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Fox Hosts Urge Flooding Iran With Small Arms To Incite Regime Change (Or Civil War)

Fox Hosts Urge Flooding Iran With Small Arms To Incite Regime Change (Or Civil War)

Fox News hosts Sean Hannity, Brian Kilmeade, and Jesse Watters have suggested flooding Iran with small arms to incite regime change, a reckless proposal that even some of their guests have rejected.

The United States and Israel last week launched an unprovoked war on Iran with shifting stated goals, one of which is regime change — or, perhaps more accurately, regime collapse. That could take several forms, including a mass uprising of the population in Iran or possibly the introduction of proxy forces, such as Kurdish militias, whom the CIA is reportedly working to arm. (The United States has a decadeslong history of encouraging Kurds across several countries to rise up and then betraying them.)

The risks of such a development are numerous, the most obvious being the threat of sending Iran into a spiral of violence that could turn into a civil war like in Syria after the Arab Spring or Iraq during the U.S. occupation. The United States poured weapons into both of those countries, helping to fuel the violence and worsen the internal conflicts.

Although such an outcome would appear disastrous on its face, there is ample evidence that the United States and Israel want to turn Iran from a regional power into a failed state incapable of countering their influence. Flooding the country with weapons could do that, and Fox News personalities are leading the charge.

Host Sean Hannity is the network’s most vocal supporter of the idea, both on his Fox prime-time show and on his radio program, which airs on Premiere Radio Networks.

“I already know” that arming Iranians is “part of the plan,” Hannity said on his March 2 radio show, telling a caller that “if you have millions of Iranians that, in fact, do have weapons and they rise up against the remnants of this regime — and there's not a lot — or for those Revolutionary Guard forces that will not put their weapons down, there's only one way to get rid of them.” (Whether Hannity’s claim to “already know” President Donald Trump’s war plans was bluster or not, the administration has been leaking insider information to its allies in right-wing media.)

Hannity returned to the topic several times during that show. “The Iranian people need to have elections, and they need to get armed, and they need to be able to fight back” against the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, he said. Later, he added, “I’m hoping that the students, the people in Iran, I’m hoping that they get the arms for any remaining Revolutionary Guard forces that won't lay down their weaponry.”

“You can't win a revolution with a slingshot — at some point they are going to need to be armed to take out the remaining loyalists,” he said the following day.

That evening, Hannity broached the idea on his Fox show during an interview with network contributor and retired Army Gen. Jack Keane, one of the war’s most vocal cheerleaders outside the Trump administration.

“Do we need to arm the civilians that had taken to the streets, that were being mowed down by the tens of thousands?” Hannity asked.

“In terms of arming the people themselves, I would pause on doing that,” Keane said. “I wouldn’t rush into that.” He added, “I don’t think just arming them and creating that — upgunning that level of violence is what we need.”

Seemingly unsatisfied with that answer, Hannity later in the same show asked retired Army Gen. David Petraeus, who oversaw the arming of U.S.-backed “death squads” in Iraq during the so-called surge, what he thought of the idea.

“Should part of the plan be to arm the people that have been slaughtered on the streets that were looking for freedom and change, so that it won’t take any American or Israeli forces?” Hannity asked. “I’ve got to believe there is going to be holdovers that are loyal to the former regime.”

“Well, I agree with my old boss and mentor and friend, Gen. Jack Keane, who earlier said that he’s not certain about that given there’s no organization there.”

Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade has floated the idea too.

“I just wonder at some point is the CIA or Mossad going to be able to arm the people?” Kilmeade said on March 3. “If you arm the people so they're not slaughtered in the streets, that would begin to get the IRGC’s attention.”

“We've got to find a way to arm that population and open up these prisons,” Kilmeade said on March 4, referring to Kurds in Iran.

His colleague Jesse Watters made a similar suggestion.

“Trump has even been on the phone with the Kurds," Watters said on March 3. “We might be able to arm them and use them as boots on the ground.” (Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, formerly a co-host of Fox & Friends’ weekend edition, said on March 4 that “none of our objectives are premised on the support of the arming of any particular force.”)

The Trump administration has done such a poor job explaining its war on Iran that even right-wing media allies are having a hard time articulating the conflict’s larger strategy and goals. Predicting the direction any war will take is a fool’s errand, but it doesn’t take a crystal ball to know that flooding Iran with weapons is a recipe for disaster and potentially state collapse. For Fox News hosts, that appears to be an acceptable outcome.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters

Fake Journalist Nick Shirley Recycles A Debunked 'Voter Fraud' Narrative

Fake Journalist Nick Shirley Recycles A Debunked 'Voter Fraud' Narrative

A new video by MAGA provocateur Nick Shirley purports to expose voter fraud in California, but in fact it’s little more than a repackaging of false narratives spread over a decade ago by right-wing operative James O'Keefe. In both cases, the right-wing influencers suggest that fraud could exist without actually exposing any, relying on innuendo and hypotheticals rather than evidence.

O’Keefe created the template for undercover videos meant to expose and embarrass liberal organizations and causes. His old videos, like Shirley’s new ones, were frequently debunked in real time, but they nevertheless served a role in providing fuel to conservative content creators hungry to stoke outrage about perceived liberal excesses. Shirley’s repackaging shouldn’t be surprising given the incentives for young, MAGA-aligned influencers to make a name for themselves in a crowded field. But the original claims didn't provoke any policy changes — reasonably so, given that they were bogus — so Shirley's repackaging has little to offer beyond a hope that new consumers take the bait.

Shirley gained prominence in recent months following a so-called investigation into fraud in Minneapolis day care centers. Although there were some real instances of fraud within the city’s social services, local news and prosecutors had already exposed and investigated many instances of wrong-doing. Still, The New York Times referred to Shirley as having “spurred the federal crackdown on Minneapolis.”

Once the right-wing’s most identifiable creator of sting-style — often deliberately misleading — exposés, O’Keefe’s star has since somewhat fallen. In 2010, O’Keefe founded Project Veritas, and over more than a decade the organization produced videos meant to discredit perceived liberal organizations, often through tactics such as manipulation and deceptive editing. According to Rolling Stone, in 2023 O’Keefe “either left or was pushed out of his own company … depending on whom you ask.” He has since tried to reestablish himself in the right-wing media ecosystem, including by creating an award in 2025 for the so-called citizen journalists who have followed in his footsteps. The first recipient was Nick Shirley.

Shirley, like O’Keefe, is promoting the possibility of fraud that he hasn't actually found

Shirley’s video is one of many from right-wing influencers, such as Benny Johnson, decrying supposedly rampant voter fraud in California, and it includes many examples and myths that have already been debunked. One of the most prominent narratives in Shirley’s video, which was already debunked when Johnson spread it, is that voters whose registrations list central locations, like an abandoned building, as an address are a clear sign of fraud. However, as Democracy Docket notes, California law “gives people experiencing homelessness the flexibility to use any location to register to vote. As long as unhoused residents can describe the place where they spend most of their time — whether it’s an address, a cross street, or a vacant lot — they can legally list it as their address on their voter registration form.”

Another one of Shirley's key examples of “fraud” in the video is a previously reported story about a woman who registered her dog to vote and cast two ballots for him in 2021 and 2022, only one of which was counted. The woman, a registered Republican, self-reported her crimes and is facing six years in prison.

The premise of Shirley’s 20-minute video is that there could be fraud in California without stricter voter ID laws and “with the state receiving millions of illegal migrants, the opportunities for fraud now are even higher.” California does require a valid ID or Social Security number when registering to vote or when voting for the first time after registering by mail, and extensive research has shown that noncitizen voting in U.S. elections is exceedingly rare and extremely unlikely to impact elections. Yet Shirley’s video has been picked up by others in right-wing media, including livestreamer Tim Pool, former FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino, and conspiracy theory website The Gateway Pundit.

Had someone just awoken from a decade-long coma, they might find these types of claims quite familiar. In 2012, O’Keefe attempted to show how easy it was to commit voter fraud in a state without strict voter ID laws via a video titled “Dead people receive ballots in NH primary,” which claims that conspirators could use the names of the deceased to cast fraudulent ballots to steal an election. But, as Media Matters noted at the time, the video “actually demonstrates just how difficult it would be to pull off such a plot.”

Although it’s true that making sure ballot rolls are accurate is important, O’Keefe’s stunt only showed that without knowing how many votes were needed, the conspirators would need to engage in a massive plot and subsequent cover-up to make sure they had covered the spread. It would be an enormous undertaking. O’Keefe provided no evidence that such a scheme existed for the simple reason that there was no such plot.

In another one of O’Keefe’s “gotcha” videos on voter fraud, a Project Veritas employee almost obtains a ballot meant for registered voter Eric Holder, then the U.S. attorney general. Project Veritas marketed the video as a slam dunk, claiming it had “proven” fraud occurred while in reality no vote was cast and no fraud occurred. The manufactured stunt, like Shirley’s escapades in California, was another senseless attempt to rally people behind more restrictive voter ID laws.

Though Shirley’s claims about California include some different details from O’Keefe and Project Veritas’ claims, the gist is the same: Both attempt to prove “voter fraud” and fail to show any actual fraud being committed. Such right-wing misinformation has been debunked for years while the truth is still that fraud is just not happening at the scale they claim.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters

Prosecutors Drop Charges Against Immigrants Accused Of Attack On ICE Officer

Prosecutors Drop Charges Against Immigrants Accused Of Attack On ICE Officer

In mid-January, right-wing media figures seized on a story that could serve as a narrative reset after an

Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed Renee Good in Minneapolis. Amid rising backlash to the Trump administration’s mass deportation operation across Minnesota, MAGA pundits hyped claims from the Department of Homeland Security that Venezuelan immigrants had attacked federal agents with a shovel and broomstick. Federal agents shot in response, the story went, wounding one of the men accused in the attack.

Since then, those claims have totally fallen apart, and on February 12 prosecutors asked the presiding judge to dismiss the case with prejudice. The prosecutor wrote that “newly discovered evidence in this matter is materially inconsistent with the allegations” put forward by the government in official filings and testimony.

Right-wing media coverage of the story was unhinged, and it followed a clear, established pattern of hyping dubious initial government claims that would later turn out to be false.

As news of the incident broke on January 14, Fox News correspondent Bill Melugin called in to Sean Hannity’s show to read a DHS statement he’d been given “literally 45 seconds ago” and to lay the foundation for the coverage to come, a role he often plays in the conservative media ecosystem.

“While the subject and law enforcement were in a struggle on the ground, two subjects came out of a nearby apartment and also attacked the law enforcement officer with a snow shovel and broom handle,” Melugin read. “As the officer was being ambushed and attacked by the two individuals, the original subject got loose and began striking the officer with a shovel or broomstick.”

“Fearing for his life and safety as he was being ambushed by three individuals, the officer fired defensive shots to defend his life,” Melugin continued.

The narrative was set, and the next morning Fox News’ Fox & Friends weighed in on the story.

“You come at these guys and these women with a shovel and if you are being apprehended and try to run away or drive over them, you will be featured in retaliation videos,” said host Brian Kilmeade. “That's what this is about."

Kilmeade’s co-host, Steve Doocy, also bought the government’s line. “You cannot hit a cop with a shovel or a broom. You just can't do that. It is against the law,” Doocy said. “It is terrible when anybody gets shot. But, unfortunately, a lot of people don't realize, if you break the law -- when you're breaking the law, there's going to be repercussions.”

Co-host Ainsley Earhart suggested capital punishment should be on the table. “When we were growing up, if you harmed a police officer, if you killed a police officer, in South Carolina you got the electric chair,” Earhart said. “When we were growing up, you didn't go after police with your car. You listened to what they said.”

Guest Trey Gowdy, who hosts another Fox show, said the supposed attack and the broader resistance to ICE’s presence gave President Donald Trump “all the justification” he needed to invoke the Insurrection Act in Minnesota, thereby deploying active military units against civilians.

The tenor of the coverage was similar elsewhere, and sometimes even more irresponsible.

On the podcast of former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, Kevin Posobiec — brother of MAGA influencer Jack Posobiec — said an immigrant was “shot in the leg because he was trying to kill an ICE agent with a shovel.”

