Six months into Donald Trump’s second presidency, an unhinged MAGA media is infested with calls for the arrest of former President Barack Obama — and one prominent right-wing commentator is even floating legal consequences for journalists who debunk their twisted rationale.
On July 18, amid a Trump administration effort to stave off a MAGA revolt over its handling of disclosures related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard released documents she claimed proved the existence of “a treasonous conspiracy” by the Obama administration following the 2016 election against Trump, claiming she had asked the Justice Department to investigate further. The president piled on in remarks to the press on July 22, claiming that “we caught Barack Hussein Obama” and accusing him of “treason.”
This argument is based on either malice or stupidity. Gabbard is conflating the findings of a December 2016 document showing that the intelligence community did not assess that the Russian government had hacked election systems and changed vote totals to benefit Trump with those of a January 2017 assessment that the Russian government had sought to influence the campaign to benefit Trump by, among other things, hacking Democratic email servers and releasing the contents.
Based on that faulty premise, Gabbard accused Obama and his advisers of subverting the intelligence community for political aims. But the December 2016 assessment is consistent with what the Obama administration was saying publicly at the time, while the findings of the January 2017 assessment were reiterated in Trump administration reports by the Justice Department as well as a Senate committee helmed at the time by current Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Indeed, that committee reviewed the January 2017 intelligence community analysis and concluded it was an “impressive accomplishment” that “reflects proper analytic tradecraft” and “provides a proper representation of the intelligence” and that the analysts who produced it faced “no politically motivated pressure.”
Members of the right-wing media ecosystem, with few exceptions, do not care about these facts, and they are using incredibly demagogic language to rile up their audiences as they call for political retribution.
Benny Johnson is floating a “military tribunal” for Obama; Mike Davis says the former president should “lawyer up”; Charlie Kirk wants “perp walks”; Liz Wheeler is demanding that the charges be not “perjury” but “treason”; Jesse Watters is asking a U.S. senator whether Obama should “go to prison.” They have apparently learned nothing from overpromising on Epstein only for the Trump administration to under-deliver when the facts couldn’t match the MAGA narrative.
Indeed, according to Mollie Hemingway, editor-in-chief of The Federalist and a Fox contributor, even typing the preceding paragraphs casting doubt on the validity of Gabbard’s argument should expose me to legal exposure. In a July 22 thread, she described Gabbard’s “revelations” as “the biggest scandal in our history” and condemned media outlets for “ignoring” and “downplaying” it.
“Every time the Washington Post, CNN, the New York Times, Margaret Brennan, The Atlantic, etc., lie and say this story is not a big deal, they are perpetuating their seditious conspiracy,” she added. “Creative minds should think about what legal exposure they have for their role in this.”
Hemingway went on to describe those outlets and journalists as “co-conspirators” in the alleged plot. She did not identify the legal consequences she believes they should face. Nor is it clear what this legal argument would mean for conservatives like her Fox colleague Andrew McCarthy or Eli Lake, who criticized Gabbard’s conclusions, or the right-wing outlets which published their assessments, Rich Lowry’s National Review and Bari Weiss’ The Free Press.
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Trump’s diverse right-wing coalition and the fractured media ecosystem he unified during his campaign may be breaking apart over his handling of the Epstein case. But he seems to recognize that one thing that brings them together is their shared hatred of Democrats like Obama and the free press, and he’s been acting accordingly. And that means that just an eighth of the way through his second presidency, we’re already in very dangerous territory.
MAGA media cheerleaders turn their sights on to their foes such as Barack Obama to deflect from reporting on Donald Trump’s plain as day ties to pedo Jeffrey Epstein.
