While it’s true that as we approach 150,000 mostly avoidable deaths from the pandemic and millions continue to file for unemployment, he doesn’t have a lot to run on, a competent candidate would make an effort to show that he understands how this crisis is impacting people and demonstrate that he’s focused on containing the outbreak and rebuilding–whether or not it’s true. This is politics 101.
polls find that Trump is losing to former Vice President Joe Biden on both of the quixotic issues he’s chosen to litigate the race; more voters question his cognitive abilities and physical stamina than do Biden’s, and while a majority of Americans oppose the removal of Civil War memorials, Biden is nonetheless more trusted to “effectively handle law enforcement and criminal justice issues,” AKA “law and order.” And polls aside, Democrats cleaned Republicans’ collective clock running on healthcare against Trump’s argle-bargle about invading refugee caravans in the 2018 midterms, long before the pandemic hit.
But what seems like an incomprehensible strategy on its face makes perfect sense when you consider that, according to multiple reports, Donald Trump is an avid consumer of conservative media who tends to be impervious to advice from experienced Republican campaign hands. And it’s becoming increasingly clear that he’s been led astray by the conservative press.
I’m sure that if you look hard, you could find a conservative commentator or two who acknowledge the existence of peaceful protesters standing against systemic discrimination in policing.But you’d have to really look for them. The overwhelming majority of right-wing discourse about these protests is premised on the belief that everyone out in the streets are rioting, looting or engaging in vandalism. It is also a given in these circles that the protests are motivated by Marxism or a desire to destroy the “American way of life” or whatever other fanciful idea occurs to the conservative commentariat–anything other than racial injustice.
That discourse leads to a significant reality-gap. While there were scattered instances of vandalism and rioting early on, real reporters on the ground in cities across the country consistently describe mostly peaceful protests, with small numbers of people occasionally crossing the line and damaging property.
Meanwhile, those of us who aren’t ensconced within the right-wing media bubble have been alarmed and appalled at an endless stream of reports–almost always accompanied by viral videos–of unprovoked police violence against reporters, legal observers and of course protesters who were only “guilty” of refusing to disperse when ordered–or in many cases, guilty of nothing at all. That police brutality has contributed to an extraordinary shift in public opinion toward the Movement for Black Lives and away from Trump’s preferred narrative of what’s happening in American cities.
A similar dynamic may be driving Trump’s mystifying decision to make his ability to pass a simple dementia test–and his bragging that the doctors who administered it were shocked that he passed–into a news story. It’s the kind of attack that would be condemned as dirty and vicious if it were delivered by an opponent.
For those of us outside the conservative epistemic bubble, Joe Biden stutters, is prone to gaffes and suffers from occasional “senior moments” when he flubs a date or gets a number wrong. Most of us have had an older relative or acquaintance who was perfectly sharp and entirely “there,” as Biden pretty clearly is, but who had similar lapses. (My late grandmother did eventually develop dementia in her mid-90s, but she started having those “senior moments” 20 years earlier, when she was about the same age as Biden.)
While this line of attack is born of desperation as the Trump campaign has failed to land solid punches on Biden–a white man who’s been around forever and is well known as a moderate, mainstream Democrat–it’s also a matter of faith in the conservative press that the “liberal media” are covering up Biden’s dementia, and that Trump would have a good chance of turning his campaign around if only he manages to expose the former Vice President as the drooling dotard they claim he is. As Greg Sargent reported a couple of weeks back, “Fox News has been relentlessly pushing the line that Joe Biden might be suffering from dementia.”
It would be wrong to attribute Trump’s stunning decline in support among seniors–long a reliably GOP-leaning constituency that he needs to remain competitive in the must-win state of Florida–to these hamfisted attacks on Biden’s cognitive acuity. That decline is clearly a result of his gross mismanagement of the pandemic, and of his party’s consistent refrain that we must sacrifice the elderly and infirm on the altar of the stock market. But those attacks certainly can’t be helping.
The carefully constructed alternate reality presented by the conservative media is a double-edged sword. They keep the Republican base engaged by maintaining a constant state of anxiety about the horrors of immigrants, socialists, modest expansions of public health insurance, tax increases on the wealthy, etc. But while savvier Republican operatives rely more on polling and focus groups to devise strategy, Trump’s ego drives him–and the sycophants he surrounds himself with–to embrace their partisan propaganda as reality. And that appears rendered him and his campaign incapable of making the substantive and enduring course-correction that they so desperately need.
https://www.mediamatters.org/tucker-carlson/how-tucker-carlson-manipulates-president-trump
Trump apparently changed his mind about whether the United States should fund the World Health Organization in response to a monologue from Fox News host Tucker Carlson. It’s at least the third time this year that Carlson’s program has triggered major changes in U.S. policy, an indication of just how effective the Fox prime-time star is at manipulating the president.
Axios’ Jonathan Swan reported Sunday that Trump, who declared last month that he was freezing the United States’ $400 million annual payment to the WHO, had been “on the brink of announcing” he would restore roughly 10% of the funding up until “late last week.” But then someone leaked the draft of the announcement to Carlson, who broke the news on his Friday-night show, denounced the WHO’s handling of the novel coronavirus, and argued against the funding. Carlson’s appeal seems to have reached the president, as Swan wrote that in light of the segment, Trump was now “leaning toward preserving his total funding cut.” And indeed, on Monday, Trump sent a letter to WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus threatening to permanently pull all U.S. funding if the organization did not “commit to major substantive improvements in the next 30 days."
