Newsbusters

CNN, to no one’s surprise, tried to play Gotcha! by claiming President Donald Trump was “bucking” his campaign promise to cut prices immediately upon taking office, and ended up making the network look more idiotic than it already does. That is a feat unto itself.

CNN took aim at Trump’s recent interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity where he stated that “‘Inflation is back.’”

He continued: “I had nothing to do with it. These people have — have run the country. They spent money like nobody has ever spent.”

After CNN Business Executive Editor David Goldman conceded Trump was correct in some respects, he then took a nosedive into the logical toilet and pulled the flush lever: “Trump’s argument that Biden is to blame for inflation is up for debate.”

Then it just got worse: “So the jury is decidedly out on how much federal spending contributed to inflation — if at all.”

Did Goldman write this after dropping acid? This is like saying the jury is still out on whether communist China is responsible for the global COVID-19 pandemic. 

The MIT Sloan School of Management admitted in July 2024 that “some policymakers — up to and including President Joe Biden — blamed shortages in the supply chain. But a new study shows that federal spending was the cause — significantly so.”

Senior MIT Senior Lecturer of Finance Mark Kritzman, one of the authors of the research, added: “Our research shows mathematically that the overwhelming driver of that burst of inflation in 2022 was federal spending, not the supply chain.”

He even conceded that “Some economists, including former Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke, have in part blamed the substantial spending for overheating the economy.”  

Strangely enough, President Barack Obama’s former National Economic Council Director Larry Summers wasn’t mentioned once in Goldman’s nutty piece. That’s despite the fact that Summers was one of the prominent voices warning Biden’s spending would hurl the U.S. into an inflation crisis since February 2021.

Goldman’s wanton assumption that only “some” economists were making this is also a flat-out lie.

In fact, USA Today ran a November 2024 piece answering the question whether government spending was contributing to inflation: “Yes, economists say: government spending can definitely cause inflation. Many economists say federal spending caused at least some of the inflation crisis in 2022.”

“Many” is miles away from just “some,” eh Goldman?

But Goldman pivoted to a National Bureau of Economic Research which admitted the inflationary effects of Biden’s $1.9 trillion stimulus package and other policies. But, chirped Goldman, “the same report also blamed the price hikes on factors including higher production costs linked to swings in demand, the war in Ukraine and Covid-era supply trouble.”

Too bad that MIT and Summers himself already previously nuked those misleading talking points. 

Goldman even twisted the findings of a bizarre International Monetary Fund report that tried to emphasize supply shocks over macroeconomic factors federal spending as the drivers of inflation globally.

The IMF report, alleged by Goldman, showed that “macroeconomic effects like federal spending weren’t to blame at all — instead it was just old-fashioned supply and demand.”

Here was the part from the IMF report that Goldman left out:

The United States is a significant exception. The contribution of broad macroeconomic tightness to inflation remains greater than in other economies despite the significant cooling of the labor market since early 2023.

Goldman concluded his nonsense by attacking Trump’s tariff proposals: “Raising taxes on imports will ultimately cost the American consumers who will be left footing the bill, economists largely agree.”

How Goldman could insinuate this in light of the fact that consumer prices have surged 23 percent of what they were since Biden first took office is just a textbook case of irony in the first degree.

Heritage Foundation economist EJ Antoni wrote on February 5 that these kinds of drummed-up fears over Trump’s tariffs  by the media are “a fallacy, by both economic theory and the record of history. Factors such as changes in exchange rates mean that foreign producers typically end up paying some (or most) of a tariff.” 

During America’s Golden Age, as Antoni pointed out, “the government essentially funded itself entirely with tariffs; the income tax didn’t even exist. Instead of tariffs wreaking untold economic calamity, they coincided with our fastest sustained levels of growth—a time that built America’s middle class.”

But did Goldman mention any of this context? Nope, instead he tried to pass the buck on Biden’s inflation mess off on Trump: “So Biden may have contributed to America’s stubborn inflation problem. But it’s now Trump’s problem, and his most prominent economic policy may make it worse.”