At The Daily Wire, host Matt Walsh claimed that after a foot chase, “the illegal alien began attacking the officers and then two individuals, apparently family members of this person, came out of a nearby apartment and began ambushing the officers with a shovel and a broom handle.”

Walsh called it “another clear-cut, totally justified shooting by law enforcement.”

Walsh’s colleague, Michael Knowles, said, “The poor ICE agents now getting ambushed — they take out shovels, they start beating this guy with a shovel, and, so, luckily, happily, the ICE agent was able to get his gun out and shoot the Venezuelan.”

Although the exact details of what happened in the incident remain unclear, the prosecutor’s own words make it plain that the government's account was false. Less than two weeks after the shooting, two Border Patrol agents would shoot and kill Alex Pretti. Right-wing media tried to justify that shooting as well.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters

As Right Splits Over Neo-Nazi Fuentes, Steve Bannon Signals His Dark Affinities

As Right Splits Over Neo-Nazi Fuentes, Steve Bannon Signals His Dark Affinities

Podcaster and former Trump strategist Steve Bannon indirectly signaled his support for Tucker Carlson and those who defended him after his friendly interview with white nationalist streamer Nick Fuentes created a massive rift within conservative media.

On Wednesday, Bannon invited former Heritage Foundation operative Ryan Neuhaus to appear on his influential War Room podcast, ostensibly to discuss the cost of living crisis facing young people in the United States. Left unsaid was Neuhaus’ central role defending Carlson’s October 27 interview with Fuentes, which was a predictable attempt by the former Fox News prime-time star to sanitize and amplify Fuentes’ antisemitic beliefs.

Still, Bannon’s signal to the more plugged-in, online segment of his audience was clear, even if shrouded in plausible deniability: Neuhaus, and by extension Carlson and Fuentes, are welcome inside of the MAGA tent

The November 12 War Room segment was not the first time Bannon has weighed in on the split. On October 31, Bannon responded to conservative backlash directed at Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, who had released a statement — which Roberts later said had been written by his then-chief of staff Neuhaus — reiterating Roberts’ longstanding friendship with Carlson and criticizing the “venomous coalition” of “bad actors who serve someone else’s agenda” now seeking to “cancel” him over the Fuentes interview.

While some conservative commentators saw Roberts’ remarks as embracing antisemitism, Bannon saw things differently.

“For Tucker having Nick Fuentes on, they wanted to crush Tucker,” Bannon said. “I think Tucker's solid as a rock.”

“There was a meltdown because Tucker had Nick Fuentes on for an interview,” he added. “I just don't get it.”

Roberts’ video has thrown Heritage into a state of panic and disarray. In an apparent attempt to mitigate the damage, Roberts distanced himself from his own words, claiming they’d been written by Neuhaus but hadn’t been circulated or vetted beyond that. By November 4, Neuhaus was out at Heritage.

Over the course of the controversy, Neuhaus has repeatedly defended himself and Carlson’s interview on X (formerly Twitter).

In what appears to be Neuhaus’ first post about the topic, on October 28 he wrote in support of the interview by arguing, “We need to reach young men.”

On October 30, Neuhaus reposted Roberts’ video — which clarified that Heritage was not “distancing” itself from Carlson — commenting: “God bless @KevinRobertsTX. We are so fortunate to have him serve as a leader representing the interests of the American people.”

God bless @KevinRobertsTX . We are so fortunate to have him serve as a leader representing the interests of the American people.

Citation

From Ryan Neuhaus' account on X/TwitterOn November 10, Neuhaus wrote: “Masks are coming off every day now and the gatekeeping strategy of Buckley is dying fast,” seemingly referencing the myth — still held as gospel among many on the right — that National Review founder William F. Buckley worked to purge antisemites from the conservative movement. “This is not only a clarifying exercise for those paying close attention, but enables a legitimate and unified future within the MAGA coalition,” he continued.

Following Neuhaus’ appearance on Wednesday, the official War Room X account posted a clip of the interview.

“Love the @Bannons_WarRoom posse,” Neuhaus responded. “It was a privilege to be on air today.”

Am

Steve Bannon

Bannon Outlines MAGA Plan To Suppress Votes And Subvert 2026  Elections

War Room host and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon this week spelled out a vision of how MAGA media could attempt to subvert the 2026 midterm elections, including by advocating for the presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents at polling places, extreme Congressional redistricting, and a mail-in voting ban.

Bannon’s proposed playbook is an evolution of the MAGA movement’s central ideological myth, which asserts that the 2020 election was stolen from President Donald Trump. This load-bearing fantasy supports any number of related policies, including MAGA media’s oft-repeated threat that every immigrant who came to the United States without authorization during the Biden administration must be deported.

It’s only a matter of time before election denial again becomes ubiquitous in right-wing media, as it did in the run-up to the 2022 midterms and prior to the 2024 general election. Beyond false claims about noncitizen voting, right-wing pundits also spread conspiracy theories in 2020 about Dominion voting machines and wrongly asserted that some votes had been flipped in 2024.

This history is key to understanding the moves that the Trump White House and MAGA media are making in anticipation of the 2026 midterms with the goal of cementing power through a host of anti-democratic means, including:

  • Sending federal police, the National Guard, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to occupy liberal cities like an invading army.
  • Seeking to ban mail-in voting.
  • Pushing for unprecedented, mid-decade Congressional redistricting efforts.
  • Attempting to purge voter rolls and suppress turnout by requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections.
  • Calling for a mid-decade census that would exclude people in the United States without authorization, which experts have argued would be unconstitutional.

Bannon laid out MAGA media’s theory of the case during his Tuesday morning show.

The Trump administration must “get these elections squared away, for once and all,” Bannon said, adding, “No mail-in ballots.”

A day earlier, Trump posted on Truth Social that he would “lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS, and also, while we're at it, Highly 'Inaccurate,' Very Expensive, and Seriously Controversial VOTING MACHINES.” (Trump’s claim that voting machines are unreliable is false.)

Bannon then escalated his rhetoric, demanding that ICE agents enforce voter ID measures in cities throughout the country, seemingly without regard to local and state laws.

“They're petrified over at MSNBC and CNN that, hey, since we're taking control of the cities, there's going to be ICE officers near polling places,” Bannon said. “You damn right.”

“If you don't have an ID — if you're not a citizen — you're not voting,” he said.

Bannon’s threat is not idle, given the Trump administration’s posture toward some of the country’s biggest cities. In June, Trump deployed ICE agents to Los Angeles to carry out workplace raids, subsequently calling in the National Guard for additional repressive power. Then in August, Trump took over Washington’s local police department and surged federal police on the city’s streets. Once again, Trump sent in the National Guard; Republican governors lined up to provide their state’s troops to serve his ends. Trump has also threatened to deploy National Guard troops to New York City, Chicago, Baltimore, and Oakland, and has directed ICE to ramp up deportations in cities run by Democrats.

Some of Bannon’s allies have attempted to suppress voter turnout by monitoring ballot drop boxes and otherwise harassing election workers. Now, as the Trump administration prepares to hire an additional 10,000 ICE agents thanks to a newly passed Republican budget, Bannon’s demand that immigration cops stalk polling places doesn’t seem far-fetched.

Already, election denial activist Jenny Beth Martin and her group, Tea Party Patriots, are going on tour to promote the SAVE Act, an anti-voting rights bill that would require proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections. Martin’s group sponsored a rally on January 6, 2021, and in 2024 she bragged that she was helping to train poll watchers for the election that year.

In his Tuesday morning monologue, Bannon also called for a “maximalist policy” on redrawing Congressional maps ahead of next year’s midterms instead of waiting until the end of the decade for the completion of the census. Trump initiated the fight, calling for Texas to redraw its maps to produce five more Republican seats in the House of Representatives. Some Democratic governors have matched Trump’s gambit, saying they’ll attempt to do the same in their own states.

In addition to Texas, Bannon called for “Indiana, Missouri, South Carolina, Florida, [and] Ohio,” to create new Republican seats through extreme gerrymandering in order to protect Trump from possible impeachment should Democrats win back the House. Trump has “a lot more than a year and a half's worth of work left,” Bannon said. “He's got more than this term and beyond.”

Bannon reiterated his threats on Wednesday, tying them explicitly to the midterms.

“Remember, for 2026, the mid-decade census that has to be right this time,” Bannon said. “No illegal aliens. You’ve got to get the algorithms right. And the collection — all the mistakes that we had. Also, the redistricting.”

“The last is the mail-in ballots,” Bannon said.

“And the left is sitting there going, well gosh, they take away mail-in ballots, people are going to have to show up, they’re going to have ICE agents around, people are going to be so afraid, intimidated, they’re going to be arrested,” Bannon added. “Well, hey, if you’re an illegal alien you shouldn’t be going to the polls anyway.”

On Wednesday, the Texas House passed a new redistricting map expected to yield an additional five Republican seats. Trump celebrated the result in a post on Truth Social, adding that if Republicans “STOP MAIL-IN VOTING” and “go to PAPER BALLOTS,” Republicans will “will pick up 100 more seats, and the CROOKED game of politics is over.”

The MAGA movement’s attacks on immigrants, voting rights, and cities they don’t control are all attempts to further entrench Trump’s political power and eliminate any possible checks or balances on it. Right-wing media figures are salivating at the opportunity to punish their opponents. It’s incumbent on legacy media to tell the whole story and draw these connections. After all, Bannon and his fellow travelers in MAGA media are very open about their playbook.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

How Fox News Feeds Fake Data On Migrant Arrests To Gullible Viewers

How Fox News Feeds Fake Data On Migrant Arrests To Gullible Viewers

Right-wing media have worked symbiotically with President Donald Trump’s administration to manufacture false media narratives of immigrant criminality and to justify subsequent crackdowns on those communities. A recent segment on Fox Business’ Mornings With Maria Bartiromo perfectly illustrates this dynamic, as guest host Cheryl Casone enabled a Homeland Security spokesperson to uncritically spread a baseless statistic to bolster the administration’s claim that it’s pursuing the so-called “worst of the worst.”

This segment exemplifies how Fox feeds garbage anti-immigrant slop to its audience www.mediamatters.org

On August 4, Casone introduced Department of Homeland Security assistant secretary for public affairs Tricia McLaughlin by discussing legal challenges Trump has faced in carrying out his mass deportation plans.

“What is the path forward here from the legal side, from the attorneys at DHS, to make sure that these deportations continue to be carried out as the American public had asked for?” Casone said.

(This framing is already misleading — in mid-July, polls from CNN and CBS News both found that a majority of respondents oppose the administration’s increased deportation program.)

After assuring the Fox Business’ audience that Trump’s targeting of immigrants had nothing to do with “racial animus,” McLaughlin moved on to what has become a common administration talking point to claim Trump’s policies “are focused on criminality.”

(Meanwhile, DHS recently asked the Supreme Court to allow ICE agents to use factors like speaking Spanish or working in construction as a partial basis for reasonable suspicion that a person is in the country without authorization.)

“Seventy percent of those illegal aliens who have been arrested under the Trump administration either have criminal convictions or pending criminal charges,” McLaughlin said. “So we are focused on getting people like MS-13 gang members, Tren de Aragua, terrorists, murderers, rapists — the worst of the worst out of this country.”

“We will keep on going, flooding the zone in sanctuary cities, and going after the worst of the worst,” she added.

The data point that McLaughlin cited — which Casone didn’t challenge — appears to have first been used in a DHS press release on June 26. DHS has used the statistic in at least seven press releases since then, and Trump “border czar” Tom Homan — the most frequent administration official to appear on the Fox networks since Trump's inauguration — has repeated it numerous times across right-wing media.

As Media Matters previously reported, the statistic appears to be false based on independent sources that collect federal data.

According to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, which is frequently cited in media and legal publications for collecting government data, “71.1% [of detainees] held in ICE detention have no criminal conviction according to data current as of July 27, 2025. Many of those convicted committed only minor offenses, including traffic violations.” TRAC further notes that just 24% of ICE detainees had pending criminal charges as of July 13.

Reports from CBS News and The Associated Press have found comparable numbers.

When Homan has recently claimed that 70 percent of ICE arrestees are criminals, he has sometimes added that the remaining 30 percent are “national security threats.” This figure appears to be the product of his own imagination. In some of statements, he has lumped in immigrants with final orders of removal alongside so-called terrorists and gang members to pad his statistic.