Many Fox personalities have used the president’s obsession with their network to influence U.S. public affairs in recent years, dictating everything from border-wall construction contracts to federal pardons to government shutdowns. But Carlson is better at this game than any of his colleagues. Twice this year, he staked out a position drastically different from virtually everyone else at Fox -- on whether the U.S. should escalate with Iran and whether the administration should take the coronavirus more seriously. And each time, he reportedly succeeded in shifting Trump’s thinking -- and federal policy.
Carlson is particularly adept at winning over the president because of his unique grasp of Trump’s psychology. Trump is a paranoid xenophobe who is fixated on his grievances and cannot handle even the slightest criticism, and Carlson crafts his argument accordingly. He almost never knocks Trump directly for his decisions, instead railing against the purportedly nefarious advisers who must have led the president astray. And his framing of the issues constantly plays to Trump’s hatred of foreigners, Democrats, political correctness, and the media.
Friday’s WHO segment provides a good case study in how Carlson exploits Trump’s weaknesses to shift his opinions.
[vid]
carlson began his monologue by presenting the potential partial restoration of funding as a surprising decision -- “bet you didn’t see this coming” -- and setting it up as a dispute between “the Trump administration” and Trump himself. He did this by contrasting the pending move with the president’s own harsh criticism of the WHO.
“Last month, you'll remember, the administration cut off U.S. funding at the president's direction. That amounts to about $400 million a year,” he said. “They did this, as the president explained, because the World Health Organization badly mishandled and lied about the coronavirus pandemic and is of course nauseatingly subservient to the government of China.”
He then pinned the pending decision on Trump’s advisers, saying, “We're told the president supposedly has agreed to sign the letter, if he hasn't already. It would be interesting to know who convinced him to do that.”
Carlson read from the draft letter, which states that the U.S. agrees to pay as much as China does. He then blamed the State Department, saying this would happen “if the State Department gets its way,” before arguing that the U.S. still won’t have as much influence as China with the WHO.
Next, Carlson reminded his audience -- including the president himself -- why Trump opposed the WHO funding in the first place.“Now, there are certainly many reasons that the president was deeply skeptical of the World Health Organization in the first place and stopped funding it,” he said. “Director Tedros Adhanom has thoroughly disgraced himself and his organization for years, but particularly throughout this coronavirus epidemic.”
In particular, Carlson homed in on the WHO’s criticism of Trump’s travel restrictions. Trump has described his decision to restrict some travel from China as a crucial move which he baselessly claims saved “hundreds of thousands” of American lives, and his political career has been centered in part on castigating claims of racism as “political correctness.” Carlson knows this, and so he sneered that the WHO had “attacked” the restrictions as “unnecessary and needless to say, racist.”
Carlson went on to castigate the WHO for supporting “Chinese propaganda,” which “killed people,” particularly criticizing Tedros’ delay in “calling the virus a pandemic when it clearly was.” In blaming the WHO, Carlson carefully avoided holding Trump accountable for ignoring months of warnings about the virus from U.S. public health agencies, his advisers, and the intelligence community, and ignored Trump’s own praise of the Chinese government’s response in the early weeks of the virus’ spread. Again, when Carlson is trying to influence Trump, he does not criticize him.
Carlson then provided a scapegoat whom he suggested was responsible for the possible partial restoration of WHO funding. “And yet, there is one person who has long, always through thick and thin, been a fervent fan of Tedros, and that's Dr. Anthony Fauci,” he said, pointing a finger at the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a frequent target of the program. After airing a clip of Fauci praising Tedros, Carlson concluded, “Well, doubtless, Dr. Fauci will be thrilled with tonight's news that we're going to continue to fund the World Health Organization.”
After the monologue, Fox medical contributor Dr. Marc Siegel joined Carlson to discuss the potential restoration of WHO funding. For the most part, both stuck to the same talking points from Carlson’s monologue, praising Trump, blaming the pending decision on advisers like Fauci, and highlighting the importance of travel restrictions. “There are people around him whose instincts are reliably bad as his are on target,” Carlson concluded of the president.
But notably, the interview featured a direct appeal from Siegel to Trump to reverse the pending decision. “I have a message for President Trump tonight, too. Please don't sign anything that restores funding to the World Health Organization before there's a huge overhaul of the World Health Organization,” Siegel said. “Yes,” Carlson replied. While
engage in this sort of direct appeal to the president, Carlson largely avoids that strategy in favor of more subtle commentary, using the second-person to make every viewer a stand-in for Trump. But this time it appears to have succeeded, as Trump’s letter to Tedros demanded “major substantive improvements” before funding could be restored.
Carlson employed similar tactics in trying to convince the president not to further escalate with Iran following the U.S. killing of Quds Force commander Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani. He argued on his January 2 broadcast that Trump himself is “wary” of war, but may have been “outmaneuvered” by advisers who are “reckless and incompetent,” like former national security adviser John Bolton. And he leaned on the president’s xenophobia, saying that those advisers “are the very same ones demanding that you ignore the invasion of America now in progress from the south.”Carlson’s commentary diverged dramatically from his colleagues, but reportedly shifted the president’s thinking in his direction.
Likewise, the March 9 Carlson monologue credited with helping convince Trump to briefly take the coronavirus more seriously includes no direct criticism of the president. Even as Carlson said that “people you trust, people you probably voted for, have spent weeks minimizing what is clearly a very serious problem,” he avoided calling Trump out, thus making it far more likely that the president would listen to him. And the monologue was filled with xenophobic references to the “Chinese coronavirus” and attacks on Trump’s frequent target, the “corrupt media establishment.”
Carlson appears to have figured out the secret formula to winning over the president through his television show: No criticism, attacks on his advisers, and a spoonful of racism to help the medicine go down.