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MAGA Propaganda: Trump's Fox News 'Cabinet' Urges Him To Escalate Iran War

As President Donald Trump prepares to meet with top aides to discuss next steps in the Iran war, his Fox News Cabinet is advising him to escalate.

Influential pundits on the MAGA propaganda channel are telling the president that he currently holds “the cards” and are urging him to use U.S. military might to seize Iran’s uranium stockpile, force open the Strait of Hormuz, assassinate the country’s leaders, and overturn its regime.

Fox has played a key role in getting the U.S. into the quagmire in Iran, with the network’s hosts (who often double as off-the-books presidential advisers) counseling him to launch the campaign in February. They continued to cheer him on over the following weeks, even as Iran’s regime remained intact and in control of its nuclear stockpile, its seizure of the Strait of Hormuz sent fuel prices soaring, public support for the war cratered, and analysts issued dire warnings of U.S. strategic defeat.

With Trump’s ceasefire with Iran failing to produce a more permanent agreement to end the conflict, the president has returned to saber-rattling and reportedly plans to meet with “his top national security team in the Situation Room on Tuesday to discuss military options.” And Fox, which often plays an influential role in shaping Trump’s worldview through its coverage, is already banging the drums for a return to war, telling its viewers — which on any given day can include the president — that the war is a success and that Trump is in control of the situation and can easily escalate without risk.

Brian Kilmeade, one of the network’s most prominent hawks and a co-host of the president’s favorite morning show, Fox & Friends, on Monday morning proposed a series of simultaneous U.S. strikes against Iranian targets.

He called for the U.S. military to “open up the strait,” “grab the uranium,” and “target these bad actors that have been insincerely negotiating with our group,” an apparent reference to assassinating Iran’s diplomatic team. Kilmeade added that “the best chance for no casualties is you open up four different fronts immediately, simultaneously.”

Fox correspondent Trey Yingst stressed on the same broadcast that Trump’s strategy has put him in control of the situation and left Iranian leaders desperate for a deal to avoid further U.S. strikes.

“President Trump holds the cards here, according to regional officials, who say that his strategic patience has given him not only the upper hand on the battlefield but also at the negotiating table,” Yingst said. “Now the Iranians … are grasping at straws. They are trying to find some path forward that would give them an agreement at least temporarily to enter into deeper negotiations to avoid such a bombing campaign.”

He added that Iran’s economic situation is “truly dire” and its officials “are having to try to sell a reality to the people that doesn’t exist. They were defeated militarily during Operation Epic Fury.”

And KT McFarland — a former Fox personality turned Trump national security adviser — even suggested during her Fox & Friends appearance that China would hesitate to engage the U.S. militarily because the U.S. success in Iran has shown them to be “no match for America militarily.”

“If you are the Chinese leader, you’ve got to look at what the United States is just pulling off in Iran,” she said. “The unbelievable precision, the capability, how everything seems to work together. We seem to have done the miraculous.”

Likewise, Mark Levin, the nasal-voiced Middle East hawk who Trump has urged supporters to watch for his Iran commentary, spent the weekend urging the president to push for regime change in Iran.

On Saturday night, Levin hosted retired Gen. Keith Kellogg, a former Fox contributor Trump named as a special envoy in 2024 who has called for “putting boots on the ground” in Iran and for the U.S. to seize its territory “like the Romans did” in Carthage.

After Levin called Trump “the only president that's put his foot down firmly and said no,” Kellogg added that “there's been eight presidents since the revolution in Iran, and only one, Donald Trump, has done something about it.” He then called for Trump to seize Iran’s Kharg Island and Qeshm Island to force open the strait.

“I would just say, go full in, get rid of this regime, whatever it’s going to take out there, because as long as you’ve got the theocratic leaders, as long you’ve got mullahs running that government, you’re going to have this problem, not just today, tomorrow, a month from now, but five or 10 years for the next presidency or our grandchildren, or children as well,” Kellogg added.

