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Republicans Fold On Epstein Files, But MAGA Media Insist Trump 'Won'

President Donald Trump has spent the last four months trying to tamp down MAGA dissent over his administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case, only to finally fold to congressional demands for more federal records related to the late convicted sex offender. According to some of his most sycophantic supporters on right-wing TV, everything is going according to plan.

“Trump’s calling their bluff on the Epstein files,” Fox News host Laura Ingraham said on Monday night. She then aired footage from earlier in the day in which the president, in a major reversal, said he would sign a bill the House of Representatives is taking up on Tuesday that mandates the release of Justice Department documents related to its sex-trafficking investigations into Epstein.

“Trump’s not hiding anything. He just said he’ll release everything the government has on Epstein," her colleague Jesse Watters crowed on the network’s next hour.

He then touted the House resolution, saying that it gives the DOJ “30 days to release everything they have on the dead pedophile. That includes the flight logs, his connections to powerful people, DOJ and FBI investigation files, and information about his 2008 sweetheart deal.”

Carl Higbie, a host of Fox competitor Newsmax, also got into the act, asking at the top of his broadcast: “Did Trump just pull like a UNO reverse on Democrats over the Epstein files?” He went on to say that “Democrats just got played” by the president saying he’d sign the Epstein bill.

“Now they have to release it,” he continued, “because all 214 Democratic Congress members signed on to the release to force the vote to release the Epstein files — against [House Speaker] Mike Johnson’s wishes, by the way, which was weird. But Trump comes out over the weekend, after months of telling people, ‘Drop it,’ and says, ‘You know what, guys, let’s just get them out there,’ and now no Democrats can hide, because last week they unanimously voted for it.”

If you’re following: Trump didn’t want the Epstein files released; Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) and the Democrats did; Johnson failed to stop House Republicans from supporting the disclosure bill; Trump was about to lose, so he caved; now the records are on track to be released; and according to Ingraham, Watters, and Higbie, that adds up to a win for … Trump?

Portraying Trump’s cave as a masterful strategic gambit requires total contempt for the MAGA audience — but that’s nothing new for either Trump or his right-wing media supporters.

Back in July, the Trump DOJ and FBI roiled the right with a memo repudiating various claims that MAGA influencers — including, in years past, the current top leadership of the FBI — had offered about the disgraced financier’s life and death. Ever since then, the president has been trying to get his followers to focus elsewhere, and his zealous supporters at outlets like Fox have been happy to help.

But as new document releases provided more evidence of Trump’s own former close relationship with Epstein, Democrats and a handful of House Republicans signed on to a discharge petition to force a vote on the Epstein disclosure bill. And after Johnson’s stall tactics and Trump’s lobbying failed, the president reversed himself and got behind the bill he had fought to kill.

Trump’s decision is elsewhere being cast as a “capitulation" and a “debacle.” But within parts of the MAGA bubble, every Trump move has to be a brilliant victory.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters

Lawsuits And Bankruptcy Plague Dr. Phil As His 'Anti-Woke' Channel Goes Broke

After the end of his popular daytime talk show in 2023, Dr. Phil McGraw launched a right-wing media network, and a new report from Slate documents a network in chaos, with suspended programming and bankruptcy filings.

In the November 2023 press release announcing the launch of Merit Street Media, McGraw proclaimed that “American families and our core values are under attack.” The release also echoed many other gripes from now-President Donald Trump and other conservatives, such as the U.S. having “out-of-control immigration.”

Since the networks’ launch, Merit failed to attract viewers, averaging just 24,000 primetime viewers in 2024. In August of that year, the network laid off dozens of staffers. And that October, McGraw spoke at Trump’s racist rally at Madison Square Garden, promoting the network during his speech—to no avail.

The Professional Bull Riders league, which had an agreement to provide content to Merit, quit the network last November. And this July, the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

Merit is also involved in lawsuits with right-wing religious broadcaster Trinity Broadcasting Network, with both parties accusing the other of deceptive business practices.

