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November 10, 2026, edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends
Neither Hegseth nor the Fox & Friends crowd gave any indication of where they were getting their claim that the drug boat strikes have saved the lives of thousands of Americans. Fact-checkers have debunked similar claims from Trump, reporting that experts say the evidence for such assertions “is similar to that of the moon being made of blue cheese,” that the alleged number of American lives saved from overdose would account for more than typically die of drug overdose each year, and that in reality, the strikes “have little or no impact on overdose deaths in the United States.”
The Washington Post further reported in July that the DEA and Pentagon concluded that the strikes had not curbed cocaine trafficking into the United States. According to the DEA analysis the Post cited, they “had failed to affect the supply or price of cocaine in the United States and had led traffickers to diversify beyond go-fast boats and to avoid international waters, opting instead for larger boats and hemming close to coastlines, where U.S. forces are less likely to open fire.”
What did the U.S. give up for a policy that accomplished little? According to Massie’s article of impeachment:
[Hegseth] chilled independent legal review within the Department of Defense, constructed a purported legal basis for the use of military force without constitutional or statutory authorization, and displaced longstanding precedent and codified maritime law-enforcement practices that are jurisdictionally assigned to Coast Guard and law enforcement agencies, by substituting in such place the use of summary lethal force by Army, Navy, Air Force, or Marine Corps elements. While doing so, Secretary Hegseth also oversaw orders denying quarter and failing to provide rescue, including secondary strikes against shipwrecked survivors, who were hors de combat, and the abandonment of shipwrecked survivors at sea, thereby endangering members of ... our Armed Forces in future military engagements by encouraging adversaries to subject American service members to the same treatment.
By subjecting persons merely suspected of criminal conduct to lethal military force without judicial process, without Congressional authorization, and without establishing a lawful basis for treating such persons or vessels as military targets, Secretary Hegseth arrogated to himself and the Executive Branch the roles of judge, jury, and executioner and asserted a unilateral power to determine who may live and who may die. Such a power is foreign to the rule of law, repugnant to the legal traditions and fundamental values of the United States and the Western world, and contrary to United States law and customary international law. This conduct undermined the integrity and credibility of the United States and its Armed Forces, damaged the diplomatic standing of the United States, and injured the interests of the Nation.
Hegseth, as a Fox host, endorsed the extrajudicial killing of helpless, captured enemy combatants. “If he committed premeditated murder,” Hegseth said of an American service member who admitted to executing an alleged Taliban bombmaker, “then I did as well. What do you think you do in war?”
While Fox appeared to sour on Hegseth after he implemented stringent restrictions on the Pentagon press corps, the network appears to be going all-in to defend him from impeachment.
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Another key pillar of the MAGA defense for Signalgate is crumbling
04/08/25 12:21 PM EDT
Fox praised and validated Trump's legally questionable boat strikes in the Caribbean
10/29/25 3:31 PM EDT
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Fox is using climate denial to undermine bipartisan support for AI safeguards
Fox personalities and guests compare AI warnings to supposedly discredited climate predictions, drawing on decades of attacks on climate science to cast widely supported protections as another bid for power and control
*Special* ProgramsClimate & Energy
Written by Evlondo Cooper
Published 10/08/26
In September, former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon announced his resignation from the company, issuing a stark warning that increasingly powerful AI systems could threaten human survival. To date, his September 9 interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper has received nearly 10 million views on YouTube, and industry insiders are calling for stronger safeguards and increased government involvement. As those warnings drew wider attention, Fox News and Fox Business hosts and guests dismissed them as the next manufactured panic from people they claimed were already proven wrong about global warming.
In addition to portraying climate change as a political hoax that has run its course (with AI now supposedly taking its place), both Fox networks have characterized calls for safeguards as an election-year scare tactic, a pretext for government control, and a threat to innovation — even as polling shows broad support for AI oversight among Republicans as well as Democrats.
Fox has already cast local opposition to data centers as a threat to American competitiveness, with many network personalities crediting foreign influence for the backlash, even as resistance has spread through Republican communities and divided conservative media. By associating AI warnings with climate “alarmism,” Fox draws on the distrust it spent years cultivating in order to now discredit calls for limits on an industry it has championed.
Warnings about catastrophic AI risks are drawing national coverage and calls for safeguards
- Former AI researchers and industry executives have warned that increasingly powerful systems could outpace efforts to control them, prompting debate over the pace of development and the need for government oversight. Public statements and television interviews have brought those concerns to wider audiences, with warnings about potential threats to human survival accompanying calls for stronger safeguards.
- Jacob Coxon’s interview with Anderson Cooper has drawn nearly 10 million views on YouTube. Coxon warned that future AI systems capable of improving themselves could threaten human survival and called for international oversight. [CNN, Anderson Cooper 360, 9/9/26]
- Coxon continued to raise concerns about the pace of AI development in a subsequent PBS interview. On PBS News Hour, Coxon discussed how increasingly capable systems could accelerate their own development and outpace efforts to establish safeguards. [PBS News Hour, 9/17/26]
- Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for slower AI development and independent oversight. In his September 12 essay “We Must Pace the Frontier,” Amodei wrote, “We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models.” He argued that safety work needed time to keep up with advances in AI and called for companies to give “ongoing, employee-like access to a team of embedded third-party evaluators.” He also called for governments to coordinate internationally on AI safety. [Dario Amodei, 9/12/26]
Climate “alarmism” has become a recurring reference point for dismissing AI warnings
- Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has been a frequent target of Fox’s attacks on AI safeguards since he and Rep. Greg Casar (D-TX) announced forthcoming legislation on September 3 to ban artificial superintelligence and pause advanced AI development until a federal regulator establishes safety rules. Hosts and guests have invoked Sanders’ past climate warnings to dismiss his proposals as another manufactured panic.
- Those attacks echo President Donald Trump’s dismissal of calls to slow AI development as a “hoax” and right-wing media’s comparisons to climate change and “COVID hysteria.” Across Fox News and Fox Business, hosts and guests have used the same claims that climate predictions had failed in order to portray calls for AI safeguards as an election-year scare tactic and a threat to innovation.