“All right, I appreciate that,” Levin replied. “I agree with that. And we’re there. Let’s get it over with already. And what do I mean by that? Destroy the regime, help the people, so they can help themselves.”

After a similar segment on Sunday night’s show featuring right-wing commentator Josh Hammer, Levin again said the U.S. needs to “eliminate that regime, because it’s the only way to prevent them once and for all from getting a nuclear weapon, tomorrow, 10 years from now, 20 years from now.”

Levin followed that up by interviewing right-wing commentator Jim Hanson, who served in the U.S. Army special forces, about how the U.S. could, as Hanson put it, “slow roll an internal unrest” in Iran “until the regime finally gets overthrown from within.” Levin suggested that this would be necessary because the Iranian regime could not be trusted to follow through on any deal Trump made.

“We have a deal, whatever the deal is, let's say it's the greatest deal since sliced bread,” Levin pontificated. “Are future presidents, future Congresses, the American people in the future, do you think we're going to be willing to enforce a deal if they break the deal, which I think they obviously will when the president leaves?”

While Trump Accuses News Outlets Of 'TREASON,' Fox Models MAGA War Coverage

While President Donald Trump accuses news outlets of committing “virtual TREASON” by producing reporting that suggests the United States is losing his war against Iran, the president’s loyal Fox News propagandists keep telling him that he’s doing a great job, saying he’s on the verge of victory, and suggesting he can fail only by backing down.

Ten weeks after U.S. and Israeli forces attacked Iran — and nine weeks after Trump demanded “unconditional surrender” of its leaders — Iran’s regime remains intact and in control of both its nuclear stockpile and the Strait of Hormuz, a crucial route for global trade whose closure has spiked domestic fuel prices. In The Atlantic, Brookings Institution senior fellow Robert Kagan wrote Sunday that Trump’s decisions have put the country on the brink of a “total defeat” whose consequences “can neither be repaired nor ignored,” and he noted that “any resolution other than America’s effective surrender holds enormous risks.”

With his war at a standstill and the Iranians rejecting his demands for a negotiated settlement, the president has repeatedly lashed out at the press for undermining the effort by producing “treasonous” reporting — an attack he resumed on Tuesday afternoon.

“When the Fake News says that the Iranian enemy is doing well, Militarily, against us, it’s virtual TREASON in that it is such a false, and even preposterous, statement,” he wrote on Truth Social. “They are aiding and abetting the enemy! All it does is give Iran false hope when none should exist. These are American cowards that are rooting against our Country."

Recent reporting suggests that Trump and his allies have been lying about how successful the war has been.

Minutes after he posted that remark, The New York Times published a report revealing that contrary to the Trump administration’s claims, classified intelligence analyses reveal that “Iran has regained access to most of its missile sites, launchers and underground facilities."

Earlier this month, The Washington Post determined that satellite imagery shows “Iranian airstrikes have damaged or destroyed at least 228 structures or pieces of equipment at U.S. military sites across the Middle East,” far more destruction than the administration has publicly acknowledged, while Reuters reported that U.S. intelligence indicates the war has not impacted Iran’s ability to develop a nuclear weapon, one of Trump’s putative rationales for starting it.

Meanwhile, NBC News reported that Trump abruptly canceled his “Project Freedom” plan to force the reopening of the Strait after Persian Gulf allies objected.

But on Fox this week, the hawkish sycophants who encouraged Trump to launch the war in the first place are still telling him he’s doing everything right.

Mark Levin: Trump’s war prevented a second Holocaust and a nuclear attack on America

Mark Levin, the nasal-voiced Fox host and sometime presidential adviser whose program Trump has urged the public to watch, devoted a lengthy and increasingly loud monologue on Sunday’s broadcast to lavishing the president with praise for launching the war and averting a second holocaust.