A CBS News report last month found that since the beginning of Trump’s second term, “3,256 of the more than 100,000 people removed were known or suspected gang members or terrorists.” That’s about three percent — not 30 percent — and databases that purport to list “terrorists” or “gang members” are notoriously inaccurate.

A news outlet that was interested in giving its audience reliable information might include any of that context when interviewing a Trump administration immigration official, but that's not the role Fox was created to serve.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters

Tom Homan

Right-Wing Media Fawn All Over 'Border Czar' Tom Homan

When Harris Faulkner concluded a recent interview with Tom Homan — President Donald Trump’s “border czar” tasked with carrying out the administration’s mass deportation operations — she did so with a benediction.

“God bless you, Tom Homan, for keeping us safe,” the Fox News anchor said solemnly.

Fox host Jesse Watters took a different, more threatening approach when he demanded that Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-IL), who is Guatemalan American, “acknowledge” that “no other country is as great as the United States,” and “if she doesn't, I'm calling Homan — she's going home.”

The devotion that Faulkner and Watters show to Homan is hardly unique in right-wing media. More than any other figure in Trump’s inner circle save perhaps deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, Homan is the person conservative outlets turn to when they need someone in Trump-world to champion the administration’s increasingly unpopular immigration policies.

According to a Media Matters review, Homan has appeared on Fox News 78 times this year and an additional 20 times on Fox Business, making him the most frequent Trump administration guest on the Fox networks since Trump's inauguration. But his reach in conservative media extends far beyond those appearances.

Over the month of July, right-wing media fawned over Homan in interviews, aiding him in manufacturing false narratives about widespread migrant crime and encouraging him to threaten so-called sanctuary cities with increased raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

Conservative interviewers also ignored or downplayed horrific conditions at a Florida immigrant detention camp known as “Alligator Alcatraz,” including allegations that detainees had been subjected to overflowing toilets, food filled with worms, and had been chained to the ground. A whistleblower just came forward describing “inhumane conditions” at the facility. These interviewers simultaneously offered Homan a platform to wildly inflate the number of so-called criminals and “national security threats” that ICE had arrested.

This dynamic illustrates the symbiotic relationship between Homan, who had his own lucrative career as a conservative pundit and consultant, and the right-wing media ecosystem — where each party has an incentive to demonize immigrants, ignore critical reporting, and create narratives about social disorder that they attribute to immigrant communities, all in the service of Trump’s mass deportation agenda.

“God bless you, Tom Homan”: Right-wing media’s month of softball interviews with Trump’s border czar

On July 1, a day before officials at Alligator Alcatraz began concentrating people in the encampment, Homan appeared on Charlie Kirk’s influential podcast.

“Tell us about the significance of Alligator Alcatraz,” Kirk began. “What is it and what will it be used for?”

After Homan offered his standard anti-immigrant boilerplate to plead on behalf of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, Kirk responded: “You’re doing a wonderful job.”

“We have your back, Tom Homan,” Kirk said at the conclusion of the interview, calling for “10 million deportations” after Homan promised to “flood the zone with sanctuary cities,” declared “zero tolerance” for those who impede ICE operations, and defended ICE personnel (“They’re not Nazis”).

Appearing on Fox News’ America’s Newsroom on July 7, anchor Bill Hemmer asked Homan about the new facility in southern Florida and whether other states might be willing to open similar sites. Homan took aim at people who opposed the administration’s approach, complaining that blue states are “too busy attacking ICE and they’re too busy attacking Trump’s policies,” referring to a shooting at an immigrant detention facility in Texas on July 4. Hemmer responded: “On that point, could this get ugly?” It was his only follow-up question.

Homan had a busy following day. Fox News’ Martha MacCallum interviewed him and didn’t ask about Alligator Alcatraz. Neither did Newsmax’s Greg Kelly, though the host found the time to shower Homan with praise, saying “you guys are on fire,” and “nobody knows the law better than you.” (Kelly also incorrectly stated, “Habeas corpus is great, but I don't think it applies to an illegal alien,” echoing a larger right-wing media campaign to suspend due process protections for immigrants.) Fox Business host and former Trump adviser Larry Kudlow introduced Homan by calling him “one of my great heroes.” Kudlow also didn’t bring up Alligator Alcatraz.

Homan has appeared on Fox News 78 times this year and an additional 20 times on Fox Business, making him the most frequent Trump administration guest on Fox by far

On July 10, Fox anchor John Roberts asked Homan three questions, all about sensational but unrepresentative examples of immigrants committing acts of violence. “There could be more, and that’s truly frightening,” Roberts said to conclude the segment.

Kirk hosted Homan for a lengthy, in-person event at Turning Point USA’s Student Action Summit on July 12. “The great Tom Homan,” Kirk said by way of introduction. “The legendary Tom Homan.” During their interview, Kirk declared that “we need to get rid of birthright citizenship” and claimed that “the legal Hispanics” support mass deportation. (A Gallup poll from July 11 found 91% of Hispanic Americans support a pathway to citizenship, and only 23% support deporting all immigrants without legal status.)

Alligator Alcatraz didn’t come up during a July 11 interview on Fox & Friends or a July 16 interview on Hannity. Newsmax host Rob Schmitt also failed to bring up the facility in his interview with Homan, though he began the segment by accusing the administration’s opponents of throwing “every possible sob story at you guys.”

On July 18, Fox Business guest host Cheryl Casone began her interview with Homan by asking about the administration’s stated goal of reopening Alcatraz prison in San Francisco as a migrant detention center before shifting her focus to its namesake in southern Florida, suggesting it might serve as a template for other states.

“What do you make of this idea of these other states that could do something similar to what they’ve done in Florida, which is Alligator Alcatraz,” Casone said. “I mean, this facility was created very quickly, and many lawmakers have been down there. They said that it is safe. You know, all of these Democrats yelling and saying it was going to be dangerous — it’s not.”

That was the same day that Fox News’ Faulkner blessed Homan at the end of her interview. Alligator Alcatraz went unmentioned.

Homan was back on Hannity on July 21, during which the eponymous host asked him three questions, all of which centered on — and inflated — the risk of so-called migrant crime. Two days later, Homan was on another Fox prime-time show, this time The Ingraham Angle, appearing over a chyron that read: “Illegals’ reign of terror.”

The next afternoon on America Reports, Roberts’ questions again gave Homan a chance to criticize sanctuary city policies. The anchor concluded the segment by reminding his audience that Homan had “vowed to flood the zone there in New York City” with ICE agents.

On July 29, Fox & Friends co-host Lawrence Jones framed Homan and ICE as dispassionately following the law. “There’s laws on the books you guys have to enforce,” Jones said, adding later, “You don’t get to selectively enforce when a judge has signed an order, right?” (The Washington Post found that the second Trump administration has defied more than 1 in 3 judicial rulings, including in high-profile cases regarding immigration and deportation.)

Homan uses right-wing media to spread false talking point that 70% of ICE arrestees are criminals, the rest are “national security threats”

A closer look at one of Homan’s latest talking points helps illustrate how the right-wing media ecosystem seeks to bolster support for Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda.

In the July 29 Fox & Friends interview, Homan claimed that “70% of the people we are arresting are criminals. Hard stop: 70%.”

“Who are the other 30%?” Homan continued. “The other 30% are national security threats.”

He reiterated later: “We’re arresting 70% criminals, and the rest are national security threats and those with final orders.”

Homan didn’t offer a citation for those figures, and Jones didn’t ask for one. Neither did NewsNation anchor Markie Martin, who interviewed Homan the same morning.

“Seventy percent of everybody we arrest is a criminal,” Homan repeated later that day on Fox News’ Jesse Watters Primetime. “Who is the other 30%? National security threats, final orders of deportation, gang members.”

Note the rhetorical slippage, as Homan moves from an unequivocal statement that 30% of people detained by ICE are national security threats to squishier phrasing that also includes immigrants with an order of deportation.

Over the next 48 hours, Homan made nearly identical versions of the claim on Newsmax’s The National Report, Fox Business’ Varney & Co., and OAN’s Real America with Dan Ball. None of these programs offered even mild pushback, much less the full debunking the claim deserves.

Homan’s first claim that 70% of ICE arrestees are criminals appears to have first been used in a Department of Homeland Security press release from June 26, which quoted DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin as saying: “Under the Trump Administration 70% of illegal aliens arrested have been convicted or charged with a crime beyond illegally entering our country.” The figure has been included in at least seven subsequent releases.

Even granting Homan the benefit of the doubt in his failure to distinguish between a criminal conviction and a charge, the DHS stat appears to be incorrect, according to media reports and other independent sources that cite ICE’s own data.

On June 24, CBS News reported that “federal statistics show nearly half — or 47% — of those currently detained by ICE lack a criminal record and fewer than 30% have been convicted of crimes.”

The Associated Press, citing ICE data, reported that “as of June 29, there were 57,861 people detained by ICE, 41,495 — 71.7% — of whom had no criminal convictions.” Of that subset, 14,318 people had pending criminal charges, meaning that about 53% of arrestees either had a criminal conviction or pending criminal charges.

According to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, which collects government data, 24% of ICE detainees were facing criminal charges as of July 13 and 28% had a criminal conviction, though TRAC adds: “Many of those convicted committed only minor offenses, including traffic violations.”

Even the scant evidence in the public record that purports to bolster Homan’s claim undercuts the Trump administration’s larger argument that it’s targeting the so-called worst of the worst.

On July 16, CBS News reported that “of the estimated 100,000 people who were deported between January 1 and June 24 by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, 70,583 were convicted criminals, according to an ICE document” obtained by the network — though “most of the documented infractions were traffic or immigration offenses.” (It’s not clear what accounts for the discrepancy between the CBS News report and other publicly available data.)

As to Homan’s second claim that the remaining 30% of ICE arrestees are “national security threats,” it appears to be the product of the Trump border czar’s own imagination. The statistic doesn’t appear in any DHS press releases from this year, and doesn’t seem to exist in the public domain beyond Homan’s own claim. Although Homan occasionally tempers his talking point by including people with removal orders, the message to conservative audiences is clear, as illustrated by the NewsNation headline: “Border czar says ICE arrests include 70% criminals, 30% threats.”

Using TRAC’s most recent numbers, ICE is holding 56,816 people — meaning that by Homan’s reasoning, more than 17,000 are national security threats. By contrast, the July 16 CBS News report found that “3,256 of the more than 100,000 people removed were known or suspected gang members or terrorists,” which is roughly 3%. (Databases that purport to list terrorists and “gang members” are also notoriously inaccurate and filled with false positives and other errors.)

Homan’s baseless assertion that 30% of ICE arrestees are national security threats — including people who simply have an order of removal — functions as a rhetorical sleight-of-hand that won’t be challenged in right-wing media. The Trump administration has absurdly claimed that unauthorized migration amounts to an “invasion.” Working backwards from there, Homan apparently concludes that any person in the United States without legal status is therefore a matter of national security.

This hall of mirrors, where regular people going about their lives are transformed into violent threats to community safety, inverts the actual dynamics at play. Right-wing outlets that serve as platforms for Homan to demonize immigrants are actually putting communities at risk, and now their coverage has helped lay the foundations for ICE and the Florida Division of Emergency Management to open a remote detention camp in southern Florida rife with abuse.

Cascading reports of horrific conditions at “Alligator Alcatraz”

Right-wing media have amplified Homan’s fearmongering even as they have largely ignored or downplayed the harms ICE is causing throughout the country, as embodied most viscerally at Alligator Alcatraz. That campaign of ignorance notwithstanding, the public has had access to horror stories from the southern Florida facility virtually from its first hours of operation.

Officials began holding people at the facility on July 2, and by July 4 reports of harsh living conditions were already starting to emerge. NBC 6 Miami reported the encampment faced swarms of mosquitos, heavy downpours, and high temperatures, all of which were standard fare for the remote area of southern Florida. The outlet later spoke with a detained man who said there was “no water here to bathe,” that the fluorescent lights were always on, and that the food, which detainees were given once a day, “has worms in it.” Another person held there had been denied his medication.