- Fox Business host Larry Kudlow: “The AI Armageddon, like the climate hoax, is an election-year Democratic ruse.” Kudlow compared calls to halt AI development to Democrats’ “existential hysteria” over climate change, claiming climate policies would have caused “our complete economic ruination” without Trump’s reelection. He cast Anthropic and OpenAI as Democrats’ “fellow travelers” and argued that letting “free enterprise work its magic” would allow the U.S. to outpace China. [Fox Business, Kudlow, 9/14/26]
- Fox & Friends co-host Lawrence Jones claimed Sanders’ previous climate timeline meant “we should have already been dead.” Jones then described people warning about AI as “the same alarmists that jumped from scandal to scandal of doomsday.” [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 9/17/26]
- Fox News contributor and conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt invoked climate warnings to dismiss AI “doomerism” and argue for trusting the marketplace. Hewitt dismissed lawmakers from both parties as “not smart enough yet to tell the country what to do” and rejected business leaders’ “self-interests” in setting rules for AI. He then explained, “I’m not into AI doomerism at all because we’ve heard this all before with climate change and global warming and nuclear winter. I’m just not alarmed by anything.” [Fox News, America Reports, 9/17/26]
- As a guest host on Gutfeld!, Lisa Kennedy Montgomery claimed Democrats were “replacing global warming heroin with tech-pocalypse fentanyl.” Attacking California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s AI safeguards, Kennedy described climate change as “the hysteria flavor those statist freaks served up to scare people into votes and higher taxes.” She added, “Well, here we are, all still here, along with the polar bears and ice caps.” [Fox News, Gutfeld!, 9/18/26]
- Guest host Michael Lee argued that Democrats’ climate warnings were grounds to reject their calls for AI regulation. Lee asked why policymakers should heed “the same people that were telling you climate change was an existential threat,” then asked, “Why do we need to do something special?” He characterized AI regulation as “stifling innovation at the behest of the richest people in the world to ring fence their industry.” [Fox Business, Mornings with Fox Business, 9/21/26]
- Fox News host Will Cain invoked supposedly failed climate warnings to dismiss AI concerns as “the boy who cried wolf.” After playing a 2019 video of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) discussing the dangers of climate change, Cain said she was “exaggerating” an “end of the world prophecy” and cited increasing coral cover in the Great Barrier Reef to discredit climate predictions. [Fox News, The Will Cain Show, 9/25/26]
- Fox Business host Stuart Varney accused “climate warriors” of linking “climate disaster to AI disaster.” On Varney & Co., he dismissed Ocasio-Cortez’s concerns about AI as “irrational fear mongering” and “blatant distortion of reality to enhance a political position.” [Fox Business, Varney & Co., 9/29/26]
Fox is recycling climate denial to discredit cross-partisan concern about AI
- Climate denial campaigns targeted public agreement that once crossed party lines. In 1997, 68% of strong Republicans and 72% of strong Democrats accepted the science of global warming. The following year, a communications plan developed by the American Petroleum Institute, fossil fuel companies, and allied groups sought to transform scientific uncertainty into conventional wisdom. By December 2009, Fox was explicitly directing reporters to question the accuracy of climate data whenever they reported that the planet was warming.
- Fox now treats climate warnings as discredited while ignoring what efforts to address global warming have accomplished. The International Energy Agency, for example, has estimated that solar, wind, nuclear power, electric cars, and heat pumps deployed since 2019 avoided 2.6 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions annually by 2024, even as global emissions continued to rise. Fox elides those benefits to portray climate warnings as an exercise in needless alarm and is now using that reasoning to argue against safeguards for AI.
- But support for AI safeguards crosses party lines. Ipsos found in March that 67% of Democrats and 63% of Republicans wanted the federal government to ensure AI outputs do not cause harm. A June Artificial Intelligence Policy Institute survey found that 88% of Democrats, 86% of independents, and 83% of Republicans wanted a “guaranteed off switch” for the most powerful AI systems. More recently, a CNN poll found that 85% of Democrats, 67% of independents, and 63% of Republicans believed the federal government was not doing enough to regulate AI’s development.
- Fox News and Fox Business are using their legacy of climate denial to undermine that bipartisan support. Decades of campaigns to discredit climate science helped turn broad agreement about global warming into a partisan divide that protected fossil fuel interests. By dismissing people raising concerns about AI as “the same alarmists,” hosts and guests draw on that distrust to portray widely supported safeguards as the work of discredited experts and advocates seeking power and control, making opposition to oversight a matter of political allegiance.
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Fox Business is framing local data center opposition as a threat to America in the AI race
06/11/26
Data center fight forced right-wing media to cover environmental justice
07/24/26
FOXLEAKS: Fox boss ordered staff to cast doubt on climate science
12/15/10
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Fox & Friends keeps pushing Trump to expand the Iran war to Yemen
09/18/26
MAGA media's broken promises about higher gas prices
09/18/26
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09/10/26
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STUDY: Figures on Fox News' key programs have called for escalation in the Iran war more than 250 times since the initial ceasefire
Mark Levin, Brian Kilmeade, and Gen. Jack Keane accounted for nearly 90 calls for escalation
Written by Harrison Ray
Research contributions from Isabella Sherk, Rob Savillo, Tyler Monroe & Casey Wexler
Published 08/26/26
In the four months since the initial ceasefire agreement between the U.S. and Iran, Fox News figures have continuously warmongered. Throughout the cycle of ceasefire violations and stalled peace talks, individuals on Fox have urged the president to “decapitate and destroy this regime,” send Iran “back to the Stone Age,” and urged him to “send the SEALs in and blow something up just for grins.”
Media Matters found that 7 key shows on Fox News — which includes Fox's evening programming as well as some shows hosted by commentators whom President Donald Trump has praised or promoted during the Iran war — called for escalatory action in the Iran War at least 252 times since the initial ceasefire agreement on April 7.
Key Findings
From April 7, when the U.S. and Iran reached the first ceasefire of the war, through August 6, network personalities and guests called for the Trump administration to escalate its war in Iran at least 252 times. Over the period, figures on Fox frequently argued for military strikes, ground invasions or seizing territory, regime change, arming Iranians, or attacks on civilian infrastructure.
Just 5 individuals — host Brian Kilmeade (35 calls for escalation), host Mark Levin (32), Fox News senior strategic analyst retired Gen. Jack Keane (22), former national security adviser and retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg (16), and Fox News contributor Marc Thiessen (13) — accounted for nearly half of all these calls for escalation. These 5 figures have all played a prominent role at some point in informing Trump's foreign policy, at times specifically on Iran. Trump has discussed Iran with Kilmeade directly and encouraged people to watch Levin's coverage of Iran, while Thiessen and Keane reportedly have his ear on Iran strategy as well. Kellogg has played high-level national security roles in both Trump administrations.
Top 5 warmongers on key Fox News shows
The network's flagship 3-hour morning show, Fox & Friends, led all shows in our study with 92 calls for escalation, followed by Life, Liberty & Levin (50), Hannity (35), and Jesse Watters Primetime (32). Laura Ingraham's show The Ingraham Angle, which has notably pushed back on the war at times, produced only 8 total calls for escalation in our study.
Key shows calling for escalation in Iran war NO GRAPH
Calls for escalation consisted of several types of arguments
The arguments within these calls for escalation fell in 1 of 5 categories — Fox figures arguing for resumed or expanded military strikes, ground invasions or the seizure of territory, further regime change, arming the Iranian populace, or attacks on civilian and non-military infrastructure.
All together, there were 299 unique arguments made over the course of the study period (calls for escalation could — and often did — include more than one argument).
Arguments calling to escalate Iran war
Speakers consistently advocated to resume or expand military strikes
As the Trump administration repeatedly announced imminent peace deals throughout the four-month period, network guests and personalities argued for the resumption or expansion of military strikes. Over that period, speakers on the 7 Fox News programs argued for resuming or expanding military strikes at least 119 times.
Brian Kilmeade, who was the network's chief advocate pushing for military strikes, argued 21 times in favor of additional strikes. Kilmeade frequently argued that the U.S. should resume military action, saying he doesn’t “see any scenario” in which the Trump administration would not have to “go back in and finish the job.” The Fox & Friends host argued that “the quicker we start again, it’s the quicker we end it.”
Fox & Friends led the key shows by a large margin, arguing for resuming or expanding strikes at least 65 times.
Jack Keane (14) and Marc Thiessen (11) followed Kilmeade with the most arguments to resume or expand military strikes. On June 5, in the middle of the supposed ceasefire, Keane said, “Let's go big, take down as much of their capability as we possibly can, and get these guys as close to collapse as a military operation can possibly achieve.”