Levin denounced the Iranian regime and the war’s critics, claiming the latter “hate America and Israel so much they'd rather tens of thousands more Iranians die horrible deaths than see our country defeat this homicidal regime” and “care not at all, not one whit, that they are not only giving aid and comfort to this horrific enemy, but they are encouraging this enemy to slaughter, to execute, to rape, to torture, and to do what homicidal regimes do, because they know the enemy, that these people are in the bag.”

After urging the U.S. to arm and organize a Kurdish resistance to the regime, Levin praised the president, saying that while “humanity allowed the Holocaust to occur,” Trump and his administration had put “this Iranian Nazi regime … on its back."

“The only president with the courage, the wisdom, the fortitude to confront this Nazi-like regime, this mass-murdering, nuclear-obsessed Islamist enemy, the world’s enemy, is Donald Trump,” he said. “And unlike other such circumstances around the world where genocide is taking place — and as a practical matter, we can’t get involved in all of them — in Iran, we have the opportunity to do something about it,” he continued, calling Iran “the biggest concentration camp in human history right now.”

Levin went on to host Fox contributor Newt Gingrich, who said the Iranian regime was “fully as evil as Adolf Hitler was or Joseph Stalin was” and the war was necessary to prevent Iran from deploying a nuclear weapon “in your neighborhood,” and Fox senior strategic analyst and retired Gen. Jack Keane, who urged the president to revive Project Freedom, “return to combat operations,” “put Kharg Island on the table,” and implement an intelligence operation to overturn the Iranian regime.

Sean Hannity: Iran’s leaders should “get out while they can”

Sean Hannity, the president’s chief mouthpiece at Fox, said on Monday’s show that Iran’s leaders are on the verge of fleeing the country.

After parroting Trump’s statement earlier that day that the U.S.-Iranian ceasefire is “on life support,” Hannity cited unspecified “reports tonight that Iran's very fractured fourth-tier leadership, they may be planning an exit to Russia and Vladimir Putin.”

“Now, if you recall, on this program before Epic Fury, there were reports the supreme leader, other leaders were planning a move, that they had planes with cash and currency on a tarmac ready to go,” he continued. “I said multiple times, my advice to all of them is to get out while they can. The supreme leader, all his top leadership, and then the next tier and pretty much the third tier, they're all dead. They should have listened to me then. My same advice applies here.”

Hannity then brought on Fox correspondent Kevin Corke for a report on the war, telling him, “I think they're just lashing out in utter complete paranoia, but this report that they might be planning an exit is intriguing to me.”

“Yeah, intriguing indeed,” Corke replied. “And I salute you. You are spot-on. You gave him great advice. Of course, they didn't listen and it could cost all of them.”

Hannity was off the air on Tuesday night as he traveled with the president on his state visit to China.

Fox & Friends: “Are we on the five-yard line? Of course, but the president had to take this action.”

The co-hosts of Fox & Friends, Trump’s favorite morning show, have spent the week alternating between assuring their viewers that victory is at hand and pushing for risky escalations to the war.

Ainsley Earhart on Monday floated a military effort to seize Iran’s nuclear stockpile. “The question is do we go in and get the enriched uranium? … Do the Israelis do it? Do the Americans do it?” she asked.

Lawrence Jones casually responded that such a mission — which experts say would constitute an immensely complex and risky endeavor — could be a “joint operation,” before pivoting back to how successful the war has been.

He criticized retired Adm. William McRaven’s declaration the previous day that the U.S. is “not really that much better off” than it was before starting war with Iran. “There is no doubt in my mind, taking out the ayatollah, a lot of their leadership, has put us in a better position,” said Jones. “Are we on the five-yard line? Of course, but the president had to take this action.” (If the metaphorical language seems confusing, consider that Jones is operating within a worldview where it’s unfathomable that we’re farther from the war’s endzone than five yards.)

On Tuesday, the trio stressed how important launching the war had been and praised Trump for carrying it out.