The publication has lost its way and is radicalizing the more sophisticated right
Matt Johnson at The UnPopulist:
When Bari Weiss resigned from The New York Times in 2020, she wrote an open letter to her boss, A.G. Sulzberger, explaining why she felt compelled to quit. Citing bullying from liberal colleagues for her “wrongthink,” and depicting the culture of the paper as one of self-censorship and ideological conformity, Weiss also previewed her next project. As “once-great journalistic institutions betray their standards and lose sight of their principles,” she wrote, “Americans still hunger for news that is accurate, opinions that are vital, and debate that is sincere.” Six months later, Weiss started Common Sense, a newsletter that subsequently became The Free Press, one of the largest and fastest growing digital media outlets today.
The Free Press’ mission statement reads like an updated version of Weiss’ open letter, and it describes the publication as a recovery of the journalistic virtues of “honesty, doggedness, and fierce independence”—this last quality arguably being the site’s main selling point. “We don’t allow ideology to stand in the way of searching for the truth,” Weiss said.
But The Free Press’ insistence that ideological considerations don’t affect its journalism is at odds with its track record. In fact, The Free Press embodies the very ideological captivity that Weiss’ open letter railed against—just in the opposite direction. Weiss’ instinct that many American news consumers were looking for something different was correct. But the publication, which was valued at $100 million last September, has found success not because it singularly embodies Weiss’ high-minded description of what once made journalism great. Rather, The Free Press has amassed a huge following by being a more artful and less shrill version of the anti-woke alarmism that permeates the right-wing media ecosystem.
The publication has always had a clear editorial slant: opposition to the woke left. No matter how bad the right gets, the site’s editorial stance remains firm: the left is worse. While The Free Press occasionally publishes articles critical of Donald Trump and the right more broadly, its overarching message is that the MAGA movement isn’t as bad as the lying liberal media would have you believe—and that the errors of Trumpism are largely a reaction to the much more serious sins of the left.
When The Free Press hit 1 million subscribers in December of 2024, Weiss wrote in her personal reflection on the milestone: “From day one, we’ve had a single guiding principle: Pursue the truth and tell it plainly. No shortcuts. No exceptions.” But a closer look reveals that, even as it rails against the pervasive bias of the mainstream media, The Free Press’ work often strains to reach its predetermined slant, inevitably compromising the quality of its journalism.
The Anti-Anti-Trump Publication
One reason for The Free Press’ popularity is that it offers intellectual reassurance to legions of anti-anti-Trump readers—sophisticated conservatives who may be uneasy about Trumpism, yet want to believe that wokeness and other left-wing excesses are the primary threats to Western civilization. Trump’s trade war and the ensuing market meltdown might give them some pause, but they’re desperate for intellectual ammunition to convince themselves and others that the administration’s crusade against “wokeness”—and associated initiatives like DEI—was necessary even if it meant trampling our democratic institutions.
Ideologically sympathetic outlets like The Free Press convince a wider swath of Americans that the Trump administration’s culture-war agenda is justified. Precisely because it pretends to be governed by journalistic values like objectivity and fairness, The Free Press helps sustain the society-wide hysteria over wokeness while downplaying the country’s descent into authoritarianism.
Consider just one headline after Trump issued his directive purging executive agencies of alleged DEI hires: “EXCLUSIVE: Inside the U.S. Mint’s Scramble to Conceal DEI Personnel.” The article highlights a “whistleblower” who busted his colleagues at the U.S. Mint for what he described as a “sloppy attempt to hide their behavior,” such as removing references to DEI in job descriptions so that they’d be “rehomed” elsewhere. The Free Press listed the names, titles, and combined salaries of “five former DEI staffers” at the Mint, in case the Trump administration needed any help finding and firing them. The Free Press apparently believes that this effort by scared and hapless federal employees to hang onto their jobs is a bombshell scandal, demonstrating that the publication is happy to support the Trump administration’s initiatives when doing so suits its purposes—even as it accuses the mainstream media of serving Democratic administrations. The far bigger scandal—certainly the one that a publication committed to free speech and free thought should find more troubling—is that the Trump administration’s anti-DEI campaign has been a vindictive and scattershot effort to create an ideologically compliant federal workforce that smacks of contemporary McCarthyism.