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From the June 5, 2026, edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends
Speakers frequently suggested deploying ground troops or seizing territory
Throughout the war, network guests and personalities frequently advocated deploying ground troops or seizing territory. Suggestions from these figures included seizing Kharg Island or other islands in the region, taking further military action in the Strait of Hormuz including reclaiming or occupying the waterway, and for the Trump administration to go in and physically seize enriched uranium. In total, network guests and personalities argued for deploying ground troops or seizing territory at least 63 times.
Brian Kilmeade led all speakers, arguing at least 13 times that the U.S. should deploy more troops or seize territory, often focusing on U.S. control of the Strait of Hormuz.
Keith Kellogg argued to deploy ground troops or seize territory at least 12 times, the next most of any speaker, often focused on seizing Kharg Island. Kellogg acknowledged in his appearances that he has "repeatedly" and "consistently" argued for taking Kharg Island, adding the president should “put a provisional government in charge.”
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From the May 18, 2026, edition of Fox News' Hannity
Speakers often advocated for further regime change in Iran
After the initial assassination strikes on the first day of the war, network guests and personalities continued to argue for further regime change at least 51 times.
Mark Levin led all speakers, arguing for this at least 11 times. His show Life, Liberty, & Levin led the charge with at least 21 such arguments. Levin frequently argued for the Trump administration to “eliminate” the regime, insisted that nothing would change Iran “except its destruction,” and argued that “the regime itself must be pulled out by the roots.”
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From the April 11, 2026, edition of Fox News' Life, Liberty, & Levin
Speakers pushed for arming Iranians
Network guests and personalities argued for the Trump administration to arm or fund the Iranian populace or Iranian opposition groups in their fight against the Iranian regime at least 42 times.
Life, Liberty, & Levin (27 arguments) led all shows by a large margin, followed by Hannity (12).
Mark Levin was seemingly the network's chief proponent of arming Iranians, arguing for this 22 times. Levin leaned on comparisons to the Reagan administration, saying in one segment, “We need to arm the Iranian people the way we armed other entities, freedom fighters, throughout the world under the Reagan administration,” and in another, touted the “success” of the Reagan administration when they “armed the freedom fighters.”
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From the May 9, 2026, edition of Fox News' Life, Liberty, & Levin
Speakers advocated for attacks on civilian and non-military infrastructure
With network guests and personalities seeming to grow frustrated with stalling negotiations, speakers resorted to arguing for attacks on civilian, oil, or other non-military infrastructure at least 24 times over the four month period.
Fox News host Sean Hannity proposed a campaign to “take out 10%” of Iran's infrastructure every three days until “everything is wiped out.” Keane argued to “destroy and dismantle” the country's energy infrastructure “on the mainland.” And Fox host Jesse Watters repeatedly touted Trump's so-called “bridge and power plant day.”
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From the April 7, 2026, edition of Fox News' The Five
Fox News' warmongering rhetoric has real-world implications
Donald Trump's close relationship with Fox News has blurred the line between the network's political commentary and unofficial policymaking. The president watches the channel “religiously,” its personalities have direct access to him, and their on-air demands often worm their way into the administration's political agenda.
And while the promised “four to five week” war — which has strained household budgets, failed to achieve its stated objectives, and killed thousands overseas, including at least 18 U.S. troops — ran on, many of Fox News' personalities and guests spent their time on air encouraging the president to dig in his heels and escalate.
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On Fox, Trump says NY Times coverage of the Iran war has been “treasonous”
July 13, 2026, edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends
DONALD TRUMP (GUEST): You know, I get a kick when The New York Times and CNN — so you got to understand: Their entire military is gone. They got nothing. They have no Navy, they have no Air Force, it's all gone. Their anti-aircraft is gone. Their leaders have all been killed. Their best leaders have been killed. They're gone. Khamenei is gone. The son is 90% gone — and The New York Times writes an article, 'They're doing better today.' Oh and they have inflation that's 350%, that used to be at 5% six months ago. They have have 350% inflation and The New York Times writes an article, 'They're stronger today than they were four months ago.' These people are sick. The New York Times is sick.
LAWRENCE JONES (CO-HOST): Obviously the American people don't believe that Mr. President, they understand who is winning this war. Really quickly Mr. President —
TRUMP: I actually think it's treasonous, Lawrence. I think it — by the way, how good is Lawrence doing? Okay, is he doing a good job?
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Fox & Friends runs sponcon segment touting “Medical Emergency Kit” marketed to MAGA
Written by Matt Gertz
Published 05/12/26
Fox News ran a segment sponsored by The Wellness Company on Tuesday in which Fox & Friends co-host Ainsley Earhardt and Dr. Peter McCullough — the lifestyle brand’s “chief scientific officer” and a one-time Fox regular — gushed over its “Medical Emergency Kit.”
“You are a genius,” Earhardt said after introducing McCullough, whose board certifications were apparently revoked over his false claims about the COVID-19 vaccines. “You’re a cardiologist. And then you said during COVID we need a better way. We need a kit with all of these drugs so that we can have them at the ready.”
McCullough touted the kit’s pre-prescribed medications to treat “dozens” of “common infections” as well as Lyme disease without seeing a doctor and having them diagnose your symptoms.
Under Earhardt’s gentle prodding, McCullough highlighted the kit’s benefits for vacationers; offered it up as a solution for accessing drugs manufactured overseas “when the shipping lanes are uncertain”; directed viewers to the company’s website to purchase it; and touted its affordable price, saying it’s “way cheaper than going to an urgent care.”
“It’s amazing,” Earhardt said at one point, “You have that idea that we all are like, Why didn't I think of that?”
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From the May 12, 2026, edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends
If you weren’t paying close attention, it was easy to miss Fox News’ disclosure that it was running sponsored content. At the beginning of the Fox & Friends segment, small text at the bottom of the screen read, “This segment is made possible by our sponsor: The Wellness Company.”
Fox subsequently posted the segment on its website.
Fox & Friends has run sponcon segments over the years on subjects like The Museum of the Bible, the hats worn at the Kentucky Derby, and GMC’s Hummer EV. But in taking money from a lifestyle brand to help sell its medical products to network viewers, Fox seems to have entered new territory.
Indeed, Fox’s segment serves as a testament to the right-wing con culture in which propagandists use ideological, often paranoid, political coverage to build trust with the movement’s rank-and-file, then get paid by people looking to cash in on their audience.
The Wellness Company tries to cash in on the right’s ivermectin craze
The Wellness Company — like other pill mills that use MAGA-inflected marketing to sell their product — fits perfectly into that ecosystem. Its Earhardt-approved “Medical Emergency Kit” retails for $299.99, including a “Free Doctor Consult” with one of TWC’s prescribing “licensed providers.”
Notably, while the product website touts the kit’s “8 life-saving prescriptions” and remedies for “30+ illnesses,” it highlights one medicine in particular — ivermectin. That’s the antiparasitic drug that Fox hosts and other right-wing media figures recklessly promoted during the COVID-19 pandemic as an alternative to the vaccines they claimed were ineffective and unsafe. They were wrong about ivermectin, as numerous studies found — but their rhetoric helped drive down vaccination rates on the right and create demand for ivermectin as a COVID-19 therapy, with deadly results.
The Wellness Company website
McCullough, like Earhardt, is a familiar face for the Fox audience — and thus a key validator for The Wellness Company’s product. An internist and cardiologist, he became a frequent presence on Fox during the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccines, making at least 37 appearances on its weekday programs in 2021 and 2022.