In one segment, Jones said that “we’ve been dealing with this threat for 47 years,” criticized news coverage in the face of the “phenomenal” military operation, and concluded, “I'm glad that the president has the will to deal with this."

“Don't forget the purpose of this,” Earhardt chimed in. “It is to get the enriched uranium away from them because they are planning a nuclear -- they want to have a nuclear weapon. What would they do with that? Well, they yell in the streets, publicly, death to America and wipe Israel off the face of the map. That's their ideology. That's how they think."

“They are not thinking clearly like Americans do,” she added. “They hate us with a passion, with a vengeance. And they have the capability, possibly, of building this nuclear weapon. So the president — that was why the president decided to begin this conflict.”

Brian Kilmeade added that Iran causes “chaos in the region” before adding, “For those people who think the president is boxed in and frustrated, I’m telling you, he gets coolest under pressure. He does not feel it at all.”

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters

Trump Says 'Watch Mark Levin' As Fox Host Urged US Troops To Seize Iran Uranium

Fox News host Mark Levin suggested the U.S. military should seize Iran’s uranium — a risky escalation experts say would place troops under fire on Iranian soil for days — during a Saturday night program that President Donald Trump had urged his supporters to watch for its discussion of “the importance of hitting Iran, HARD!!!"

Under normal circumstances, the nasal-voiced screeds a sycophantic Fox news host yells on his taped weekend program wouldn’t matter for much. But Trump is often persuaded by what the network’s MAGA propagandists tell him through his television, he’s previously leaned on council from Levin with regard to Iran in particular, and earlier on Saturday, the president urged his supporters to tune in to Levin’s show that evening.

“Watch Mark Levin interview of Brilliant Marc Thiessen tonight at 8:00 P.M., on FoxNews,” Trump posted to Truth Social. “Will discuss the importance of hitting Iran, HARD!!!”

Trump’s instruction for supporters to watch Fox discourse on the prospect of further escalations in Iran comes as the war approaches a flashpoint. Iran’s regime is intact and it has successfully closed the Strait of Hormuz, a strategic victory that threatens global trade. With Trump’s initial prediction of a four-to-five-week war in doubt, U.S. troops are streaming toward the region and preparing for weeks of ground operations. The Pentagon has reportedly prepared a list of purported “final blow” options that include seizing Iran’s Kharg Island oil terminal and extracting Iran’s uranium, even as Trump himself is reportedly “getting a little bored” and “wants to move on” from Iran, as a senior White House official told MS NOW.

Fox’s pro-Trump hosts are trying to influence the president’s next move. Laura Ingraham warned last week that further escalation could trigger “cascading problems for the region” and “political problems for the president,” while Sean Hannity suggested that the war is all but over and Jesse Watters said any further action would amount to a “knockout.”

Saturday’s broadcast illuminates Levin’s position among the network’s biggest hawks. And he appears to be showering Trump with praise in an effort to get the president on board with his latest escalation scheme. Levin touted Trump’s “enormous intelligence,” claimed his “victory” against Iran is “absolutely incredible,” and portrayed the war’s critics as merely Trump-haters.

The Fox-Trump feedback loop has in recent months played a role in the president’s decisions to send White House border czar Tom Homan to oversee immigration enforcement in Minnesota; prioritize the SAVE Act over all other legislation; order the deployment of ICE agents to airports; and start the war against Iran. Will it now help trigger an incredibly risky military operation?

Levin: We need ground troops in Iran because “we’ve got to get the uranium”

After spending the bulk of Saturday’s monologue praising Trump’s war and denouncing its critics (described below), Levin came to the point: He wants the president to deploy ground troops in Iran to seize Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile.

“Why would we need troops on the ground?” he explained. “Well, there's a lot of reasons, and we wouldn't need 300,000 of them.”

“We've got to get the uranium — if it cannot be destroyed, if it cannot be altered, we've got to get it,” Levin said. “That's why I am reading in the paper, we are talking about the 82nd Airborne, we're talking about these various special forces and the various military services and so forth.”