On July 9, The Miami Herald published a lengthy investigation into Alligator Alcatraz, reporting that detainees had no access to showers or water with which to flush the toilets, that giant bugs had breached the tent walls, and that temperatures whipsawed between freezing cold and swelteringly hot. Many of those details were subsequently confirmed by The Associated Press, which added that there were “flooding floors with fecal waste,” and The Washington Post, which reported that some detainees had been “shackled to a bench.”

Conditions only deteriorated from there. On July 22, NBC News reported a man held at the facility had developed fungus on his feet from the standing water and overall poor sanitation. The same day, The Guardian cited immigration advocates who claimed at least six people sent to the facility had been hospitalized. WLRN Public Media spoke on the phone to a migrant in the camp, who said guards “chained me to the ground,” forced him to stand in the sun without water from 1-7 p.m., and “called him the n-word.”

Lawyers and immigration advocates for the detainees have sued in federal court, alleging that the Trump administration and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis have created a legal black hole where the ultimate jurisdiction for the facility is deliberately opaque. “This is an unprecedented situation where hundreds of detainees are held incommunicado, with no ability to access the courts, under legal authority that has never been explained and may not exist,” the plaintiffs argued. Detainees there have reportedly gone on hunger strike, though DHS denies the claim. Videos show ambulances entering and leaving the facility repeatedly over the course of several days.

In short, Alligator Allcatraz is operating as an extrajudicial concentration camp designed to disappear and punish immigrants largely outside formal legal processes. If Tom Homan and his MAGA media allies have their way, it won’t be the last. DeSantis has already suggested his state will soon unveil a second detention camp, and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said the government is looking to open similar facilities in Arizona, Nebraska, and Louisiana. On August 5, Noem announced a second camp would be opened in Indiana, dubbed the “Speedway Slammer.”

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

11,000 Could Die: Right-Wing Media Ignore Potential Impact Of Trump's Big Ugly Bill

11,000 Could Die: Right-Wing Media Ignore Potential Impact Of Trump's Big Ugly Bill

Two analyses of the House of Representatives’ version of President Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” found that its deep Medicaid cuts — which right-wing media figures have supported for months — would result in more than 11,000 preventable deaths annually. When all aspects of the legislation are included, according to one of the analyses, the bill could cause an estimated 51,000 preventable deaths per year.

Right-wing media figures, however, have repeatedly claimed that people who “deserve” to be on Medicaid won’t be affected by the bill. Instead, they falsely argue that Medicaid will be strengthened for “the people that actually need it,” as Fox News’ Sean Hannity put it recently.

It remains to be seen exactly how much congressional Republicans will end up slashing Medicaid, as the House legislation passed on May 22 and the Senate is currently finalizing its own version.

The House version of the bill finances massive tax benefits for the extremely wealthy with its steep Medicaid cuts, which include the harshest Medicaid work requirements Congress has ever put forward.

The bill would also limit states’ ability to access federal funding by freezing what’s known as provider taxes, and punish states that use their own money to offer health insurance to immigrants.

The Senate’s proposed Medicaid cuts are even deeper than those in the House bill.

Researchers estimate Medicaid cuts in GOP bill could result in over 11,000 deaths annually

The two studies that examined the House’s legislation came to similar conclusions, though one focused primarily on the bill’s Medicaid provisions while the other took a look at the legislation as a whole.

The more recent study, from the Annals of Internal Medicine, was published June 17 and examined the House GOP’s proposed Medicaid cuts.

“Enactment of the House bill advanced in May would increase the number of uninsured persons by 7.6 million and the number of deaths by 16 642 annually, according to a mid-range estimate,” the authors write.

The authors stress that even this estimate could be an undercount, as their figures “exclude harms from lowering provider payments and shrinking benefits, as well as possible repercussions from states increasing taxes or shifting expenditures from other needs to make up for shortfalls in federal Medicaid funding.”

They also acknowledge that they and the Congressional Budget Office — which offers analysis of federal spending — made an “assumption that many of those losing Medicaid coverage would find alternative coverage,” which “may be overly optimistic.”

Conservative pundits claim Medicaid cuts won’t harm people who “deserve” health insurance

Previously, analysis from KFF found that the proposed bill would decimate hospitals that provide care to large numbers of Medicaid recipients, especially in rural areas, which would likely compound the harms of the legislation.

The other research into the Big Beautiful Bill’s effects, published June 3, was conducted by experts at the Yale School of Public Health, and was commissioned by two Senate committees working on their chambers’ version of the bill.

The Yale experts estimated that 7.7 million people would lose insurance as a result of the House bill, which would “result in an estimated 11,300 additional deaths annually due to lost access to Medicaid or ACA Marketplace coverage.”

The stark number increases dramatically when other aspects of the bill are included. The proposed legislation would end support for Medicare Savings Programs — cost sharing programs that allow Medicaid to pay Medicare premiums — leading to an estimated 1.38 million low-income Medicare beneficiaries losing their coverage. The authors write that the bill “would increase mortality by 18,200 per year due to reduced access to subsidized prescriptions.”

The House version also repeals nursing home staffing standards — which could lead to an estimated 13,000 deaths annually — and fails to extend the Affordable Care Act premium tax credit, which the authors write “is expected to push another 5 million Americans into uninsurance, resulting in 8,811 more deaths each year.”

In all, the authors estimate that the Big Beautiful Bill could result in more than 51,000 preventable deaths every year.

Right-wing media insists those who “deserve” coverage won’t be affected by the bill

These credible estimates are virtually absent from right-wing media coverage of the bill. To the contrary, conservative pundits have supported many of the most draconian aspects of the Big Beautiful Bill, including its burdensome and unnecessary work requirements — one of the key mechanisms in the legislation to kick people off of Medicaid.

Conservative pundits have also frequently pushed the false narrative that the Republican legislation won’t harm people who “deserve” health insurance, whether that’s Medicaid or private plans purchased through the ACA.

  • Fox News host Sean Hannity dismissed the Yale study’s conclusions, repeating that the cuts to Medicaid were “nonexistent.” He added that his reading of the bill was that “the only thing that would be cut are those people that don't belong on the rolls that have given fraudulent information that will be weeded out of services they never deserved in the first place.” [Fox News, Hannity, 6/5/25]
  • On his radio show, Hannity said the bill’s so-called Medicaid reforms would only target “able-bodied” people running “scams,” who “are sources of legitimate savings without reducing benefits to the people that actually need it.” [Premiere Radio Network, The Sean Hannity Show, 6/6/25]
  • The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles claimed that the bill “is not taking health care funding away from the people who deserve it,” but rather, “it’s taking Medicaid funding away from the 1.4 million illegals who are on Medicaid.” Knowles added, “It's taking Medicaid funding away from people who are abusing the system, who are not legally entitled to it, people who refuse to work, people who don't meet even basic requirements to avail themselves of health care and welfare.” [The Daily Wire, The Michael Knowles Show, 6/4/25]
  • On Hannity, former House speaker and current Fox contributor Newt Gingrich argued that the proposed Medicaid cuts will not “take anybody deserving of help off the Medicaid rolls,” but will impact “illegal immigrants … people who refuse to work and … people who are crooks.” He went on, saying, “Why the Democratic party would want to be the party of illegal immigrants, crooks, and people who refuse to work is beyond me.” [Fox News, Hannity, 6/3/25]
  • Fox News anchor Martha MacCallum said that Medicaid “expanded greatly over Covid — people got used to a lot of these benefits and they don’t want to give them up,” but that cuts are necessary so “that people who deserve these benefits can get them.” Her guest, Fox Business host Charles Payne, previously said, “Those who can work and are getting these benefits, they should work.” [Fox News, The Story With Martha MacCallum, 5/20/25]
  • On his War Room podcast, former Trump adviser Steve Bannon said that “we don’t want to cut Medicaid to the folks that need it” adding that “25% of MAGA is on Medicaid … but it’s got to be very restrictive.” He continued: “Two and a half million illegal aliens have all to go,” and suggested that work requirements should be for “80 hours a week,” rather than 80 hours a month, as the House bill mandates. [Real America’s Voice, War Room, 5/19/25; Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 6/12/25]
  • On Fox News, former congressional adviser Emily Domenech said, “When it comes to Medicaid, we’re looking at opportunities to cut back on the waste, fraud, and abuse that make the programs cost too much and take away from the people who really deserve them.” [Fox News, The Faulkner Focus, 5/16/25]

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Steve Bannon

Medicaid Cuts Will Harm Millions -- And Not Just 'Able-Bodied Men'

Right-wing media figures are telling their audiences that proposed work requirements for Medicaid will be targeted at men who are unwilling to look for a job, when the actual population most likely to be affected is poor, rural women who are taking care of elderly parents or adult children.

The discussion comes as congressional Republicans negotiate a budget bill that is widely predicted to deliver massive tax cuts to the wealthy and corporations while gutting social safety net programs like Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps. The House passed its version of the bill on May 22, which included what Axios described as “the biggest Medicaid rewrite in the history of the safety-net program, which will likely result in millions of Americans losing their health insurance coverage.”

One of the ways the House's legislation reduces Medicaid costs is by introducing arduous and unnecessary work requirements for beneficiaries that would begin at the end of 2026. The Congressional Budget Office, which provides nonpartisan economic analysis to lawmakers, estimated that 10.3 million people would lose their Medicaid by 2034 if the bill was passed in its May 14 form. The New York Times cited the same figure in its coverage of the House bill’s passage. (The bill also adds work requirements to SNAP, which could put almost 11 million people at risk of losing some of their food assistance.)

Much of the right-wing commentary supporting the bill mischaracterizes Medicaid beneficiaries by claiming there is a large pool of “able-bodied” people who refuse to seek employment. In fact, 92 percent of people on Medicaid are working, have a disability, or are performing duties — such as going to school or caregiving — that could qualify for an exemption from meeting work requirements.

It’s true that there is a group of people who qualify as able-bodied, nonworking Medicaid recipients without a young child who also aren’t enrolled in school. But contrary to conservative punditry, that population is overwhelmingly made up of women (79%), mostly living in rural areas, who are caring for elderly parents or adult children and have low levels of formal education and have recently left the workforce, according to new research from the University of Massachusetts Boston.

“Work requirements would primarily target this population,” the researchers write.

Jesse Watters: work requirements target young men who “sell ecstasy on the side"

Fox News, Fox Business, and the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page — three gilded properties in Rupert Murdoch’s media empire — have pushed for cuts to Medicaid, either by adding work requirements or through an outright rollback of the program’s expansion under the Affordable Care Act. Slashing Medicaid is incredibly unpopular, including among supporters of President Donald Trump, so on some occasions Fox has misled its viewers into thinking the Republican budget doesn’t pose a threat to the program.

But as Trump has thrown his weight behind the bill, so too has Fox modified its austerity-heavy rhetoric.

Following the House’s passage of the bill, Fox national correspondent Aishah Hasnie said some Republicans from states that have “a lot of constituents on Medicaid” were “worried there were going to be massive cuts.”

“Really, Republicans wanted to go after illegal immigrants that were using Medicaid and able-bodied men that were on Medicaid,” she continued. “They wanted to add work requirements, and those work requirements now will start in 2026. It’s a huge win for fiscal conservatives.”

On May 19, host Jesse Watters said, “If you're a young, able-bodied, healthy American man — 26 years old, you don't even want to go to work — you can get on Medicaid.”

“You can live at your parents’ house, play softball on the weekend, sell ecstasy on the side, not even look for a job — and you can get free health care,” Watters added. “That’s what they’re doing. They’re just closing that lazy loophole."

The same day on Fox & Friends, on at least two occasions co-host Charlie Hurt falsely argued that work requirements strengthened Medicaid.

“A major Democrat attack on the bill is they claim it cuts Medicaid,” Hurt said. “What it actually does is it saves Medicaid by not paying, first of all, people who are ineligible for it, but also because it doesn’t — it puts in work requirements for, you know, 30-year-old, able-bodied males without dependents, and it says, you know, if you are going to get welfare from the government, you're going to need to work, and that seems like a really low standard to a regular person."

Elsewhere in the program, Hurt argued the bill strengthens Medicaid and “protects it by getting people off that — able-bodied, 30-year-old men … without dependents ought to be working."