McCullough used the network’s platform to undermine the public vaccination effort, tout the purported effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin in treating the virus, and claim that an NFL player who was struck in the chest, collapsed on the field, and was diagnosed with cardiac arrest had suffered “vaccine-induced myocarditis.”
McCullough’s COVID-19 vaccine commentary made him an outcast in the medical community.
His former employer, Baylor Scott & White Health, filed a lawsuit against him in 2021, citing “irreparable reputational and business harm” caused by McCullough being identified with his former Baylor titles in interviews (the parties apparently reached a settlement in 2023).
Then in 2022, the credentialing committee of the American Board of Internal Medicine recommended stripping McCullough of his certifications over his vaccine claims. The Journal of Medicine reported in January 2025 that ABIM’s look-up tool identified McCullough’s certifications in internal medicine and cardiovascular disease as “Not Certified, Revoked,” which remains their current status.
But as The Daily Beast reported in a 2023 profile of The Wellness Company, McCullough became “a hero in anti-vaxx circles” — and thus an attractive business partner for Foster Coulson and Dave Lopez, the “Trumpworld-linked investors” who founded TWC that year. They were joined by other “disreputable medical professionals,” including TWC “Chief Epidemiologist” Dr. Harvey Risch, another veteran of Fox's crusade against the COVID-19 vaccine campaign.
As the Beast detailed, the group was “hawking a Goop-like lifestyle brand—complete with supplements, podcasts, telehealth, and even a dating service—to conservative audiences with the help of far-right influencers.”
The company has tried to tap into the right-wing fearmongering of the day. When conspiracy theorists warned in 2024 about a plan to kill off “excess population” through the hypothetical pathogen “Disease X,” The Wellness Company ran sponsored content at outlets like Breitbart and The Gateway Pundit pointing to its “Medical Emergency Kit” as a remedy.
Over the past few months, ads for TWC have also run on the right-wing podcast shows of Candace Owens and Jack Posobiec.
But now with a sponsored Fox & Friends segment, TWC is taking that act to a much bigger audience — one they are counting on to trust the testimonials from McCullough and Earhardt.
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Fox & Friends really does not want viewers to understand that Trump’s tariffs are taxes paid by Americans
Donald Trump illegally raised your taxes. Fox would rather not talk about it.
Written by Craig Harrington
Published 02/25/26
For the second time in a week, a Fox News personality went to bat to protect President Donald Trump from the fallout of the Supreme Court overturning his unpopular tariff policies, falsely reassuring viewers that they are not paying for Trump’s import tax scheme.
During two February 25 segments of Fox & Friends, co-host Lawrence Jones responded to criticism of Trump’s tariff policies by repeatedly (and falsely) telling viewers that the president’s critics were lying when saying his tariffs had cost American families money over the past year. His comments followed a segment last week wherein Fox host Harris Faulkner had wondered aloud whether foreign countries would seek refunds for tariffs they paid to the U.S. — before she was informed that tariffs are taxes paid by American consumers, not foreign exporters.
During today’s Fox & Friends segment, the hosts aired a portion of newly inaugurated Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger’s
to Trump’s State of the Union speech where she said that “everyday Americans are paying the price” of Trump’s tariffs and described his latest tariff proposal “another massive tax hike on you and your family.” Jones scolded Spanberger: “Just to be clear, what she said is 100% false,” claiming that “there has been zero inflation based on the tariffs” and that “you cannot say that it caused inflation on the American people.”
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From the February 25, 2026, edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends
Later, Jones returned to the topic during a segment with pollsters Kellyanne Conway and Mark Penn, discussing a portion of Spanberger’s rebuttal when the governor noted that Trump’s “reckless trade policies have forced American families to pay more than $1,700 each in tariff costs.” Jones responded that Spanberger's statement was “not true” and again added that tariffs had not been inflationary. Conway was even more direct, simply claiming, “Those are lies.”
Jones wrapped up his performative outrage by acting aghast that Spanberger would claim tariffs cost American families money. “To say it was inflationary, that it's costing you more money, the data doesn't support that, yet she told the people that,” he said.
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From the February 25, 2026, edition of Fox NewsFox & Friends
Americans are absolutely paying the cost of Trump’s tariffs.
As economists and experts have repeatedly explained, foreign countries do not pay tariffs. Tariffs are import taxes paid by American consumers.
Trump massively increased tariff receipts compared to 2024, raising a record-breaking amount of tariff revenue in his first year in office. The money had to come from somewhere.
And last November, The Budget Lab at Yale estimated that Trump's tariff policies had at that point cost the average American family roughly $1,700. An analysis by the Joint Economic Committee's minority staff released just last week estimated that “American consumers overall paid more than $231 billion in tariff costs between February 2025 and January 2026, an average of roughly $1,745 per family.”
Far from misleading viewers with her speech, Spanberger actually did Trump a favor by rounding the cost of his tariffs down.
And this isn’t just a question about whether or not tariffs are generally inflationary (they are) or whether Trump’s tariffs have shown up in consumer prices (they have). This is about real costs that have been passed along to actual Americans as a result of Donald Trump illegally raising their taxes.
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Firm Tied to Kristi Noem Secretly Got Money From $220 Million DHS Ad Contracts
The company is run by the husband of Noem’s chief DHS spokesperson and has personal and business ties to Noem and her aides. DHS invoked the “emergency” at the border to skirt competitive bidding rules for the taxpayer-funded campaign.
by Justin Elliott, Joshua Kaplan and Alex Mierjeski
November 14, 2025,
On Oct. 2, the second day of the government shutdown, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem arrived at Mount Rushmore to shoot a television ad. Sitting on horseback in chaps and a cowboy hat, Noem addressed the camera with a stern message for immigrants: “Break our laws, we’ll punish you.” [BUFFALO?]
Noem has hailed the more than $200 million, taxpayer-funded ad campaign as a crucial tool to stem illegal immigration. Her agency invoked the “national emergency” at the border as it awarded contracts for the campaign, bypassing the normal competitive bidding process designed to prevent waste and corruption.
The Department of Homeland Security has kept at least one beneficiary of the nine-figure ad deal a secret, records and interviews show: a Republican consulting firm with long-standing personal and business ties to Noem and her senior aides at DHS. The company running the Mount Rushmore shoot, called the Strategy Group, does not appear on public documents about the contract. The main recipient listed on the contracts is a mysterious Delaware company, which was created days before the deal was finalized.
No firm has closer ties to Noem’s political operation than the Strategy Group. It played a central role in her 2022 South Dakota gubernatorial campaign. Corey Lewandowski, her top adviser at DHS, has worked extensively with the firm. And the company’s CEO is married to Noem’s chief spokesperson at DHS, Tricia McLaughlin.
The Strategy Group’s ad work is the first known example of money flowing from Noem’s agency to businesses controlled by her allies and friends.
Government contracting experts said the depth of the ties between DHS leadership and the Strategy Group suggested major potential violations of ethics rules.
“It’s corrupt, is the word,” said Charles Tiefer, a leading authority on federal contract law and former member of the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan. He said that the Strategy Group’s role should prompt investigations by both the DHS inspector general and the House Oversight Committee.
“Hiding your friends as subcontractors is like playing hide the salami with the taxpayer,” Tiefer added.
Federal regulations forbid conflicts of interest in contracting and require that the process be conducted “with complete impartiality and with preferential treatment for none.”
