Tag: fox news lies
Fox News Spinning Madly To Make Sense Of Trump's 'Affordability' Message

Fox News Spinning Madly To Make Sense Of Trump's 'Affordability' Message

Following this month’s Democratic election victories -- which even Fox News suggested were due to concerns over affordability -- the network is attempting to craft a coherent message on the issue from various Trump administration policies and announcements.

For instance, a November 18 segment on Fox & Friends noted that President Donald Trump is working to “alleviate food import tariffs,” making “efforts to address high mortgage rates,” and considering $2,000 “rebate checks.”

Yet these three solutions that the Fox report presents as Trump’s plan to “ease” the “affordability crisis” all come in response to issues that Trump has made worse.

LAWRENCE JONES (CO-HOST): Meanwhile, President Trump is looking to make life more affordable for all Americans, eyeing solutions for high costs.

MARK MEREDITH (WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT): The White House says one of its major goals remains to make America affordable again. As we know, Americans coast to coast are fed up with the rising cost of living. And with the midterms looming, the White House is also trying to show people what it’s doing publicly.

MEREDITH: The administration’s effort includes removing some of the tariffs the president himself imposed on a number of food products, as well as addressing higher mortgage rates, something that of course many people are dealing with. And the president’s teasing the possibility of tariff rebate checks as soon as next year.

The Yale Budget Lab’s latest estimate shows that Trump’s tariffs will cause “price level rises by 1.2% in the short run, representing a loss of $1,700 for the average household,” and the Tax Foundation’s latest estimate says Trump’s tariffs “amount to an average tax increase per US household of $1,200 in 2025 and $1,600 in 2026.”

These Trump tariffs previously had widespread support from Fox, which is already praising the president for lowering them as a “quick fix” on the affordability crisis he made worse.

And during the above Fox & Friends segment, co-hosts Ainsley Earhardt and Lawrence Jones spoke positively of possible stimulus checks, styled as tariff “rebates” even though both The Budget Lab and the Tax Foundation estimate that they will cost far more than the revenue Trump’s tariffs have brought in so far.

Additionally, some of the Trump administration’s proposals to make housing more affordable, including mass deportation of undocumented immigrants and a 50-year mortgage, would likely end up increasing housing costs.

Fox’s scramble to piece together a Trump administration affordability plan comes amid Trump’s own false messaging that he has already solved the affordability crisis.

In a series of Truth Social posts and public remarks he made earlier in November, Trump repeatedly pointed to the cheaper (and significantly smaller) Walmart Thanksgiving dinner bundle for this year to declare victory on the issue of affordability, saying things like: “So the Democrats ‘affordability’ issue is DEAD!” and “We are the affordability, when we are the ones that have done a great job in affordability, not the Democrats.”

More recently, Trump has repeatedly and falsely claimed that prices are lower now under his administration.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters

Despite Fox's $787 Million Lawsuit Payout, Bartiromo Is Still Lying About 2020 Election

Despite Fox's $787 Million Lawsuit Payout, Bartiromo Is Still Lying About 2020 Election

Fox News host Maria Bartiromo, who was arguably the network’s most high-profile promoter of election conspiracies that cost Fox millions in payouts, was back promoting those debunked conspiracies on her Monday broadcast.

The incident occurred during Bartiromo’s show Mornings with Maria, broadcast on Fox Business. Bartiromo and her panel were discussing President Donald Trump’s decision to pardon a group of 77 people who tried to help him steal the 2020 election that he lost to former President Joe Biden. The most prominent pardon recipient was disgraced former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, along with right-wing lawyer John Eastman.

- YouTube youtu.be

Conservative columnist Liz Peek said she supported the pardons (which are symbolic because no federal charges are pending) but that Giuliani and company were “wrong” in attempting to subvert the election.

“Well, we don’t know if they were wrong, by the way, with all of those mail-in ballots. There is more investigation to be done here and I suspect President Trump has his DOJ doing it,” Bartiromo responded.

The right’s conspiracies about mail-in ballots have been endlessly promoted from Trump on down and have been discredited and debunked. Conservatives have sought to cast doubt on ballots delivered via mail in elections where they lose but have not voiced similar concerns in elections they win.