McGraw and Merit tried to translate a pro-MAGA message into financial success. Most notably, McGraw conducted a fawning interview with Trump in August 2024, amid that year’s presidential campaign. The interview gave Trump an opportunity to reiterate numerous conspiracies, including the false claim that he “won the election against [Joe] Biden.”Earlier this year, McGraw rode along with Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents during raids and recorded content for the network.

None of this kept his venture afloat, though. Once again, despite conservative claims that people want products that counter the “woke” ideas of equality and fairness, such things are often failures.

For instance, Target abandoned its diversity efforts after Trump’s return to the White House, and in response, the company lost millions in sales and required a management shakeup. And Elon Musk’s Tesla has seen truck sales drop after the electric vehicle company’s leader attached himself to the Trump administration.Earlier this year, McGraw rode along with Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents during raids and recorded content for the network.

For instance, Target abandoned its diversity efforts after Trump’s return to the White House, and in response, the company lost millions in sales and required a management shakeup. And Elon Musk’s Tesla has seen truck sales drop after the electric vehicle company’s leader attached himself to the Trump administration.By contrast, ventures seen as favoring “woke” values have often been a hit.

Conservatives complained that this year’s Superman film was described by director James Gunn as pro-immigrant—but the film is the third-highest-grossing theatrical release of the year.

After megastar Taylor Swift endorsed Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris last year, Trump said he hated her and that the “Woke singer” was “NO LONGER HOT.” However, Swift’s newest album, The Life of a Showgirl, smashed records.

She is clearly no Dr. Phil.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos

Trump Has Intimidated MAGA Outlets As Epstein Scandal Boils Over

President Donald Trump has succeeded in getting his media supporters to stop talking about his old friend Jeffrey Epstein, the deceased sex offender and financier. Prominent MAGA media figures ignored a wave of Epstein news on Tuesday, signaling that Trump’s pressure campaign has paid off with their silence — even as (or, perhaps, because) his own corrupt involvement in the story has grown.

The initial resistance but eventual submission of Fox stars, Newsmax hosts, and MAGA influencers demonstrates that the Trumpist right’s only defining principle is that the president is good and his position at any time is the correct one — everything else can be tossed over the side at his command.

MAGA media figures lashed out at the Trump administration in July after the FBI and Justice Department released a memo which debunked foundational claims of the right’s Epstein narrative. Trump, who has a host of connections to Epstein, responded to that criticism by demanding his allies move on from the story and offering up new common enemies for them to focus on instead.

Meanwhile, Trump’s DOJ made a series of shady moves related to the case. First, the DOJ attorney who successfully prosecuted Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell in 2022 was fired. Then the department’s No. 2, former Trump personal lawyer Todd Blanche, interviewed Maxwell in prison with clemency from her old friend the president all but dangling over the conversation. The Trump administration subsequently transferred Maxwell to a minimum-security prison camp and released transcript and audio from the interview, in which the convicted sex trafficker asserted that she never saw Trump “in any inappropriate setting.”

Nothing to see here!

On Tuesday, members of Congress returned to Washington following the summer recess and brought with them a passel of Epstein news:

The House Oversight Committee met behind closed doors with six women who say they were sexually trafficked by Epstein.
Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) filed a discharge petition to force a vote on his bill with Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) requiring the release of files related to Epstein that have not been publicly released.
House Oversight Chairman James Comer (R-KY), in an apparent effort to forestall momentum around the bill, put 34,000 pages of Epstein files online — but as reporters and committee Democrats quickly noted, the documents included redactions and the overwhelming majority had already been released.
Massie accused Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) of orchestrating a cover-up of the Epstein story.

The influx of Epstein news, combined with a press conference on Wednesday featuring 10 of the disgraced financier’s victims, led Politico’s Playbook to declare this “the story Trump can’t kill.”

But while mainstream news outlets are providing plenty of coverage of the Epstein case, many Republican voters are likely not hearing about any of it. The propagandists they listen to prioritize remaining in Trump’s good graces over everything else, and they are largely following his command to sweep Epstein and his victims under the rug.

Fox host Laura Ingraham signaled she planned to cover the Epstein story, teasing the Oversight Committee’s document release at the top of her Tuesday broadcast. “We'll bring you any breaking details as they come,” she said.