“It’s worthy of an investigation to ferret out how these decisions were made, and whether they were made legally and without bias,” said Scott Amey, a contracting expert and general counsel at the watchdog group Project on Government Oversight.
The revelations come as the amount of money at Noem’s disposal has skyrocketed. The so-called Big Beautiful Bill granted DHS more than $150 billion, and Noem has given herself an unusual degree of control over how that money is spent. This summer, she began requiring that she personally approve any payment over $100,000.
Asked about the Strategy Group’s work for DHS, McLaughlin, the agency spokesperson, said in an interview, “We don’t have visibility into why they were chosen.”
“I don’t know who they’re a subcontractor with, but I don’t work with them because I have a conflict of interest and I fully recused myself,” she said. “My marriage is one thing and work is another. I don’t combine them.” Her husband, Strategy Group CEO Ben Yoho, didn’t respond to questions.
“My marriage is one thing and work is another. I don’t combine them,” said DHS Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin, who is married to Strategy Group CEO Ben Yoho. Tricia McLaughlin via Instagram
In a written statement, DHS said, “DHS has no involvement with the selection of subcontractors.” They added that the Strategy Group does not have a direct contract with the agency, saying “DHS cannot and does not determine, control, or weigh in on who contractors hire.”
Contracting experts said that agencies can and do sometimes require that subcontractors be approved by officials. It’s not clear how much the Strategy Group has been paid.
This is not the first time that the Strategy Group has gotten public money through a Noem contract. As governor of South Dakota in 2023, her administration set off a scandal by hiring the Ohio-based company to do a different ad campaign, paying it $8.5 million in state funds. While the state said the contract was done by the book, a former Noem administration official told ProPublica that Noem quietly intervened to ensure the Strategy Group got the deal. ProPublica granted some people anonymity to discuss the deals because of their sensitivity.
The firm also paid up to $25,000 to one of Noem’s closest advisers in South Dakota, previously unreported records show. (The adviser, 28-year-old Madison Sheahan, now serves at DHS as the second-in-command of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Sheahan didn’t respond to questions about why she was paid.)
The DHS ad that the company filmed at Mount Rushmore has aired during “Fox & Friends” in recent days. Executives from the Strategy Group traveled to the shoot and hired subcontractors to fill out the film crew, according to records and a person involved in the campaign. The ad’s aesthetic sits somewhere between a political campaign ad and a Jeep commercial as Noem tells would-be immigrants to “come here the right way.”
“From the cowboys who tamed the West to the titans who built our cities,” Noem says, as images of Trump Tower in Chicago and Trump raising his fist after the assassination attempt last year flash on the screen, “America has always rewarded vision and grit.” Noem continues: “You cross the border illegally, we’ll find you.”
Watch the DHS Ad Filmed at Mount Rushmore
Obtained by ProPublica
The ad is the latest in a campaign that Noem debuted in February, just a few weeks after she took charge of DHS. “Any delay in providing these critical communications to the public will increase the spread of misinformation, especially misinformation by smugglers,” the agency wrote, explaining why it was skipping the competitive bidding process normally required for government contracts. The initial ads featured Noem thanking Trump for securing the border.
The contracts total $220 million so far, leading the DHS ad budget to triple in the most recent fiscal year, according to Bloomberg. The lion’s share of ad contracts is typically used to buy TV airtime or spots on social media. Advertising firms make money by taking an often-hefty commission. Federal records show the contracts have gone to two firms. One is a Republican ad company in Louisiana called People Who Think, which has been awarded $77 million.
But the majority of the money — $143 million — has gone to a mysterious LLC in Delaware. The company was created just days before it was awarded the deal.
Little is known about the Delaware company, which is called Safe America Media and lists its address as the Virginia home of a veteran Republican operative, Michael McElwain. McElwain has long had his own advertising company (separate from the Delaware one), but there’s little evidence that firm could handle a nine-figure federal contract on its own: It reported just five employees when it received COVID-19 relief money a few years ago.
How, where and to whom Safe America Media doled out the $143 million is unknown. Any subcontractors hired to do work on the DHS ads are not disclosed in federal contracting databases.
The office funding the ad contracts is listed as the DHS Office of Public Affairs, which is run by McLaughlin, contract records show. McLaughlin married Yoho, the Strategy Group CEO, earlier this year.
In its statement, DHS said the agency does its contracting “by the book” and the process is run by career officials. “It is very sad that Pro Publica would seek to defame these public servants,” DHS added.
Asked about why the agency chose Safe America Media, DHS said, “The results speak for themselves: the most secure border in American history and over 2 million illegal aliens exiting the United States.” McElwain and People Who Think didn’t respond to questions.
Yoho was still in college when he first served as campaign manager for a U.S. congressman. Now, at 38 years old, he’s a national player in the cutthroat industry of political advertising. Federal election records show tens of millions in payments to his firm during the 2024 election cycle, coming from dozens of Republican congressional candidates. And Noem has proved a particularly lucrative client.
Lewandowski brought Yoho into Noem’s inner circle back in South Dakota, according to two people familiar with the matter, putting the young consultant in charge of the ad side of her 2022 gubernatorial reelection campaign. Noem had a more than $5 million advertising budget for the race, records show. After she won in a landslide, Yoho, who has called Noem a friend, came to South Dakota to attend her inauguration ceremony. He sat off to the side of the stage, next to Lewandowski. (Lewandowski didn’t respond to a request for comment.)
Yoho shared a photo of himself with Noem and her husband, Bryon, at Noem’s 2023 inauguration in South Dakota. Benjamin Yoho via X
By then, Yoho’s next big project with Noem was already in the works. In late 2022, Noem was quietly preparing to launch another sprawling ad campaign — only this time, the money would come from state coffers. The stated goal was to encourage workers to move to South Dakota. The upcoming contract opportunity wasn’t public yet, but Yoho was already involved in planning the campaign, according to records first reported by Sioux Falls Live.
Then on Jan. 12, 2023, Yoho’s company registered to do business in South Dakota under the name Go West Media. The next day, the contract opportunity went live.
Seven companies submitted proposals for the project. Then the pressure from above set in, according to a former Noem administration official involved in the process.
The former official said a top Noem aide told them the governor would be angry if Yoho’s company didn’t win the contract. “He was very direct: ‘She wants to do it,’” they said. Contemporaneous text messages reviewed by ProPublica corroborate that senior Noem administration officials pushed for Yoho to get the contract. Eventually, he did. (In its statement, DHS denied that Noem influenced the process.)
Noem starred in Yoho’s ads herself,,
and
as she touted her state’s growing economy. Exactly how much Yoho and the Strategy Group made off the $8.5 million deal is unclear. Some of the money was used to purchase spots on Fox News, including one during a Republican presidential debate. Some of the money appears to have gone back to South Dakota — into the bank account of another of Noem’s top advisers.
Noem in costume in ads she starred in that were produced by the Strategy Group, funded with public money in South Dakota. South Dakota Governor’s Office of Economic Development via YouTube
Sheahan, now the second-in-command at ICE, was paid up to $25,000 by Go West in 2023 for “consulting,” according to a financial disclosure document Sheahan later filed. At the time, Sheahan was serving as both the operations director for Noem as governor and the political director for Noem’s campaign work, according to a copy of her 2023 resume obtained by ProPublica. Her responsibilities included coordinating “daily logistics and operations” for Noem and her team, the resume said. She also managed the “relationship with high level donors” to American Resolve, Noem’s network of outside political groups.