Bannon says work requirements for able-bodied men should be minimum “40 to 60 hours”

Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon has attempted to present himself as both a defender of Medicaid and an advocate for large cuts to the program. One of the ways he tries to reconcile that contradiction is by dividing Medicaid users into the deserving and undeserving poor, using rhetoric strikingly similar to Fox’s.

On May 13, Bannon acknowledged that in the United States “we don’t have great jobs, and that’s why a lot of MAGA is on Medicaid."

“An able-bodied seaman ought to be putting in, I don’t know, 40-60 hours?” Bannon said, reminding his audience of his former career as a Naval officer. “If it’s a month they ought to just rack it up."

“If you’re able-bodied, you’ve got to show that you’ve got work requirements, minimum,” he continued.

In February, Bannon also mischaracterized the Medicaid population as laden with nonworking, able-bodied men.

“Right now, why are people on Medicaid? It's economic distress,” Bannon said. “They don't want to be on Medicaid. It's economic distress. You’ve got 18 million men not in the workforce. Able-bodied men — 18 million men in this nation not in the workforce."

Right-wing pundits push “able-bodied” trope without specifying gender

Some right-wing coverage of work requirements pushes the trope of the able-bodied, nonworking Medicaid recipient without specifying gender.

On May 19, Bannon took aim at the Medicaid expansion population, even as he acknowledged how many Trump supporters could get hurt by slashing the program.

“I’m one of the proponents of not cutting Medicaid to the bone because you’ve got a ton of working class people on Medicaid now,” he said.

“You’ve got the able-bodied that are not even doing basic checks because of what Biden put in,” he added, apparently referring to states that joined the Medicaid expansion during Biden’s term.

The following day, Fox News anchor Martha MacCallum claimed that “Medicaid was designed for low-income families with children, pregnant women, the elderly, people with disabilities, and people in need of long-term care."

“It was not designed for able-bodied people who can work and aren't working,” she continued, adding that the government should make sure only “people who deserve these benefits can get them."

On May 15, the Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro devoted nearly five minutes to reading and praising an op-ed in The New York Times written by four top Trump administration officials in support of work requirements.

Shapiro argued that for able-bodied people who aren’t working, it’s “not because of lack of job opportunity,” and concluded by telling Medicaid recipients to “get off your butt and work."

Taking Arkansas’ disastrous experiment nationwide

The op-ed from the Trump officials that Shapiro endorsed relied heavily on a report from a conservative think tank, the American Enterprise Institute. The report found that “Medicaid work requirements would target a large number of recipients, many of whom do not currently work a sufficient number of hours to comply.” The author acknowledged his finding “appears to contrast with the conclusions of some similar analyses, which suggest that most Medicaid recipients who can work, do work.” (Hyperlinks in original.)

Given that discrepancy, it’s worth examining AEI’s record on the issue. In 2018, AEI published a blog headlined “The Truth About Medicaid Work Requirements,” which discussed the first Trump administration’s approval of Arkansas’ request to mandate work requirements for its Medicaid population.

“Critics have warned of catastrophe” that will “threaten the well-being of low-income Americans,” the article states, before adding, “A closer look at what the states are actually proposing suggests these claims are overblown."

“It’s hard to imagine why those not exempt could not easily meet these requirements,” the piece concludes.

AEI’s predictions proved totally wrong. When Arkansas followed through and mandated work requirements for Medicaid in 2018, more than 18,000 recipients — roughly 1 in 4 statewide — lost their coverage, even though “more than 95% of the target population appeared to meet the requirements or qualify for an exemption,” according to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

There were myriad reasons for the program’s catastrophic failure. The NEJM study found that “the implementation of this policy was plagued by confusion among many enrollees,” and a “lack of Internet access was also a barrier to reporting information to the state."

Research from liberal think tank the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities further found that people “who were supposed to be exempted from submitting monthly proof of their work hours were not always shielded from losing coverage."

“People were confused because of the different types of exemptions that were available and varying timelines for re-verifying different exemptions,” CBPP concluded.

And the policy also failed on its own terms. As the NEJM study noted, the study didn’t find “any significant change in employment” or in the amount “of hours worked or overall rates of community engagement activities."

Illustratively, AEI reacted to the NEJM study — which undermined the arguments the conservative think tank had put forward — by simply dismissing it. In a 2023 blog, AEI wrote that the study “attempted to assess the effects of Medicaid work requirements on employment, but challenges associated with implementing the policy and studying its effects make those results difficult to interpret."

It’s safe to say that for the more than 18,000 Arkansans who lost their Medicaid, the ultimate effect of the work requirement mandate was not difficult to interpret. Right-wing media figures now want to take that disastrous experiment nationwide, all to fund a tax cut that will overwhelmingly benefit the extremely wealthy. Attacking the trope of the able-bodied man who refuses to work is simply their latest tactic.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Fox Strains To Justify Trump Extending His Tax Cut For Wealthiest

Fox Strains To Justify Trump Extending His Tax Cut For Wealthiest

Fox News personalities have gone all in supporting President Donald Trump’s plan to extend his unpopular 2017 tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, offering a hodgepodge of justifications for why it’s necessary to keep taxes low for rich people and businesses as Congress moves to slash billions in social safety net programs.

Fox’s charm offensive comes as congressional Republicans debate the fine points of the looming budget, including how deeply they’ll reduce spending on Medicaid and nutrition assistance programs for working class families to offset the lost tax revenue. The two chambers have passed separate budget outlines, and both have Medicaid and other social safety net programs in their sights.

Extending Trump’s 2017 giveaway to the ultrawealthy

If the Republican Party were a factory, perhaps its only reliably produced widget would be regressive tax legislation. During Trump’s first term, his tax law — the main legislative achievement prior to the COVID-19 pandemic — primarily benefited the wealthy, with the astronomically rich realizing the greatest gains.

According to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, the top one percent of taxpayers were expected to pay about $61,000 less in taxes on average as a result of the law, and the top 0.1 percent could expect an average of about $252,000 in tax savings. By contrast, the bottom 60 percent of tax filers were expected to average less than $1,000 in relief — with the bottom 20 percent averaging a paltry $70 in tax savings.

Expert analysis shows that making Trump’s first term tax cuts permanent would exacerbate wealth inequality and mainly benefit the richest people in the United States. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found that if Congress made the 2017 law permanent “the richest 1 percent of Americans would receive $44.1 billion in tax cuts” as a class, and would benefit from “an average tax cut of nearly $26,000.” As with the 2017 bill, the bottom 60 percent would save about $1,000 or less per year.

Large corporations also laughed all the way to the bank. A separate ITEP report found that Trump’s 2017 cuts meant that the country’s “largest, consistently profitable corporations saw their effective tax rates fall from an average of 22.0 percent to an average of 12.8 percent.” That same group of 296 firms saved a cool $240 billion in taxes from 2018 to 2021 relative to what they would have paid absent Trump’s giveaway.

Now, as Trump’s tariff policies threaten the domestic and international economy, Fox News appears determined to ensure the richest people in the country continue to benefit at the expense of working people.

Fox personalities oppose increasing top tax rates on moral grounds

All signs suggest that the eventual tax policy Trump and congressional Republicans enact will be a boon for the wealthy. Still, several Fox News figures reacted with horror to leaks from the White House that the president was potentially considering an increase in tax rates for top earners. Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon has been pushing to let the tax cuts expire for those in high-income brackets, and some within the White House have argued in favor of raising taxes on people who take home more than $1 million per year.

That outcome was always exceedingly unlikely — Trump put the notion to bed during a recent Oval Office presser — but even a whiff of progressive taxation was too much for Fox pundits.

On April 15 — Tax Day — Fox Business host and former Trump economic adviser Larry Kudlow appeared on Special Report With Bret Baier and offered a familiar argument against raising taxes on the wealthy.

“I thought the Republicans wanted to reward success, not punishing it,” Kudlow said. “This loose talk about a higher top — another new bracket for millionaires — I don’t think it’s a crime to be a millionaire by the way, small businesses would pay this top bracket. I do not understand this.”

“I can't believe Mr. Trump is going to go along with this,” Kudlow added. “He campaigned on, you know, extending his tax cuts.”

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Right-Wing Media Figures Defamed IRS To Benefit The Super-Rich

Right-Wing Media Figures Defamed IRS To Benefit The Super-Rich

Right-wing media figures have spent years attacking the Internal Revenue Service, including spreading conspiracy theories about armed agents targeting conservatives. Now, President Donald Trump is gutting the agency in a move that experts say will benefit the richest of the rich in the United States.

According to The Washington Post, the IRS’ “burgeoning efforts to more closely inspect the taxes of some of the country’s richest people and most powerful companies are stalling because of layoffs imposed by the Trump administration."

The Post went on to report that the IRS had fired “7 percent of its roughly 100,000-person workforce in February, including at least 5,000 in the enforcement and collections divisions,” and that “tax experts say the cuts undermine the agency’s much-touted effort to crack down on wealthier Americans — who for years have faced slimmer and slimmer odds of being audited."

The Trump administration’s hobbling of the agency follows years of attacks on the IRS by right-wing media — most notably by spreading a myth that the Biden administration was planning to hire 87,000 armed agents to investigate and persecute conservatives. A Biden-era law did increase funding for the IRS, but didn’t specify the number of new employees and certainly didn’t mandate that they carry weapons. The false number comes from a Treasury Department report that suggested how many total employees the IRS could hire over 10 years to “maintain current levels,” according to PolitiFact. And, crucially, the new hires were tasked with investigating high-income tax avoiders.

Right-wing media attacked Biden-era funding for IRS to go after wealthy tax cheats

In August 2022, Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act into law, adding $80 billion to the IRS’ budget to go after wealthy tax cheats. That month, Fox News repeated the falsehood that the IRA added 87,000 IRS agents more than 200 times, including at least 40 instances of falsely saying the agents would be armed.

Host Laura Ingraham said the IRS was the “new Gestapo,” and host Brian Kilmeade claimed “Joe Biden’s new army” is going to “hunt down and kill middle class taxpayers.” (In fact, then-Treasury Secretary Janet Yellin instructed the IRS not to increase audits for filers making less than $400,000 annually.)

Former Fox News marquee star Tucker Carlson repeated the armed-agents conspiracy theory at least nine times, in one instance telling his audience Biden was hiring “87,000 armed IRS agents to make sure you obey.” Earlier that month, Carlson falsely claimed that the IRS was being used “as a military agency."

Turning Point USA founder and MAGA influencer Charlie Kirk said on his radio show that the “87,000 new IRS agents will be used to go after mom-and-pop restaurants, donors to MAGA candidates, people like you,” and that their assignment was to target “dissidents."

Fox ignored IRS collection of back taxes from the wealthy — while demonizing immigrants

The attacks continued throughout the rest of Biden’s term. In January 2023, right-wing outlets rehashed the 87,000 armed-agents myth as House Republicans voted to slash IRS funding. That fall, conservative pundits cheered on newly minted Speaker of the House Mike Johnson’s attempts to cut IRS funding. On November 20, Ingraham again accused the IRS of “targeting conservative groups."

In February 2024, Fox News almost entirely ignored a report from the IRS and the Treasury Department that found the agency was “poised to take in hundreds of billions of dollars more in overdue and unpaid taxes than previously anticipated,” according to The Associated Press. As Media Matters reported at the time, Fox spent only 5 minutes discussing the report — which estimated the government would be able to collect $56 billion per year over 10 years — and 55 minutes criticizing a New York City program to provide migrants with prepaid credit cards that cost $53 million.

Right-wing media pushed tax avoidance for the ultra-rich, austerity for the working class

The long-running right-wing media campaign against the IRS has always had one clear goal: to protect the ultrawealthy from IRS enforcement. The Trump administration is now realizing that goal. The recent Washington Post article reported that a West Virginia revenue agent said some of the recently “laid-off employees had about 40 cases between them, each looking at people making $400,000 or more.” Some reports now estimate that the Trump administration could ultimately fire half of the IRS’ 100,000 person workforce.

The programs that Trump is eviscerating have already been successful. As of last July, the IRS had collected more than $1 billion in back taxes from wealthy individuals and families. Right-wing media figures have cheered on these cuts, which will primarily benefit rich tax cheats, as they simultaneously push for austerity measures for the working class.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Russ Vought

Project 2025 Operative Wrecking Consumer Finance Protection Bureau

The new head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — a former top architect in the controversial transition plan known as Project 2025 — reportedly told its employees on February 10 to “not perform any work tasks this week,” at least temporarily shuttering an agency that has been the target of right-wing media attacks for years.