“He's not talking about sending regular Army and infantry in by the hundreds of thousands — the men he's talking about, the units he is talking about, they are specialized,” Levin continued. “And you know what else? I remember from my days in the Reagan administration, many of them are trained for a moment like this to try and secure enriched uranium. Many have been trained for moments like this.”

Thiessen, the Washington Post columnist and Fox contributor whom Trump described as “Brilliant,” likewise argued that “if we don't get that enriched uranium, and they want to get back at us for what we've done, the easiest way to do it would be to get it to al-Qaida and let them use it for a dirty bomb.”

“So we have got to get what Donald Trump correctly calls the nuclear dust before this operation is done,” Thiessen concluded.

The Wall Street Journal’s description of an operation to extract nearly 1,000 pounds of nuclear material buried in the middle of a hostile country during a shooting war does not sound as easy as Levin and Thiessen made it out to be. The paper reported:

Teams of U.S. forces would need to fly to the sites, likely under fire from Iranian surface-to-air missiles and drones. Once on site, combat troops would need to secure perimeters so that engineers with excavating equipment could search through debris and check for mines and booby traps.
The extraction of the material would likely need to be conducted by an elite special operations team specially trained to remove radioactive material from a conflict zone. The highly enriched uranium is likely contained in 40 to 50 special cylinders that resemble scuba tanks. They would need to be put into transportation casks to protect against accidents. That could fill several trucks, said Richard Nephew, a senior research scholar at Columbia University and a former nuclear negotiator with Iran.
Unless an airfield was available, a makeshift one would need to be set up to bring equipment in and take the nuclear material out. The entire operation would take days or even a week to complete, experts said.

Trump “hasn’t made a decision on whether to give the order” and is “considering the danger to U.S. troops,” but “remains generally open to the idea,” the Journal reports.

More open, perhaps, after hearing the pitch from Levin and Thiessen.

Levin: Trump has “enormous intelligence,” his Iran “victory” is “absolutely incredible”

Before urging Trump to send U.S. ground troops to invade Iran, Levin began his Saturday monologue by offering fulsome praise for the war of choice he had urged the president to start.

“I've been thinking about the war with Iran,” he began. “I like to call it a military operation. I actually like to call it a peace mission, because that's what it is, and how incredible it is, and the magnitude of this victory. It's not a final victory, but this victory up to this point is incredible, absolutely incredible.”

Levin meandered through his justification for the war, denouncing President Barack Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, which he described as “an agreement that would ensure they get a nuclear weapon,” and comparing U.S. military deaths during the Iran war with those during other U.S. conflicts dating back to the Korean War as well as fatalities from murder and fentanyl overdoses.

He ultimately claimed that Iran could have turned its enriched uranium for a “dirty bomb” and then employed terrorists to detonate it in a U.S. city. “So what the president is doing is monumental in terms of protecting the American people,” Levin explained.

The host concluded that “we're in good hands” with Trump “because he's a man with enormous intelligence, enormous common sense. He's not an ideologue. He doesn't run around with slogans. He is prudential. He looks at the facts, he looks at the challenge, and he's dealing with it.”

Thiessen likewise gushed over the president’s war.

“We're about halfway through this thing,” Thiessen claimed, “and when this is all over, this is going to go down in history as possibly the greatest military campaign the United States has waged since the American Revolution.”

Levin: War critics “aren’t serious people,” they “are people who just oppose Trump”

Levin finds his own arguments so compelling that he can’t imagine why anyone would disagree with them.

Pointing to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and recently resigned former Trump intelligence official Joe Kent, Levin commented, “These aren't serious people with serious disagreements. These aren't serious people with substantive knowledge that's different than it was before. No, no, no. These are people who just oppose Donald Trump. That's the truth.”

He later complained that Schumer, “the conga line of Democrats,” and “the woke Reich neofascist isolationists” were giving Iran “the benefit of the doubt.”