As his firm received millions from the South Dakota state government, Yoho separately continued to work for Noem in other capacities. He worked under Lewandowski on the publicity campaign for Noem’s 2024 memoir, according to a person familiar with the matter. (The book became famous for including an anecdote about Noem shooting her dog.)
The Strategy Group also received a stream of payments for social media consulting and media production work over the last few years from Noem’s American Resolve PAC. Federal election records show the PAC made its last payment to Yoho’s company this February, a couple weeks after Noem took her post as the head of DHS.
Corrections
{Do you have any information we should know about Kristi Noem or DHS contracts? Justin Elliott can be reached by email atjustin@propublica.organd by Signal or WhatsApp at 774-826-6240. Josh Kaplan can be reached by email atjoshua.kaplan@propublica.organd by Signal or WhatsApp at 734-834-9383.*}:
Jeff Ernsthausen contributed research.
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Fox ignores climate change while covering collapsing houses along the North Carolina coast
:{SpecialPrograms Climate & Energy:(style="font-family:Merriweather"):}:
Written by Ilana Berger
Published09/19/25
During a September 18 segment, Fox & Friends covered the most recent instance of a house collapsing into the Atlantic Ocean — this time on Hatteras Island in North Carolina — and mentioned erosion along the coast, but left out that climate change is contributing to the problem. Sea-level rise and erosion from increasingly severe storms has helped claim 11 other homes in the unincorporated community of Rodanthe, North Carolina.
Video
Citation
From the September 18, 2025, edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends
CARLEY SHIMKUS (CO-HOST): A stilt house collapsing on the shore along the Outer Banks of North Carolina this week. It's now the 12th home claimed by the Atlantic Ocean in the past five years. The two-story beach home fell at the north end of Hatteras Island. Thankfully, the home was empty at the time. Officials say recent storms have worsened erosion, leading to more collapses like this. Those are your headlines, guys. Huge home.
AINSLEY EARHARDT (CO-HOST): It's interesting they let them just collapse. They don't destroy them before, knowing this is going to happen.
SHIMKUS: Yeah, that's right. And clearly the ocean is moving up the shore or they wouldn't have built that home in the first place.
EARHARDT: It's a big problem. It's a big problem on the East Coast. And you spend so much to have that beachfront property and then, you know — over time, it's gone.
SHIMKUS: It is, yes.
The Charlotte Observer correctly implicated the role of climate change in its reporting on the home’s destruction, highlighting that Hurricane Erin in August generated “waves as high as 50 feet,” causing “severe erosion in some places along the East Coast.”
The Observer noted that “the home was well away from the ocean and behind a vegetated dune when it was built in 1969. But a series of storms, which have occurred more frequently in recent years due to climate change, carved away the beach and the dune and brought the surf up to the pilings of the home and a string of others to its north and south.”
While the Fox & Friends segment mentioned that worsening storms “have caused erosion,” the network has repeatedly downplayed any connections between hurricanes and climate change, which has been making storms grow rapidly and more intense, destroying homes and businesses. Fox has also downplayed the threat of sea level rise, which occurs “mostly due to a combination of melt water from glaciers and ice sheets and thermal expansion of seawater as it warms,” according to NASA.
As FactCheck.org pointed out, “For every inch of sea level rise, approximately 100 inches of beach are lost, according to NASA oceanographer and climate scientist Josh Willis.”
Trump’s Department of Energy recently published a so-called “critical review” of climate science, which included several climate contrarians as authors and “cherry-picks text, data, and studies that paint an incomplete picture” in order “to suggest rising sea-levels in the US are only due to land-sinking,” according to the Union of Concerned Scientists. The DOE report uses limited information to claim that there is “no obvious acceleration beyond the historical average rate of sea level rise.”
Meanwhile, members of the Cape Hatteras National Seashore, which manages the coastal area that was impacted, told The Charlotte Observer that “there are probably dozens of homes endangered on the oceanfront.”
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08/15/25
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April 18, 2025, edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends
BRIAN KILMEADE (CO-HOST): So let's talk Democrats. And for the most part, you're looking at a party looking for leaders. But one thing they are getting is big crowds. And they're getting big crowds where Bernie Sanders and AOC are traveling around. They're going to areas, and there's definitely people out there when you have 49, you know, when you have millions of people vote for Democrats, you can get a big crowd. I'm astounded to see Yale University did a survey, and it says that AOC is now in the second spot behind Kamala Harris as the most popular, but she's supposed to be the working class socialist. A message to those that oligarchs are ruining this country, and the rich are gonna get richer unless she is voted in, and 83 year old Bernie Sanders is the nominal leader.
LAWRENCE JONES (CO-HOST): So you got Kamala Harris at the top of the list.
AINSLEY EARHARDT (CO-HOST): It's — yes, you're right. Yeah.
JONES: She lost every swing state. The American people overwhelmingly rejected her. She was a bumbling mess on the campaign trail, could not complete her sentences accurately. No one really knew what she stood for. And then you got AOC that's right behind her, Ainsley.
EARHARDT: Is she tied with Cory Booker?
JONES: Exactly. A radical. The people in the country aren't gonna sign up for her agenda. I just think it's another double down on crazy.
EARHARDT: You know, this is what, this is what we all feared. I remember when Bernie Sanders came on the scene, and he said, ‘I'm a socialist.' We were like,‘What? No one's voting for you.' Now look at these crowds. This is where our country is going, and it is very, very scary. They are socialist. They are so far to the left. They are progressive.
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11/15/18 2:57 PM EST
03/13/19 1:56 PM EDT
04/21/25
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an 2 24
Fox & Friends credits November jobs gains to “Donald Trump's victory”
12/06/24
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MSG hATE RALLY
October 28, 2024, edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends
STEVE DOOCY (CO-HOST): It felt a lot like the RNC reunion. You saw a lot of people you saw at the RNC right there.
Of all the comments, however, of the warm-up acts, there was a comic who made some offensive comments about Latinos and Puerto Ricans and African-Americans and others. And he has already been denounced by Republicans and by the campaign.
But unfortunately for the Trump campaign, the Harris campaign has denounced it and mobilized influential Puerto Rican influencers like Bad Bunny, who is very big in the Puerto Rican community and Latino community — he put out something on Instagram. And so did Ricky Martin with millions of followers and he wrote or he said this is what they think of us, vote for Kamala Harris. A Trump adviser said the speaker's remarks were not vetted. We are going to talk to Karoline Leavitt — she's gonna be with us in a moment.
BRIAN KILMEADE (CO-HOST): Part of the pre-show, that was two hours before the president.
DOOCY: Yup, the warm-up.
KILMEADE: It's amazing. The cover of The New York Times, Trump at Garden, a closing carnival of grievances, misogyny, and racism. Only, only somebody who works for the Harris campaign pretending to be a reporter for The New York Times would write something like that if you watched, that three hours or four hours. You had to flip around to get it. We didn't take all of it live. But also — you don't point out that R.F.K. the famous Democratic family actually was one of the featured speakers around the most famous inventor in the world, Elon Musk? That stands out? No, a comedian with a successful podcast said some off-color.
LAWRENCE JONES (CO-HOST): But you lose goodwill when before the rally even started they called it a Nazi rally. Before they even took the stage. They had already said that it was going to be a racist rally.
And so number two, maybe it's just me, Dana, uh Ainsley, I have a dark sense of humor you know? And so I like — maybe this was not the appropriate format for the comedian to be there but it's comedy.