Following Trump’s loss to Biden, Bartiromo took the lead on Fox’s airwaves in promoting baseless conspiracy theories arguing that Trump had actually won the election. Many of her statements helped form the basis of Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit against Fox, pushing back on claims from Bartiromo and others that the voting services company had helped Biden steal the election.Internal communications at Fox disclosed during the suit showed that Fox staffers knew that Bartiromo’s claims were false. One message from “Special Report” anchor Bret Baier admitted that allegations Bartiromo pushed out to her social media accounts were “crap.” Internal messages also showed that Fox hosts were aware that promoting these conspiracies increased their ratings with conservative viewers.

Ultimately Fox paid out a $787 million settlement to Dominion.

Bartiromo’s decision to rehash the conspiracies that caused so much damage to Fox’s bottom line makes it clear that the network cares more about pushing out right-wing lies than anything else, even the bottom line.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos

Stoking Division Amid Disaster, Trump And His Minions Betray America

Stoking Division Amid Disaster, Trump And His Minions Betray America

The solidarity of American communities in the face of catastrophe, whether natural or manmade, is an aspect of our national character that most of us cherish. We never tire of stories about our fellow citizens upholding each other at the worst of time. We venerate the firefighters, emergency service workers, law enforcement officers and ordinary neighbors whose endurance and sacrifice holds communities together against cruel circumstance – without regard to race, creed, color, gender, or partisan affiliation.

Or at least we did during much of our history. Yet as huge swaths of Los Angeles are consumed by wildfire, it is striking to see those traditional American values torched by a self-serving coterie of right-wing billionaires, whose loyalty to any principle beyond self-aggrandizement is nil: Rupert Murdoch, Elon Musk, and of course their political avatar Donald Trump, the president-elect.

While the LA blaze rages on, all three of these men have used their gigantic public platforms to stoke a different but exceptionally destructive conflagration. Rather than encourage patriotic bonding and mutual aid, they broadcast messages of division, hatred, and suspicion, served up in a poisonous stew of blatant lies, conspiracy theories, and wretched nonsense.

Even as the Los Angeles Fire Department’s undaunted officers and leaders work around the clock, confronting danger and tragedy in every moment, loudmouths like Musk have the temerity to attack them, prattling on about “DEI,” the effort to mitigate decades of discrimination. Neither the Tesla mogul nor Murdoch’s blithering minions on Fox News Channel -- who are shocked that the LA fire chief is a lesbian -- have produced a shred of evidence to show that diversity hinders firefighting. They never will. For the purposes of right-wing Republican propaganda, facts and logic are irrelevant and annoying.

In the same vein are Trump’s attacks on California Gov. Gavin Newsom, whom he disparages with his usual gutter vernacular as “Newscum.” Posting ridiculous falsehoods about the state’s water supply, claiming the governor is withholding water from burning communities, can only be regarded as an obnoxious distraction while state officials try to save lives and stop the fire. With reservoir levels at or above capacity in most of the state, there is no shortage of water, but its use has been hampered by the awful winds and other technical barriers.

Instead of seeking ways to support the scorched and weary Angelenos, the Trump gang aims only to fabricate myths that will overshadow the real cause of this disaster. On CNN, GOP spokesman Scott Jennings has repeated a fake story about budget cuts to the LA Fire Department, when in fact the department received a $50 million increase last year. Donald Trump Jr and various other clowns are whining over a tiny donation of equipment to Ukraine, which has no impact whatsoever.

They will literally say anything to avoid discussing the way climate change – the underlying cause of the hot, dry superstorm that turned a local fire into a regional inferno. They don’t believe in it, so it can’t be causing the fires. Except of course it is.

Trump’s impending return to power is awful to contemplate in these circumstances -- especially for those in California who remember how he behaved the last time he occupied the Oval Office. He denies climate change and oppose any program to stem its deadly impact. And he has repeatedly manipulated federal aid to punish states he considered politically hostile to him, including during the 2018 wildfires in southern California.

As reported earlier this year by Politico, Trump refused to approve critical assistance for those communities until aides showed him that Orange County had given him more votes in 2016 than the entire state of Iowa. Obviously, that is not what presidential duty requires, as if that would matter to him.

The incoming president appears to have no compassion, no instinct to help those who have suffered horrendous losses and terrible. As usual, he is thinking about himself, his partisan objectives, and his obsession with vengeance against perceived enemies.

The Trump years, which will now be extended for another presidential term, have inflicted awful damage on American morale, empathy, and unity. Restoring that spirit will take years and probably decades. It doesn’t seem accidental that Murdoch and Musk, Trump’s gleeful enablers, are of foreign origin. Like him, they display no regard for American ethics and customs. And like him, they are making America not great, but small, stupid, and mean.

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism.--


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