“Why would you give a terrorist regime that slaughtered Americans and is the biggest promoter of terrorism the benefit of the doubt?” he whined.

Thiessen likewise told Levin that the Democrats are “rooting for defeat,” adding, “There are people in this country who hate Donald Trump more than they hate the Iranian regime that just massacred 32,000 people in their streets.”

That’s what Trump wanted his followers to tune-in for: A totally one-sided dismissal of the Iran war’s critics in favor of continued escalation in an aimless conflict that's already spiraled out of control.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters

MAGA Debate Over Iran Conflict Degenerates Into 'Micropenis' Flame War

Megyn Kelly, the former Fox News Host turned podcaster, is in the business of getting attention. This week, it worked. She got the attention of the President of the United States in her attack on fellow conservative talker Mark Levin, not to mention the support of fellow bomb thrower Marjorie Taylor Greene.

At the center of the attack is the question of the size of Mark Levin's member.

Levin is for the war with Iran, Kelly is against it. But they aren't debating the war like we teach children to do, using their words to make a point rather than calling names. No, the way you get attention is by going on the attack.

"Poor Megyn Kelly. An emotionally unhinged, lewd, and petulant wreck. She's completely revealed and destroyed herself," Levin wrote in on social media post on Sunday. "She's everything people say she is, but much worse. Never an intelligent, thoughtful, or substantive comment. Utterly toxic."

Kelly responded to Levin, calling him "micropenis Mark," writing that he "thinks he has the monopoly on lewd."

"He tweets about me obsessively in the crudest, nastiest terms possible," Kelly wrote. "Literally more than some stalkers I've had arrested. He doesn't like it when women like me fight back. Bc of his micropenis."

That's when Trump got involved. He took to social media on Sunday to defend Levin and attack Kelly.

"Mark Levin, a truly Great American Patriot, is somewhat under siege by other people with far less Intellect, Capability and Love for our Country. Mark is Tough, Strong and Brilliant. When you hear others unfairly attack Mark, remember that they are jealous and angry Human Beings, whose "sway" is much less than the Public understands, and will, now that they know where I stand, rapidly diminish."

Megyn was not cowed. I'm sure she was delighted. The exchange was getting lots of attention. So she piled on. Kelly wrote on Monday that Levin is "such a SMALL MAN he had to go beg the president for a pat on the head (in the middle of a war!) to make himself feel better about ... well, you know ... Just like all feckless, weakling bullies Micro can dish it out but he can't take it. After just one post putting the so-called 'great one' in his place, he ran crying to Daddy," she wrote.

Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), once a staunch Trump ally, offered her support to Kelly, writing: "I wholeheartedly support Megyn Kelly telling the world that Mark Levin has a micropenis. It's the most deserved insult and I don't care if it's vulgar. And Trump's gigantic defense of Levin only enraged the base more. People are DONE. MAGA destroyed by micropenis Mark Levin."

These are our opinion leaders? Our public intellectuals? The people getting all the attention in what should be a serious discussion of our goals and our mission in Iran? This is what MAGA has devolved to.

And in the midst of this, you have the president and his FCC chair complaining about how the mainstream media is covering the war and threatening broadcast licenses. The mainstream media is a model of restraint compared to the screamers on the right. The threats clearly violate the First Amendment. If the coverage comes out to be mixed, at best, that's because this administration has so completely failed at messaging this war: stating a rationale, defining the engagement, outlining the endgame. Theirs is an invitation to skeptical coverage.

The way to deal with that skeptical coverage is to answer the underlying questions about mission and duration, not to blame the people who are asking. But MAGA is too busy throwing mud at each other to answer the fundamental questions about this war that still have not been addressed. President Donald Trump has no one to blame but his own friends for the coverage he doesn't like. They deserve it.

Susan Estrich is a celebrated feminist legal scholar, the first female president of the Harvard Law Review, and the first woman to run a U.S. presidential campaign. She has written eight books.

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

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