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names schiff; ingraham gives him out, does not take it
// Trump ally Mike Davis: “Retribution is a key component of justice”
10/15/24 10:09 AM EDT
10/15/24 mma
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Trump publicly bragged about tanking the border bill — now a Fox host is trying to help him revise history
Written by Media Matters Staff
Published 09/27/24
Fox & Friendsco-host Ainsley Earhardt is helping former President Donald Trump run cover for his public sabotage of a bipartisan immigration bill he previously bragged about tanking.
On the September 27 episode, Earhardt argued that while Vice President Kamala Harris has been blaming Trump for the failed immigration bill, “he says, ‘I never called those lawmakers.’ Those lawmakers say the same thing. ‘No — he had nothing to do with it. We didn’t like the bill.'”
Earhardt’s attempt to help Trump revise history is stymied by a series of facts.
Trump publicly came out against the bill in a Truth Social post, stating, “I do not think we should do a Border Deal, at all, unless we get EVERYTHING needed to shut down the INVASION.” In a separate post, Trump wrote, “Only a fool, or a Radical Left Democrat, would vote for this horrendous Border Bill.”
Trump himself has previously owned the blame for the failed bill. At a late January rally, Trump vowed to “fight it all the way” and stated, “A lot of the senators are trying to say, respectfully, they’re blaming it on me. I say, that’s okay. Please blame it on me. Please.”
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September 25, 2024, edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends
AINSLEY EARHARDT (FOX HOST): Think about the few speeches we have heard her give or interviews we have heard her give. She is not focusing on the environment anymore, climate.
STEVE DOOCY (HOST): Listen, and regarding costs of stuff. When she talks about how insurance — your insurance, your home insurance is going up, because of climate change, I have actually heard that from my insurance broker. They said okay. Your rates are going way up. I said why? Because of the weather. Because of climate change. So that is — that's somebody who is not a partisan.
AINSLEY EARHARDT: They just want to charge you more, It's the weather. El Nino.
STEVE DOOCY: Also why they are canceling people. That's why she is using that.
BRIAN KILMEADE (HOST): One more windmill and his insurance rates will go down. Fantastic. Get me those solar panels from China.
LAWRENCE JONES (HOST): Right.
As Media Matters recently documented:
During the August 28 edition of Fox News’ America’s Newsroom, Fox Business correspondent Max Gordon reported on the skyrocketing cost of car insurance, another one of the “big issues coming up in the campaign” according to anchor Dana Perino. Gordon went on to connect this pocketbook issue to climate change, noting that the, “Increase in severe weather events has been one of the main drivers behind these increasing premiums. Climate events that cause a billion dollars or more in damage have been steadily on the rise, impacting how insurers set rates.”
Notably, the climate crisis is creating a housing insurance crisis as well. Climate change is making storms and wildfires more destructive. Last year, the U.S. experienced a record 28 disasters that cost more than a billion dollars each in damage. In response, some private insurers are raising premiums in areas frequently hit by extreme weather or pulling out of high-risk areas altogether, leaving homeowners uninsured.
Rising insurance costs are not the only economic impact of climate change. A study released early this year found that climate change is among the factors driving inflation which is “driving up the prices of food and other goods worldwide.” As Axios reported: “This is not the first study to note the economic toll of climate change, or even the inflationary pressures of increasing temperatures and extreme weather events."
Here is a recent CBS News segment on how climate change is affecting insurance rates:
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MMA 9 24
....The Trump-aligned Project 2025, which was created to serve as the blueprint for his next presidential administration, also includes numerous proposals to further restrict overtime pay and protections for American workers.
Yet now Fox News is promoting his supposedly “pro-worker” announcement that he will move to eliminate taxes on overtime pay if reelected.
News organizations shouldn’t fall for Trump’s gimmick.
- ## Fox News hyped Trump’s announcement as “pro-worker”
- Fox contributor and former Trump Treasury official Monica Crowley on the proposal: “Very pro-worker, as Donald Trump has been throughout his political career, certainly as president.” Crowley continued: “You know, Donald Trump deserves a lot of credit for coming up with creative, innovative, out-of-the-box new policies like no tax on tips, no tax on Social Security benefits, and now no tax on overtime. It's all of a piece of a Trump pro-growth economic agenda that he put forward in the first term of tax cuts, regulatory relief, unleashing our great energy sector, and striking fair-trade deals for the American worker. He puts the forgotten men and women first. This is America first. It's all part of an Americans first policy, and he's going to do it again.” Fox News, *Jesse Watters Primetime*, [9/12/24]
- Project 2025 contributor and conservative economist Stephen Moore on Fox’s Hannity: “If you work extra hours, you're going to get a little bonus from Trump.” Moore added: “I had not heard about this policy, but I think it's kind of a neat policy. I think people are going to really like it.” Fox News, *Hannity*, [9/12/24; The Guardian, 2/29/24]
- Fox & Friends host Lawrence Jones said the policy will benefit “everyday people.” Co-host Ainsley Earhardt, introducing a discussion of Trump’s announcement, said: “Many of the people here at Fox work overtime. Many people in your industry work overtime.” Jones said, “He is baiting the Democrats right now. … They keep saying that he is for the billionaires class. That he is for the tax cuts for the rich. And every single time they do that he responds with policy that affects everyday people.” Fox News, *Fox & Friends*, [9/13/24]
- Fox Business host Taylor Riggs: “I think that this is … another good plan for him to really appeal to that blue collar worker.” Riggs added: “Less taxes is always good for everyone. Right? We already pay the government way too much money in wasteful spending that they use it on. … Overall I do think maybe it’s helpful for the worker.” Fox News, *Fox & Friends*, [9/13/24]
- Fox Business framed Trump’s announcement as a plan “to help ease the financial burden on working Americans.” Twitter/X, [9/13/24]
- ## As president, Trump moved to repeal and failed to defend a regulation that would have expanded overtime protections to more than 4 million workers
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// haiti pet fail? mma 9 24
the “crime crisis” narrative Fox News concocted for Donald Trump was exposed at Tuesday night’s debate when moderator David Muir pointed out that FBI data shows violent crime has actually fallen dramatically in recent years. The network’s stars are responding by lashing out at Muir, falsely claiming violent crime is actually up, and arguing that even if data show violent crime is plummeting, “we're all a little bit more scared than we used to be.”
Trump, in a nonresponsive answer to a question about how he would carry out his plan to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, claimed that due to migration under President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, “crime in this country is through the roof. And we have a new form of crime. It's called migrant crime. And it's happening at levels that nobody thought possible.”
Trump’s assertion of rising crime echoed months of anecdote-based Fox coverage — but Muir pointed out in response that actual data shows the opposite, saying, “President Trump, as you know, the FBI says overall violent crime is coming down in this country.”
Indeed, preliminary FBI data released in June found “steep drops in every category of violent crime in every region in the first three months of 2024 compared to a year earlier, continuing a downward trend since a coronavirus pandemic surge” during Trump’s administration.
Trump responded to Muir by echoing baseless right-wing media claims that the FBI had been “defrauding” data. But the agency’s report is consistent with other sources showing that crime is falling.
Video
CitationFrom the September 10, 2024, presidential debate.
The co-hosts of Fox & Friends responded the next morning by arguing that data that shows violent crime has fallen is irrelevant in the face of the vibes.