The Free Press does throw in an occasional thoughtful essay willing to scrutinize Trump, such as Yuval Levin’s “You Can’t Run Government Through Retribution.” But the publication relies on such articles to grant license for its steady stream of anti-anti-Trump commentary, such as Eli Lake’s contention that a bunch of young software engineers gaining access to some of the most sensitive systems and data in the U.S. government is not so worrisome in historical context. In “The Boys of DOGE,” Lake writes: “[B]efore you reach for the Valium, it’s worth considering that this is by no means the first time twentysomethings have helped lead a revolution inside the nation’s capital.” According to Lake, the DOGE takeover of the federal government is reminiscent of Ronald Reagan relying on young speechwriters, as if the relevant issue was age alone and not the potentially illegal and unconstitutional actions of Musk and his youth brigade. Instead of emphasizing the unilateral destruction of entire agencies by a bunch of interns at Musk’s companies, The Free Press trumpets “Two Cheers for DOGE” and declares that “this White House, in the course of six weeks, has done the seemingly impossible: They have found the waste, the fraud, and the abuse.”
The publication’s soft-pedaling of Trumpism isn’t confined to its DOGE coverage. In November, Vinay Prasad authored an article about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that promised to “take a look at some of his most controversial opinions” but ended up sane-washing him. Remarkably, Prasad failed to mention Kennedy’s insistence that Wi-Fi causes cancer; tap water may be turning kids gay; Jews had more freedom during the Holocaust than the unvaccinated had during the Covid-19 pandemic; and HHS (the agency Trump chose him to run) helped to orchestrate a coup during the pandemic that destroyed the Constitution and turned the U.S. into a totalitarian surveillance state. Instead, Prasad discussed a few of Kennedy’s more defensible positions—such as the idea that the Covid lockdowns went too far—and argued that Kennedy’s “hand-wringing” detractors were treating him “unfairly.” Though Prasad mentioned RFK Jr.’s belief that childhood vaccines cause autism—the axis around which his “public health” advocacy has rotated for many years—he doesn’t think this is disqualifying for an HHS secretary.
The Free Press later ran an article critical of RFK Jr. by Jeffrey S. Flier. But publishing the first (much more popular) piece that provided a completely distorted picture of RFK Jr.’s beliefs, while omitting the most salient and objectionable ones, is tantamount to journalistic malpractice. This is true even if one overlooks the deeply irresponsible editorial decision to “both-sides” an antivax crank who was being considered for the role of the nation’s top public health official.
The Personal Ideological Journey Formula
If there was a Free Press pitchbot, it could hardly come up with a better headline than the one affixed to columnist Batya Ungar-Sargon’s article last week: “I Used to Hate Trump. Now I’m a MAGA Lefty.” The headline gives the impression to an unfamiliar reader that Ungar-Sargon’s conversion is something new, when she has been a dependable Trump cheerleader for years. Most recently, she’s been claiming that Trump’s tariffs will reverse not just America’s manufacturing but also, preposterously, its masculinity crisis. In her MAGA conversion piece, she describes Trump as “socially moderate, anti-interventionist, and committed to America’s blue-collar workers.”
The “socially moderate” Trump has pushed countless baseless panics originating from the extremes of right-wing discourse and chose a radical ideologue as his number two. The “anti-interventionist” Trump wants to seize control of the Panama Canal and annex Greenland, and he just bombed Yemen. The president “committed to America’s blue-collar workers” imposed by fiat a sweeping tariff agenda that would be devastating to the working and middle classes (he only backed down when the self-inflicted market crisis threatened to spiral out of control). Ungar-Sargon writes: “Democrats also support censorship, while the GOP now touts free speech.” Trump is waging war on the media through lawsuits designed to suppress dissent. He has expelled major media outlets from the Pentagon, inserted ideologically sympathetic outlets into the White House press pool, and limited access by major agencies like the Associated Press. ICE agents are arresting legal residents for writing op-eds and expressing opinions the administration doesn’t like.