But Ingraham never returned to the story. And her prime-time colleagues Jesse Watters, Sean Hannity, and Greg Gutfeld did not mention Epstein that night. On Wednesday, while CNN, MSNBC, and a host of other networks carried the press conference with Epstein’s victims live, Fox instead aired a few minutes of remarks from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) before cutting away. The Trump administration even helped the network counterprogram, providing an appointee for Fox to interview.

Fox isn’t the only MAGA outlet giving the Epstein story short shrift.

Newsmax’s prime-time hosts — including Greg Kelly, whose show took a bizarre pro-Maxwell turn last month — also did not mention Epstein on Tuesday.

And several MAGA commentators who initially criticized the Trump administration’s handling of the Epstein story after the release of the DOJ/FBI memo did not mention Epstein on Tuesday on their X accounts, including Tim Pool, Laura Loomer, Charlie Kirk, and Jack Posobiec.

Trump told them to stop caring about Epstein and his victims, and after some initial resistance, they’ve done it. Instead, the MAGA right’s most prominent figures are focusing on stories the president wants covered in the way he wants them discussed. They are spending their energy greasing the skids for Trump’s federal invasion of Chicago and praising the military strike he ordered on a vessel the administration claims was carrying Venezuelan gang members and drugs.

Perhaps the stories Epstein’s victims tell at Wednesday’s press conference will force these people to find their consciences. But for now, it appears any effort to inform Republican voters about developments in the Epstein story will run up against the reality that their preferred news providers have dropped the story at Trump’s insistence.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Leavitt Delivers White House Platform To A Plagiarist And Fabricator

The New York Times reports Podcaster Benny Johnson has been a regular in the Oval Office since President Donald Trump and his aides invited right-wing entertainers into the press room. What’s less regular is his honesty.

The day after Trump announced the federal takeover of law enforcement in Washington, the White House invited Johnson to the press briefing, where he told Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt and the rest of the press corps about recording murders on a camera outside his home, and that his “house was set ablaze in an arson” attack.

Claims by critics that Washington wasn’t dangerous, he said, were “lies.

But the Times reports police records showing no murders on Johnson’s block since at least 2017. And his home was not burned. It was a neighbor’s house that caught fire, according to the city’s fire department in 2021.

“Such details didn’t stop Ms. Leavitt from leapfrogging off his comments to promote the president’s federalization of Washington’s law enforcement,” writes Times reporter Ken Bensinger.

Johnson’s history does not suggest honesty, Bensinger adds. He got his start in media in 2011 at right-of-center website The Blaze before jumping to BuzzFeed News in 2012, where he was fired two years later, after editors discovered plagiarizing in 41 of his articles. Johnson apologized, but the Times reports three years later, his plagiarism continued at conservative news site the Independent Journal Review. He was suspended and then demoted after assigning an article that falsely implied that Obama had influenced a federal judge’s ruling that adversely affected Trump. Johnson also had to retract an article that falsely attributed information to Antifa.

And then, last fall, the Times reports, federal prosecutors revealed charges against two Kremlin operatives who had paid $10 million to a company called Tenet Media to produce video content as part of an influence operation. Johnson was one of the influencers contracted by Tenet to create that content.

He described himself as an unwitting victim of the Russian scheme.

More recently, the Times reports, Johnson gained nearly three million new subscribers to his YouTube channel from April to July of this year, while also showing a suspicious drop in total monthly views of his videos by more than 40 million — an overt suggestion of manipulation.

“Clearly we’re dealing with an administration that’s far more focused on narratives than truth, and this conduct is consistent with that,” Freedom of the Press Foundation Director Seth Stern told the Times. “It is awful that real journalists who attempt to report real news and feel constrained by the pursuit of truth and don’t make stuff up are no longer able to get the access they once had.”

Read the New York Times report at this link.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

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Smart. Sharp. Funny. Fearless

Republicans Fold On Epstein Files, But MAGA Media Insist Trump 'Won'

Lawsuits And Bankruptcy Plague Dr. Phil As His 'Anti-Woke' Channel Goes Broke

Trump Has Intimidated MAGA Outlets As Epstein Scandal Boils Over

Leavitt Delivers White House Platform To A Plagiarist And Fabricator

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