“Any time people say violent crime is down in America,” offered Brian Kilmeade, “I ask you, people of Philadelphia, where they are hosting, find anyone in Philadelphia who thinks violent crime is down. I ask you, people of Chicago, site of the DNC, walk around and tell us how crime is under control. I ask you in Washington, D.C., where violent crime is down, the carjacking capital of the country, ask anyone in Washington, D.C., if they feel safer today than four years ago. There is the numbers and there is the reality.”
“It’s the word ‘violent,’ however they define ‘violent.’ Crime is up,” responded Ainsley Earhardt.
“Kamala Harris didn’t even make that point — it was the moderators,” Lawrence Jones added. “They’re not there covering these stories. They’re not going to all these major cities talking about the violence that is impacting urban America on the day to days, so they probably believe what the FBI numbers are saying.”
In fact, according to data compiled by the Major Cities Chiefs Association, all three cities Kilmeade mentioned have seen steep declines in homicides and at least one other category of violent crime the group reported (rapes, robberies, and/or aggravated assaults).
Video
CitationFrom the September 11, 2024, edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends.
The trio returned to the subject later in the program.
“One of my favorite parts of the debate, and when it just became clear to me that the bias was jumping off the screen at one point, was the conversation about crime,” Jones complained. “And then David hops in and says, ‘Well, actually, the FBI is saying that the crime is going down.’”
“OK, well now, we know those numbers aren’t quite accurate,” he continued, echoing Trump’s false claim from the debate. Jones then urged Muir to spend more time focusing his broadcast on crime anecdotes, saying, “David, you have a newscast every single day. You may not report on it, but you have local affiliates in major cities all across this country. They are reporting on the crime in Chicago, in Philadelphia. Why not pick up the phone and call them and see what’s going on on the ground?”
“I think, Lawrence, the operative word there was ‘violent,’ and David said, ‘Violent crime has gone down,’” Earhardt replied. “We know that crime is up in these cities, we know that thousands, millions of more illegal immigrants have come over our border under this administration, many of them are affiliated with gangs. We know that more of them have murdered more little girls or young women than ever in my lifetime.” (Earhardt was alive in the 1990s, when violent crime and homicides peaked at levels dramatically higher than the present.)
“So violent crime might be going down,” she continued, “but crime overall, we're all a little bit more scared than we used to be."
“Ask anybody in the streets of Philadelphia, outside where that debate was taking place, if they think crime is going down,” Kilmeade added. “In New York City, you walk the streets here, I don't care what the bar chart or the pie chart says, it’s not going down.”
Related
- ### Fox News' attempt to manufacture a Biden crime crisis runs into a problem: Violent crime is down
02/29/24 12:55 PM EST
07/16/24 9:04 AM EDT
09/11/24
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mma 8 24
August 26, 2024, edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends
RACHEL CAMPOS-DUFFY (FOX NEWS HOST): What's the other side? It's a globalist ticket with these mystery puppet masters running it. We don't really know who is making the decisions on the other side. And I think this is so interesting because so many times people say, you know, "we want unity" and they accuse Donald Trump, in particular, of being so divisive and here you have RFK Jr., you know, a prominent Democrat and Donald Trump, the nominee for the Republican Party, reaching across the aisle, to find common ground. And I was thinking, Ainsley, what are those common issues?
It's the border. The economy, government surveillance, free speech, peace in the world, and food policy. Think about the other side, we just had a week of the Democrat convention. I can't tell you what their policies are. Other than abortion. And so I just think these are huge issues, the one's that I laid out for you that RFK and Donald Trump agree on. I think this is a real threat just to the system and kind of speaks to what I always thought, Donald Trump isn't really running against Kamala Harris, he is running against a corrupt system. And I think he's promising, along with RFK Jr. and JD Vance, to sort of blow up that system, expose the corruption. And nowhere do you see that more than in our food policy.
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mma 8 24
News outlets reported that Vice President Kamala Harris proposed raising the corporate tax rate to 28% if she wins the presidency this November, partially rolling back the Trump-era tax cuts that slashed corporate taxes.
Even though corporate tax revenue plummeted in response to the Trump tax cuts, and American corporations are undertaxed relative to other developed economies in the OECD, conservative media began assailing Harris’ policy with false claims of immediate and “massive layoffs” and higher inflation.
As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has explained, Trump’s 2017 tax cut was skewed to the richest Americans, and the corporate tax cut even moreso, with the bottom 90% of workers gaining nothing from the corporate tax rate cut, while corporate executives earning nearly $1 million a year got an average $50,000 earnings boost. A leading reason that Trump's corporate tax changes benefited the wealthy was the imposition of a flat tax of 21% to replace what had been a graduated rate system, ranging from 15% to 35%.
:{And thanks to Trump’s tax cuts, even as corporate profits went up during most of his presidency, corporate tax revenue dropped until the pandemic and the years after. Corporate tax revenue as a share of the economy remains near historic lows at under 2% of gross domestic product, and it’s also near historic lows as a share of federal tax revenue. :{}:
Meanwhile, the Organisation for Economic Co-operations and Development (OECD) average showed corporate tax revenue in 2020 at just over 15% of total tax revenue, and 3% of GDP, showing that U.S. corporations have a very light tax burden in comparison. In 2023, the Institute of Taxation and Economic Policy estimated that raising the corporate tax rate to 28% would raise more than $1.3 trillion in revenue over 10 years.
Yet conservative media reacted to Harris’ proposal with hyperbolic doom and gloom. Citing an analysis from the Tax Foundation, Fox News personalities claimed that raising the corporate tax rate would lead to “massive layoffs” “right off the bat.” Yet the Tax Foundation’s analysis projected a loss of only 128,000 “full-time equivalent jobs” by 2034. This is a drop in the bucket of the millions of jobs projected to be created over the course of a decade. Other conservatives claimed that raising the corporate tax rate would be inflationary; in reality, tax increases are broadly considered deflationary.
- Fox Business’ Jackie DeAngelis falsely claimed that if Harris “raises the corporate tax rate to 28%, almost 150,000 people right off the bat are going to lose their jobs.” DeAngelis added: “Ultimately the corporations aren't these big, bad evil entities.” Fox News, *Fox & Friends*, [8/20/24]
- Fox & Friends co-host Lawrence Jones claimed that “you’re gonna have massive layoffs” if Harris raises the corporate tax rate to 28%. Co-host Brian Kilmeade defended the Trump-era rate, saying, “Corporations have people in it,” and claiming that it would make the U.S. uncompetitive with European countries with lower corporate tax rates. Fox News, *Fox & Friends*, [8/20/24]
- Fox Business host Charles Payne: Harris wants to “go to war with corporate America.” Payne then proclaimed Harris will “make the lives of workers harsher,” adding that “there will be fewer jobs.” Fox News, *The Faulkner Focus*, [8/20/24]
* Wash. Times columnist and Trump campaign staffer Tim Murtaugh: “She wants to tax job creators at a higher rate than Chinese communists do.” Murtaugh added: “Who do you think will pay for the tax increase? Do you suppose maybe it’s passed on to consumers like always? Harris is dangerous.” Twitter/X, [8/20/24]
- Fox contributor Jason Chaffetz: “Do you think a 30% increase in the corporate tax rate will increase the cost of your life? Yes, it will. Everything will cost more. That’s VP Harris’ plan. Believe her.” Twitter/X, [8/20/24]
- Right-wing commentator Bill Mitchell: Raising the corporate tax rate is inflationary. Mitchell posted that “corporations will pass costs onto consumers.” Twitter/X, [8/20/24]
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