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To be sure, The Free Press isn’t a purely partisan outlet. Deputy managing editor Joe Nocera was refreshingly critical of the Trump DOJ’s decision to suspend bribery and fraud charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams. An editorial appropriately challenged Trump’s claim that Ukraine is somehow responsible for the war. The Free Press republished Matthew Yglesias’ informative Slow Boring essay on the trouble with tariffs. But the overwhelming thrust of the outlet’s coverage has been reliably sympathetic to Trump and critical of his political opponents.
This was particularly clear before the election, when the outlet had to make editorial decisions about which candidate to criticize and which to promote. My own analysis of The Free Press’ political coverage in the six months leading up to the election found that it was overwhelmingly tilted in favor of Trump and against the Democrats. Of the articles published in the U.S. Politics section of the site between May 6 and Nov. 5, 70 were supportive of Trump or critical of Democrats, while just 14 were supportive of the Democratic candidate (Harris or Biden) or critical of Trump.
But those rough estimates don’t capture the full picture. The Free Press’ selection of issues to cover—such as the destructiveness of pro-Palestine campus protests and the excesses of “trans ideology”—was overwhelmingly right-wing coded. Even weakly anti-Trump or pro-Democratic articles were crammed with caveats about how the mainstream media is biased in favor of the Democrats, the left is problematic as well, and so on. Articles that criticized Trump did so from the standpoint of sympathy toward him and hostility toward his Democratic opponents. The framing went something like this: Why is Trump making mistakes x, y, and z when Harris is such a disaster who is unfit to serve? Why is the right indulging nativism, which is just like the identity politics on the left?
The Free Press, a right-wing website run by Bari Weiss, has moved further to the right (aka the Anti-Anti-Trump Right), likely in order to stay in good graces with MAGAworld.
Eli Lake joins the show today to discuss a crisis of legitimacy among elite institutions that don’t believe you can handle the truth. From the economy, to Covid, to climate change, you must be gently guided to their preferred conclusions.
When is a coup not a coup? When the neocons say so.
Neocon Central is battered but not beaten these days. The rise of Trump has split the rock in half, but only when it comes to Trump himself. On other issues, the rock remains firm.
A useful example has just presented itself, the claim made by both the Trump-hating Washington Post and the Trump-friendly Eli Lake, holding forth in the non-Trump-friendly confines of “Bloomberg Opinion”. According to the Post, “Don’t call it a coup. Venezuelans have a right to replace an oppressive, toxic regime”, while Eli “explains” that “There Is No Coup in Venezuela”.
Well, there was no coup in Venezuela—no successful one, at least. A couple of days ago, Juan Guaidó, opposition leader to the grotesquely incompetent and murderous regime of President Nicolás Maduro, posted an online video of himself “at a military air base—flanked by soldiers and the imprisoned opposition figure Leopoldo López, apparently freed by security forces from house arrest—announcing the 'final phase of Operation Freedom' in partnership with Venezuela’s 'main military units,' ahead of planned protests on May 1” (quoting from Uri Friedman’s article, “How an Elaborate Plan to Topple Venezuela’s President Went Wrong” in the Atlantic Monthly).
But that was the highpoint of Juan’s day. The “major military units” didn’t show, and, as Friedman explains, the Trump Administration, along with the Washington Post and Eli, who thought they had the whole thing in the bag, ended up with egg on their faces. Which is better than blood, which is what is now on the faces of Venezuelans. This regime change thing looks so easy on paper. Well, the next time for sure!
Hello Washington Post and hello Eli Lake. Stop being as stupid as Donald Trump. Stop upending other people’s lives to work out your fantasies of “absolute power”.
Afterwords
Everyone (everyone except for a couple of compulsively stupid leftists) realizes the horror that has been unleashed by the grossly brutal, corrupt, and incompetent governments of first Hugo Chávez and then Nicolás Maduro. But foisting “regime change” from the outside has been uniformly disastrous every time it’s been tried. If only people would listen to Daniel Larison. But he makes far too much sense.