Russ Vought, who also serves as the director of the Office of Management and Budget, wrote over the weekend that the CFPB “will not be taking its next draw of unappropriated funding because it is not 'reasonably necessary' to carry out its duties.”

The CFPB has saved working Americans tens of billions of dollars since it was founded in 2011, including more than $6 billion in annual overdraft fees alone from 2019-2023. Calling it “one of Wall Street’s most feared regulators,” The New York Times reported on February 9 that the bureau’s success has put it “squarely in the Trump administration’s cross hairs.”

It has clawed back $21 billion for consumers. It slashed overdraft fees, reformed the student loan servicing market, transformed mortgage lending rules and forced banks and money transmitters to compensate fraud victims.
It may no longer be able to carry out that work.
…
In less than 36 hours, Mr. Vought threw the agency into chaos. On Saturday, he ordered the bureau’s 1,700 employees to stop nearly all their work and announced plans to cut off the agency’s funding. Then on Sunday, he closed the bureau’s headquarters for the coming week. Workers who tried to retrieve their laptops from the office were turned away, employees said.

Now, Vought appears to be fulfilling a Project 2025 promise — and a longtime right-wing media goal — by taking an axe to the CFPB.

Vought and Project 2025 envision massive White House power grab

Prior to joining the Trump administration, Vought founded the Center for Renewing America, one of more that 100 conservative organizations on the advisory board of Project 2025. He also wrote the chapter in Project 2025’s policy book, Mandate for Leadership, on the Executive Office of the President of the United States, calling “to bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will.”

Vought laid bare Project 2025’s broad ambitions in a secretly recorded video last year, saying that he and his collaborators had prepared “about 350 different documents that are regulations and things of that nature that are — we’re planning for the next administration.”

The Trump administration has already begun following through on Project 2025’s goals, and dismantling the CFPB is no different. Mandate for Leadership refers to the bureau as a “highly politicized, damaging, and utterly unaccountable federal agency” that is “unconstitutional,” writing that the “next conservative President should order the immediate dissolution of the agency—pull down its prior rules, regulations and guidance, return its staff to their prior agencies and its building to the General Services Administration.”

In his dual role at the top of OMB and the CFPB, Vought is well-positioned to enact this sweeping agenda, and he is already taking steps that would amount to a massive power grab for Trump’s White House.

Vought and his colleagues at the Center for Renewing America are leading supporters of a radical theory that the executive branch can unilaterally refuse to spend money allocated by Congress. Toward that end, Vought issued an OMB memo that temporarily froze all federal funding. (The memo was later retracted after widespread backlash.)

Vought outlined his extreme vision for expansive control in a recent interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

“There are no independent agencies,” Vought said, specifically mentioning the CFPB among others. “So there may be different strategies with each one of them about how you dismantle them, but as an administration, the whole notion of an independent agency should be thrown out.”

Right-wing media have long attacked the CFPB

Right-wing media figures have targeted the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau since its inception in the wake of the Great Recession.

In 2015, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board attacked the CFPB for its multiyear investigation into racially discriminatory car financing practices. The Journal’s board called the effort an “outrageous regulatory campaign” and called on Congress to implement additional hurdles to the CFPB’s enforcement capacity. The CFPB ultimately clawed back tens of millions of dollars for racial minorities who had been subject to higher-than-average loan rates across several lenders.

In November 2017, Fox News anchor Dana Perino invited a guest on to criticize the CFPB without disclosing that they represented clients opposed to the bureau’s regulations. Right-wing blog The Federalist published an article the same day with the headline: “This Is The Perfect Time To Destroy The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.” A day later on Fox News, never-Trump conservative Jonah Goldberg referred to the CFPB as a “hate crime against the Constitution.”

More recently, right-wing media figures targeted a Biden-era initiative at the CFPB that went after predatory credit card gouging schemes and other junk fees that cost working people in the United States more than $10 billion every year.

Trump administration following through on Project 2025’s goals

“This morning he's [President Biden] talking about late fees, and he's talking about corporate America, and it's companies' fault that people are facing inflation,” Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo said. The next day she again criticized Biden’s focus on “late fees,” directing her viewers’ anger toward undocumented immigrants instead of credit card companies.

On February 5, Fox published an opinion piece calling for Trump to “delete Elizabeth Warren’s failed experiment once and for all,” claiming that “CFPB is doing more harm than good, and its dissolution is not just a policy preference but an economic necessity.”

As news of Vought’s takeover broke, several conservative outlets cheered what they saw as the demise of the CFPB. The Daily Wire framed Vought’s actions in its headline as the “Latest Trump Admin Move To Cut Government Waste.” Conspiracy theory website The Gateway Pundit celebrated: “The corrupt agency which was the ‘brainchild’ of Senator Elizabeth ‘Pocahontas’ Warren (D-MA) could be on its last legs.” The think tank Vought founded also weighed in, publishing a white paper titled: “The CFPB Should Be Shut Down.”

On Fox News, host Laura Ingraham defended the good name of several financial institutions against the intrusions of the CFPB.

“Now, to give you a sense of how partisan that place has become, in December its chief rushed to file several lawsuits against the payment platform Zelle, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo, alleging this amorphous failure to protect consumers,” Ingraham said. “It's ridiculous. And it amounts to another shakedown of business by anti-capitalist crusaders. That’s all it is.”

Ingraham was a lonely voice at Fox News celebrating the news, despite network figures campaigning against the CFPB for years. A Media Matters study found that between Vought’s appointment to head the agency on February 7 and 3 p.m ET on February 10, “network personalities mentioned the CFPB just 5 times for a total of about 40 seconds.”

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Russ Vought

Project 2025 Plotter Is Behind Federal Funding Freeze

A new memo issued by the Trump administration directing the federal government to temporarily cease disbursing billions of dollars in funds appears to draw on arguments made by Russ Vought, the president’s selectee to run the Office of Management and Budget.

Vought was a primary architect of Project 2025, a sprawling effort organized by The Heritage Foundation to provide policy and staffing recommendations for President Donald Trump’s second term. In addition to that role, Vought is also the founder of the Center for Renewing America, a MAGA-aligned think tank that has spent over a year arguing that the president can unilaterally refuse to spend funds allocated by Congress, an authority known as the impoundment power that was severely curtailed by Congress in 1974.

The new Trump administration memo was issued by Matthew Vaeth, acting director of OMB pending Vought’s confirmation vote. The document calls for federal agencies to “temporarily pause all activities related to obligation or disbursement of all Federal financial assistance.”

“The use of Federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies is a waste of taxpayer dollars that does not improve the day-to-day lives of those we serve,” the memo states.

Although the two-page memo doesn’t use the term impoundment, law professor Steve Vladeck argued that the Trump administration is claiming “the unilateral power to at least temporarily ‘impound’ tens of billions of dollars of appropriated funds—in direct conflict with Congress’s constitutional power of the purse, and in even more flagrant violation of the Impoundment Control Act of 1974.” The existence of the document was first reported by journalist Marisa Kabas and later confirmed by The Washington Post and The New York Times. (OMB issued a follow-up memo claiming the freeze does “not apply across-the-board” and withheld funds are “not an impoundment under the Impoundment Control Act.”)

Direct effects of the memo are unknown but they could be highly detrimental

“Experts said the memo as written was poised to bring a rapid halt to scores of federal functions, from assistance to homeless shelters to financial aid for college students,” the Post reported. “Health grants distributed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and state aid for disaster reconstruction, might face delays.”

The memo appears to exempt Social Security and Medicare recipients, and it says the halt “does not include assistance provided directly to individuals.” It isn’t clear whether Medicaid recipients will be affected, although some early reports indicated that payments had been disrupted.

The New York Times additionally reported that transportation funding and loans to small businesses could also be affected. In a statement to the Times, Diane Yentel, the chief executive of the National Council of Nonprofits, warned: “From pausing research on cures for childhood cancer to halting food assistance, safety from domestic violence and closing suicide hotlines, the impact of even a short pause in funding could be devastating and cost lives.”

HuffPost reported already that some payments for Head Start — which funds preschool for low-income families — are at risk of being delayed. HuffPost also reported that officials at Meals on Wheels, the food program for elderly Americans, are worried they could face funding disruptions.

Vought long pushed for a radical interpretation of the impoundment power

In June 2023, Vought posted on X (formerly Twitter), “Making Impoundment Great Again!” Days later, the Center for Renewing America’s X account wrote that “the impoundment power is our secret weapon to totally dismantle the WOKE & WEAPONIZED federal bureaucracy.” The CRA post linked to a Real Clear Politics article quoting Vought as saying, “When you think that a law is unconstitutional” — referring to the Impoundment Control Act — the response should be to “push the envelope.”

In July 2023, CRA senior fellow Jeffrey Clark — who as a DOJ attorney attempted to overturn the 2020 election by pushing a fake elector scheme at the end of Trump’s first term — appeared on Steve Bannon’s War Room to argue against the Impoundment Control Act.

“So what I’m working on, essentially, are the constitutional arguments for why that was wrong and various ways in which the Impoundment Control Act is just flatly unconstitutional,” Clark said.

Vought continued to beat the drum months later.

“The loss of impoundment authority — which 200 years of presidents enjoyed — was the original sin in eliminating the ability for a branch-on-branch to control spending,” Vought said the following February on Fox Business.

In June 2024, the Center for Renewing America released a white paper arguing that the Impoundment Control Act — passed following President Richard Nixon’s refusal to spend funds for environmental, transportation, and educational priorities — is unconstitutional and a break with legal precedent. The authors of that paper later wrote articles for The Hill and right-wing blog The Federalist making similar claims.

Vought highlighted the centrality of the impoundment power to his think tank’s project. “Why did we found the Center for Renewing America?” he wrote on X. “To write papers like this.”

During Trump’s first term, he attempted to unilaterally withhold roughly $400 billion in foreign aid funding for Ukraine, leading to his first impeachment for violating the impoundment law.

During Vought’s recent confirmation hearing to serve as director of OMB during Trump’s second administration — a job he also held during Trump’s first term — Vought refused to promise to follow the Impoundment Control Act on the grounds that both he and Trump believe it is illegal.

Last August, Vought was filmed in an undercover video claiming that he and his Project 2025 collaborators had written “about 350 different documents that are regulations and things of that nature” in preparation for a possible Trump victory. He said in the video that one of his goals is to “end multiculturalism” in America.

The OMB memo has triggered a massive reaction across the political spectrum. Bannon celebrated the move on War Room, while Senate Democrats are calling for a delay to Vought’s confirmation vote following the news. A former OMB official said the memo read like a “hostage note written directly by Russ Vought.”

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Mass Deportation May Rely On Extremist Sheriffs And Snitch Bounties

Mass Deportation May Rely On Extremist Sheriffs And Snitch Bounties

Organizations on the advisory board of Project 2025, a sprawling plan to provide the incoming Republican presidential administration with policy and staffing recommendations, have responded to President-elect Donald Trump’s victory by promoting extreme approaches to carrying out his promise to deport upward of 10 million undocumented immigrants.

Right-wing think tanks the Center for Immigration Studies, The Claremont Institute, and the Center for Renewing America have all advanced anti-immigrant policies since Trump’s win. Some of their proposals include offering bounties for information on suspected undocumented people, conscripting far-right so-called “constitutional sheriffs” to serve as immigration enforcers, and attempting to make life so miserable for out-of-status immigrants that they flee the country — referred to euphemistically as “self-deportation.”

Trump has already named the two top officials who will be tasked with carrying out his mass deportation plan, and they both have direct connections to Project 2025. Tom Homan, Trump’s pick for “border czar,” is a visiting fellow at The Heritage Foundation, Project 2025’s lead organizer. He is also credited as a contributor in Project 2025’s policy book, Mandate for Leadership, which proposes drastic cuts to legal immigration in addition to harsh crackdowns on undocumented people. Homan has promised to “to run the biggest deportation operation this country has ever seen.”

Alongside Homan will be Stephen Miller — a top architect of Trump’s Muslim ban and family separation policies — who will serve as deputy chief of staff and homeland security adviser in the new Trump administration. Miller and his conservative advocacy organization, America First Legal, attempted to distance themselves from Project 2025 amid growing backlash to the effort, but their fingerprints are all over it. Miller appeared in a Project 2025 promotional video, a top AFL executive authored a chapter in Mandate, and AFL was on the advisory board until it removed itself following public outcry.

But the likely influence that Project 2025 partners will have on Trump’s looming immigration policy extends far beyond Homan and Miller. Below are some of the coalition’s more extreme proposals.

Center for Immigration Studies pushes bounties, self-deportation

The Center for Immigration Studies is one of the three main branches of the Tanton network, named after John Tanton, whom the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as “the racist architect of the modern anti-immigrant movement.” The SPLC has designated CIS as an anti-immigrant hate group.

On November 13, CIS published a blog under the headline “The Trump Deportation Plan: Easier Done than Said.” The article argues for a stricter version of E-Verify — which uses Social Security data to determine employment eligibility — called G-Verify, which would require employers to electronically submit the eligibility form to the Department of Homeland Security.

The blog acknowledges that these programs “would not capture unauthorized migrants who work ‘off the books’” — a common critique of E-Verify, which critics argue actually pushes immigrant workers into unregulated markets.

That’s where the bounties come in. CIS continues, “However, lawful employees, business competitors, customers, or even family members who are aware of this unlawful practice might be willing to report the employer’s criminal practice to DHS in return for a small (say $2,000) reward and a promise of confidentiality.”

In another blog — this time for the National Review — CIS Executive Director Mark Krikorian revived the idea of “self-deportation,” which is to say coercing undocumented people into leaving the country by making life miserable for them.“

Persuading illegal aliens to go home on their own saves the government time and money,” Krikorian wrote.

“And it’s also preferable for the illegal aliens themselves, allowing them to return on their own terms,” he continued, “They can settle their affairs, pack up their belongings, and go home for Christmas — and not come back.” After arguing that immigrants leave the country all the time, he suggested that one reason might be that “little Mario came home one day from P.S. 666 insisting on being called Maria.”

Krikorian has been joined in resurrecting this once-radical proposition by Heritage Foundation President — and Project 2025 evangelist — Kevin Roberts, who recently pushed it on The Vince Coglianese Show. While praising his colleague Tom Homan as a fantastic hire, Roberts argued that “such a big part of this is trying to inspire self-deportation.”

As a sign of how far contemporary politics have shifted toward the nativist right, it’s worth remembering that Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) was roundly excoriated for proposing “self-deportation” as a central plank of his immigration plan during the 2012 presidential race. He was denounced at the time by liberal magazines, mainstream outlets like the Washington Post editorial board, and conservatives including former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and a little magazine called the National Review.

In another blog published following Trump’s win, CIS argued that “the time may have come for President Biden or President-elect Trump to deploy the [Alien Enemies Act] against Iranian nationals residing in the U.S.” Per the author’s own description, invoking the act would allow “the president to summarily detain and remove nationals of enemy nations” — i.e., Iran. As the Brennan Center for Justice notes, the Alien Enemies Act “is best known for its role in Japanese internment, a shameful part of U.S. history for which Congress, presidents, and the courts have apologized.”

The Claremont Institute: Conscript right-wing sheriffs for deportations

The Claremont Institute is a MAGA-aligned think tank that publishes the right-wing blog The American Mind. While the conservative authors featured on The American Mind may not necessarily speak for the institution, they offer a clear window into the Trump movement.

On November 8, The American Mind posted a blog headlined “Mr. President, Deputize Your Local Sheriffs.” The piece was written by Kyle Shideler of the Center for Security Policy, an SPLC-designated hate group.

“President Trump should look to sheriffs to fill U.S. Marshal roles,” Shideler argued, for the purpose of facilitating “the cross-deputization of local sheriffs’ deputies and police officers along the Southern border, which is needed to address prohibitions against state and local officials enforcing federal immigration law.”

“That manpower will be required if Trump is to meet his campaign promise of securing the border and expelling millions of illegal aliens,” he continued.

Shideler further suggested that “conservative organizations” could “identify local law enforcement leaders who support the Trump agenda” — adding that “those who have participated in the Claremont Institute’s Sheriffs Fellowship would be an excellent place to start.”

Jessica Pishko — author of a recent book about sheriffs and right-wing movements — reported on Claremont’s inaugural sheriff fellows program in 2022. She revealed that it “presented for the sheriffs two sets of people in America: those communities sheriffs should police as freely and brutally as they see fit, and those ‘real’ Americans who should be considered virtually above the law.”

As Pishko and others have noted, many of Claremont’s honorees adhere to the far-right ideology of the constitutional sheriffs movement, which holds that sheriffs “should be the ultimate law enforcement authority in the U.S.”

Center for Renewing America defends “Operation Wetback”

The Center for Renewing America is a MAGA-aligned think tank founded by Russ Vought, a Christian nationalist and top architect of Project 2025.

On November 8, CRA published a white paper titled “Primer: U.S. Deportations — A Longstanding & Normal Process” which attempts to normalize and sanitize an earlier mass deportation undertaking officially known as “Operation Wetback” (though CRA’s authors don’t use that racist slur).

The authors argue that “mass deportations are a normal part of the president’s toolbox.”

“For example, in 1954, the U.S. government conducted a campaign that resulted in the mass deportation of Mexican nationals—1,100,000 persons,” they continue.

Left unmentioned is the humanitarian catastrophe unleashed by the mass deportations. As Dara Lind wrote for Vox when Trump praised the Eisenhower-era mass deportations in 2015, immigrants were “deported en masse: by train, by truck, by plane, and by cargo ship.” She adds that a “congressional investigation described conditions on one cargo ship as a ‘penal hell ship’ and compared it to a slave ship on the Middle Passage.”

In one mass raid, 88 people died of “sun stroke as a result of a round-up that had taken place in 112-degree heat,” according to a definitive account by Mae Ngai.

And as Professors Louis Hyman and Natasha Iskander argue, Operation Wetback was largely a propaganda campaign that “enforced the idea that American citizens are white.”

Nevertheless, the 1954 operation has become a touchstone for the Trumpist right. As but one example, Stephen Miller recently cited the “Eisenhower model” as justification for the potential deployment of the U.S. military “in a large-scale deportation operation.” CRA’s anodyne description of the 1950s deportations shows how embedded this history has become in the MAGA movement.

Project 2025 embeds itself in Trump 2.0

Trump’s new administration and its partners in the conservative policy ecosystem are laying the groundwork for the most nativist, xenophobic government in decades. From Homan and Miller to the think tanks providing them scaffolding, every sign suggests that the Trump administration will terrorize, surveil, and deport immigrants and their communities in record numbers. And Project 2025 and its partners will almost certainly continue to provide a roadmap for the draconian crackdown.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Trump Set To Name Project 2025 Architest As Top Budget Official

Trump Set To Name Project 2025 Architest As Top Budget Official

President-elect Donald Trump is planning to appoint Russ Vought, a Christian nationalist who has plotted to remake the federal workforce in MAGA’s image, to serve as his administration’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, according to CBS News. Vought held the same position during Trump’s first term. Since leaving office he has been a leading architect of Project 2025, a sprawling plan to provide staffing and policy options to the next Republican administration.

In his role at Project 2025, Vought was instrumental in ensuring that decimating the ranks of federal civil service became a conservative priority. He wrote the second chapter in Project 2025’s policy book — Mandate for Leadership — titled: “Executive Office of the President of the United States.” In it, he argued that “a President today assumes office to find a sprawling federal bureaucracy that all too often is carrying out its own policy plans and preferences—or, worse yet, the policy plans and preferences of a radical, supposedly ‘woke’ faction of the country.”

As part of his anti-woke crusade, Vought has repeatedly defended and promoted Christian nationalism, at one point calling for an “army” of right-wing activists with “biblical worldview” to staff the next Republican administration. He wrote an op-ed for Newsweek in 2021 with the headline “Is There Anything Actually Wrong With 'Christian Nationalism?’” More recently, Politico reported that a document from the Center for Renewing America — a MAGA-aligned think tank Vought founded — listed “Christian nationalism” as a top priority for a second Trump term.

While at the helm of the Center for Renewing America, Vought has been outspoken in his advocacy of Schedule F — a scheme to reclassify career civil servants as political appointees. Trump attempted to implement Schedule F in the waning days of his first term, but its effects were blunted by his loss in 2020. If his incoming administration moves forward with the plan, which seems all but inevitable, as many as 50,000 career staffers could be replaced with MAGA loyalists. (Some other estimates put the number closer to 20,000.)

Vought has championed the use of congressional rules to defund and remove individual government employees for punishment and deploying “ideological purity tests” to ensure federal workers are loyal to Trump.

During a recent interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Vought argued that the “whole notion of an independent agency should be thrown out.”

Following a broad backlash to Project 2025, Vought was caught on hidden video discussing his work at the initiative and how it might play if Trump returned to the White House.

“Eighty percent of my time is working on the plans of what’s necessary to take control of these bureaucracies, and we are working doggedly on that,” Vought said. “Whether it’s destroying agencies’ notion of independence, that they’re independent from the president.”

In the interview, Vought claimed that he’d been working on “about 350 different documents that are regulations and things of that nature” for a future Trump administration.

“You may say, ‘OK, DHS, we want to have the largest deportation — what are your actual memos that a secretary sends out to do it?’ Like, there’s an executive order, regulations, secretarial memos,” Vought said. “Those are the types of things that need to be thought through so you’re not — you’re not having to scramble or do that later on.”

This early preparation includes creating documents to facilitate the “largest deportation in history” and to deploy the military to “maintain law and order” against civilian protesters. Vought elaborated that the mass deportations were part of a plan to “end multiculturalism” in the country.

As a hardline conservative, Vought has pushed to implement harsh austerity measures throughout the country. The Washington Post reported that Vought advocates for eliminating trillions of dollars in “anti-poverty programs such as housing, health care, and food assistance.” He has called for massive cuts to Medicaid and floated future cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

Toward that end, Vought and his colleagues at the Center for Renewing America are leading proponents of a radical interpretation of executive authority that claims the president can unilaterally refuse to spend money allocated by Congress. Known as the “impoundment” power, Vought and his fellow travelers assert that a 1974 law that mandates presidents spend money Congress has allocated — passed after President Richard Nixon refused to spend federal funds for clean water and schools — is unconstitutional.

This theory, if Trump acts on it, would centralize budgeting power within the Oval Office and tilt the balance of power between the president and Congress even further towards the executive branch.

Aside from slashing the United States’ very limited safety net, Vought’s think tank released a budget proposal for fiscal year 2023 that would unleash the FBI against Trump’s declared enemies and “thwart the increasing societal destruction caused by progressive policies at the state and local levels that have defunded police, refused to prosecute criminals, and released violent felons into communities.”

Now, as he reprises his role as the head of OMB, he will wield considerable influence within the Trump administration and will almost certainly play a central role in the likely purge of the federal workforce.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Right-Wing Media Spread Abortion Falsehoods After Trump's Debate Defeat

Right-Wing Media Spread Abortion Falsehoods After Trump's Debate Defeat

Right-wing media figures responded to former President Donald Trump’s poor debate performance on Tuesday night by spreading falsehoods about Minnesota’s abortion law.

During the debate, Trump made false and misleading assertions about legislation enacted by Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. “But her vice presidential pick says abortion in the ninth month is absolutely fine,” Trump said. “He also says execution after birth, it's execution, no longer abortion, because the baby is born, is okay.”

As ABC News moderator Linsey Davis noted after Trump’s comments, “There is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it's born.”

Trump’s comments about “abortion in the ninth month” are also misleading. In 2023, Walz signed the Protect Reproductive Options Act, or PRO Act, into law, further codifying the right to an abortion in Minnesota. As KARE11 reported this April, Minnesota healthcare providers performed only one third-trimester abortion in 2022, the most recent year for which data is available. The same was true in 2019 and 2020. In 2021, a single Minnesota resident was listed as having received a third-trimester abortion, but it was performed out of state. Generally, only about one percent of abortions nationwide occur after 21 weeks.

Despite clear evidence to the contrary, right-wing figures took Trump’s comments and ran with them.

Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade falsely claimed that under Walz, Minnesota performed five “abortions” after a child had been born — in other words, had committed the crime of infanticide. “It soon turned to the fact-checking on abortion, when it come to there’s no abortion after the ninth month, when, in fact, under Gov. Tim Walz, it happened at least five times in Minnesota,” Kilmeade said. “When a moderator … fact-checks you and the moderator is wrong, that's tough on a candidate.”

It’s not entirely clear what Kilmeade is referring to, but he is completely wrong on Minnesota’s abortion laws. In 2021, Minnesota recorded five instances of a “born-alive infant” following an abortion procedure; two were not viable, two were provided “comfort care,” and in the final instance, “fetal anomalies were reported resulting in death shortly after delivery.” In no case was a so-called post-birth abortion performed.

Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk also mischaracterized the 2023 Minnesota legislation, writing on X (formerly Twitter), “The left believes in legal infanticide.”

Contrary to Kirk’s claims, the 2023 law clearly states: “An infant who is born alive shall be fully recognized as a human person, and accorded immediate protection under the law.”

As 10News reported, citing a doctor who supports abortion rights, the law was designed to make “sure doctors aren't forced to prolong the suffering of an infant unable to live on its own.” An editorial in the Minneapolis Star Tribune further explained how the law’s changes supported families by not forcing “an infant with severe anomalies undergo extraordinary and futile medical care.”

Fox News co-host Kayleigh McEnany echoed Kirk’s mischaracterization of the Minnesota law. “Where was the question about Tim Walz allowing babies born alive after abortion to die in Minnesota and then removing reporting requirements?” McEnany wrote on X.

The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles similarly wrote, “Kamala’s own running mate repealed the legal requirement that physicians attempt to ‘preserve the life and health of the born alive infant.’”

Knowles’ colleague at The Daily Wire, Mary Margaret Olohan, did as well.

Right-wing radio host Erick Erickson made a similar claim, though did not specify that he was talking about Minnesota.

This line of attack against Walz isn’t new. In August, Fox’s McEnany made similar misleading claims, telling her viewers that “his abortion policy allows abortion until birth.”

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Kevin Roberts

Project 2025's Extreme Agenda Is An Attack On Unions And All Workers

Project 2025, a sprawling right-wing plan to provide policy and staffing to a future Republican president, proposes an extreme anti-worker agenda that would severely curtail unions’ ability to collectively bargain on behalf of their members and reverse gains organized labor has made in recent years. It would also weaken overtime regulations, give corporations wider latitude in misclassifying workers as independent contractors, and dismantle safety regulations that prohibit young people from working dangerous jobs.

The initiative’s policy book, Mandate for Leadership, is an attempt to roll back New Deal-era, working class victories by allowing state-level exemptions from the National Labor Relations Act and the Fair Labor Standards Act, and by creating nonunion “employee involvement organizations” to undermine unions’ negotiating power. It additionally calls for sharp reductions in the budgets of the National Labor Relations Board and the Department of Labor and a freeze on new hires.

Project 2025 is organized by The Heritage Foundation and includes more than 100 conservative groups on its advisory board, which have collectively received more than $55 million from groups tied to conservative megadonors Leonard Leo and Charles Koch. Leo has been pushing the Supreme Court to further erode the power of organized labor, and the Koch family has waged a war on unions for more than 60 years.

Project 2025: Eviscerate overtime and dismantle pro-worker regulations

One central proposal in Mandate that illuminates Project 2025’s extreme anti-work posture is the suggestion that employers should be allowed to eviscerate overtime regulations and potentially withhold pay. The attacks on overtime take several forms, including a proposal to allow workers to accrue vacation instead of time-and-a-half compensation — but at least 40 percent of lower- and middle-income workers already don’t use their allotted paid time off. Under this policy employers could coerce workers into “voluntarily” selecting vacation that they’re either formally or informally prohibited from taking, thereby denying them overtime compensation.

Project 2025 further recommends that workers and bosses agree to extend the overtime threshold to a period of two weeks or one month. The policy would empower management to overload busy weeks with extra-long shifts and take advantage of slow periods through under-scheduling — effectively eliminating overtime altogether.

Another related attack on overtime comes in the form of allowing workers to negotiate away national employment law rights like time-and-a-half pay in exchange for noncompensation benefits like “predictable scheduling.” Such a change could incentivize predatory scheduling practices in order to coerce workers to give up overtime. If that’s not enough, Mandate also suggests returning to a Trump-era regulation that would deny overtime to most employees making more than $679 per week or $35,000 annually, which would leave behind millions of workers.

At virtually every turn, Mandate for Leadership stacks the deck against workers, including opening up young people to exploitation in dangerous jobs.

  • It seeks to revert to a Trump-era law that allows employers to categorize workers as independent contractors, thus denying them benefits and legal protections extended to employees.
  • It significantly dismantles safety protections for workers by directing Congress and the Department of Labor to “exempt small business, first-time, non-willful violators from fines issued by the Occupational Health and Safety Administration.”
  • It argues that due to “worker shortages in dangerous fields,” with “parental consent and proper training, certain young adults should be allowed to learn and work in more dangerous occupations.” This proposal is even more alarming when paired with Mandate’s call to exempt states from the FLSA, which governs child labor laws.

Despite a superficial concern for workers from the MAGA movement, Project 2025’s recommendations would be disastrous for the working class and a boon to economic elites.

A return to company unionism

Project 2025 seeks to roll back New Deal-era labor victories by proposing that Congress “pass legislation allowing waivers from federal labor laws” — like the National Labor Relations Act and the Fair Labor Standards Act — “under certain conditions.” Allowing state-level exemptions to the NLRA and FLSA would almost certainly trigger a race-to-the-bottom dynamic, where firms relocate to states with the weakest (or nonexistent) labor protections at the expense of workers. That’s what happened in states that passed so-called “right-to-work” laws — which starve unions of resources by preventing them from collecting fees from all employees they represent, thereby creating a free-rider problem — where employers were able to depress wages and union membership.

Unions have made significant gains under the Biden administration’s National Labor Relations Board, which enforces labor law and investigates anti-union practices. That progress is largely thanks to NLRB general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo, who has taken an aggressive, pro-worker enforcement posture. Project 2025 promises to fire her on “Day One.” It also calls for reductions in the budgets of the NLRB and the Department of Labor to the “low end of the historical average,” as well as implementing a “hiring freeze for career officials.”

Mandate’s anti-unionism extends beyond funding cuts and a personnel freeze to attack unions at their core — most significantly, by suggesting that Congress “pass labor reforms that create non-union ‘employee involvement organizations.’” Although Mandate offers few details on what purpose these EIOs would serve, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) proposed similar legislation in 2022; his bill makes it explicit that these organizations “are not unions and ‘cannot enter into collective bargaining agreements.’” EIOs would signal a return to the days of company unionism, stripping power from workers by providing employers with what pro-labor think tank the People’s Policy Project calls “another union avoidance tool” and diluting the membership and voting power of actual unions. Like in Rubio’s bill, Mandate’s EIOs would place a “a non-voting, supervisory member” on the board of directors at large, publicly traded companies — an entirely powerless role incapable of advancing workers’ interests.

Project 2025 would further undermine unions by eliminating “card check” — where a majority of workers who have signed union authorization forms can ask their employer for voluntary recognition — and mandating “the secret ballot exclusively.” Although the idea of a secret ballot has the veneer of democracy, in practice it’s a power grab for management. By forcing organizers to go through the byzantine NLRB election process, an employer can buy itself time to wage an anti-union campaign and bog down the process, often through illegal means. A 2019 study found that employers violated labor laws in 41.5% of NLRB-supervised union elections in 2016 and 2017 and intimidated or coerced workers in nearly a third of all elections.

The structural power imbalance is exacerbated by the huge discrepancy in resources between the parties. Every year, employers spend more than $400 million just on consultants in their attempts to thwart union drives. When coupled with anti-worker harassment, that’s money well spent from the point of view of management. A 2022 study found that union elections through the NLRB were successful “in less than 10% of cases where the employer resists the organizing effort to the point that an unfair labor practice charge is filed.”

In 2023, the NLRB under Abruzzo provided unions with a major win by ruling that if an employer is found to have violated labor law during the course of an election campaign, it must immediately recognize the union — without requiring an election — and move to contract negotiations. Mandate would reverse that ruling.

Mandate additionally looks to roll back Biden administration NLRB protections for “protected concerted activity” — that is, actions workers take to better their working conditions, even outside of attempts to form a union. Project 2025 looks to return to the Trump administration’s interpretation, which took a very narrow view of what was protected and opened up workers to retaliation from their bosses for actions like discussing workplace safety concerns with fellow workers.

Project 2025’s war on organized labor in its own words

  • Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts: “Congress should rescind the federal charter of the National Education Association—the only union that enjoys a federal charter—no longer putting the federal imprimatur of support on the special interest group.” [Heritage.org, 1/9/24]
  • Jonathan Berry, author of the labor chapter in Mandate, writing at American Compass: “In practice, modern unions in the American private sector are beset by serious agency problems that limit their effectiveness as institutions for individual workers to share in the common good.” [American Compass, accessed 7/9/24]
  • The Heritage Foundation budget blueprint for fiscal years 2023: “The Department of Labor’s Women’s Bureau should be eliminated.” [Heritage.org, 2022]
  • Heritage: “How to Close Down the Department of Labor.” [Heritage.org, 10/19/95]
  • War Room host and key booster of Project 2025 Steve Bannon: “If Nevada is Close They Will Steal it with the Culinary Union.” [Gettr, 3/21/24; Media Matters, 11/9/23]
  • Stephen Moore, Heritage Foundation fellow: “Why Every State Should Guarantee the Right to Work.” [Heritage.org, 7/17/2014]
  • Claremont Review of Books, a media outlet affiliated with Project 2025 advisory board member the right-wing Claremont Institute: “Right-to-work laws make it easier for states to attract businesses, because many companies prefer to locate in right-to-work states, believing that unions not only drive up costs but reduce productivity with baroque work rules and adversarial stances.” [Claremont Review of Books, Summer 2015]

Go deeper into Project 2025’s attacks on workers

  • Jonathan Berry, author of Mandate’s chapter on labor, was a top official in the Labor Department under Trump — which was catastrophic for workers. Trump’s labor secretary, Eugene Scalia, was a “wrecking ball aimed at workers” who had spent decades in his career as a lawyer “helping corporations gut or evade government regulations, including worker protections.” During Scalia’s tenure, with Berry “overseeing all aspects of rulemaking and policy development,” millions of workers were denied overtime benefits. [The New Yorker, 10/19/20; Economic Policy Institute, 9/24/19; Mandate for Leadership, 2023]
  • Unions are building power in the United States, but Project 2025 would likely curtail the National Labor Relations Board’s progress. A June study found that “workers today have a better chance of winning their union representation election than at any point in the past 15 years, with a win rate of more than 70 percent.” Project 2025’s promise to remove NLRB General Counsel Abruzzo, alongside its other anti-union proposals, would likely halt those gains and result in fewer employers being held accountable for their anti-worker, law-breaking tactics. [Center for American Progress, 6/20/24]
  • Mandate for Leadership’s policies could allow firms to discriminate against LGBTQ communities while at work. The guidebook recommends restricting the Supreme Court’s ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County — which extended civil rights protections to gay and trans people — to apply only to hiring and firing decisions. Other types of workplace discrimination, such as enforcing dress codes or denying workers access to a bathroom that corresponds to their gender identity, would theoretically be permitted under this regulatory regime. [GLAAD, 6/24/24; Mandate for Leadership, 2023]
  • Project 2025 further opens the door to workplace discrimination against LGBTQ people by pushing a false definition of so-called “biological binary” sex. “The President should direct agencies to rescind regulations interpreting sex discrimination provisions as prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status, sex characteristics, etc,” the book states, adding: “The President should direct agencies to focus their enforcement of sex discrimination laws on the biological binary meaning of ‘sex.’” [Mandate for Leadership, 2023]
  • Like other sections of the document, the chapter on labor takes aim at abortion rights. It argues that Congress and the Department of Labor should “clarify” that states have the power to “to restrict abortion, surrogacy, or other anti-life [employee] ‘benefits.’” [Mandate for Leadership, 2023]

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.