When is a story about farmers NOT about farmers? When the farmers are but a narrative device with which the media can stealthily advocate for a preferred policy in peril. In this case, farmers used as human shields so NBC can advocate for the Green New Deal (under its actual name, the Inflation Reduction Act).

Watch the report in its entirety, as aired on NBC Nightly News on Wednesday, February 19th, 2025 (Click “expand” to view transcript):

LESTER HOLT: With the president’s freeze on certain federal funding, some farmers aren’t getting critical government grants that they were counting on. They tell Emily Ikeda they’re struggling to pay their bills.

KEVIN LEAVITT: There’s about 100 of them out there.

EMILY IKEDA: Kevin Leavitt hoped these solar panels would help his Maine farm flourish.

LEAVITT: The hope here is these panels will produce enough electricity that the farm needs all year long.

IKEDA: He was only able to move forward with the pricey project because of a federal program that promised to shoulder roughly a third of the cost after completion. But the panels have been up and running for weeks, and no sign of the $45,000 he’s been counting on from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. 

Could you have ever imagined finding yourself in this position after taking on that agreement?

LEAVITT: No. But everything is in writing. Everything signed. You’re stressed out. You’re on edge. It has a toll on you.

IKEDA: President Trump has signed a flurry of executive orders pausing federal funding for review, including the Inflation Reduction Act, the climate initiative passed during the Biden administration. That has grant money built in for farmers like Leavitt to conserve soil, water, and energy.

FARMER: I can’t get any answers….

IKEDA: Coast to coast, farmers who overwhelmingly supported Trump in November are voicing confusion and concern.

FARMER: I’ve already done a bunch of the work. Already paid for the material. Already paid for the labor, so I’m out all that cost…

USDA SPOKESPERSON: It’s going to reach into every state and every community nationwide. That’s how far the reach of the Department of Agriculture is.

IKEDA: A USDA spokesperson says Secretary Rollins is aware farmers have been waiting on payments during this government review, and is working to make determinations as quickly as possible, citing plans to share information later this week. Until then:

What do you want people in Washington to know?

LEAVITT: Enforce the contract that they gave to us- that they gave to everybody else. And do what it says.

IKEDA: Or else what?

LEAVITT: Or else there might not be farms.

IKEDA: Emilie Ikeda, NBC News- West Gardiner, Maine.

This whole story is a sneaky way of trying to elicit support for an Inflation Reduction Act that did nothing to reduce inflation, but did effectively add to our national deficit. Sprinkled throughout the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act were the components of the Green New Deal, the landmark “climate” legislation championed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (DSA-NY). 

The deception lies in framing the story as being about farmers in distress due to not receiving their promised government subsidies. One immediately thinks that the subsidies in question are perhaps tariff offsets or some other USDA incentive- until the one farmer points to the solar panels. 

At that point, it becomes crystal clear that the protagonist of the story is not the farmers but the Green New Deal subsidies placed on hold due to villainous spending freezes and DOGE cuts. There is little actual concern for our great farming communities beyond their usefulness in service of the climate agenda, and in undermining the current administration.

This story is little more than climate propaganda of the worst kind, crafted at the expense of our farmers.

 

Reporters are in a dither than Team Trump’s committing a “naked violation of the First Amendment” by denying access to the Associated Press. So said Erik Wemple of the Washington Post, adding “As [press secretary Karoline] Leavitt recited her position, she might as well have been stomping on a copy of the Bill of Rights under the lectern.”

The tiff started over the AP refusing to acknowledge President Trump renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America.” Both sides are digging in. The liberal media blob didn’t react this way when Team Biden obstructed access to the New York Post in their time. The AP in no way should be presented as nonpartisan or “the gold standard of neutrality.”

On the PBS News Hour, NPR White House correspondent Tamara Keith claimed Trump “going after AP for an editorial choice, is going directly at the First Amendment. It is going directly at the freedom of the press. And it is not coincidental that they are going after AP. AP is extremely influential. They’re also kind of straight down the line. They are not a partisan news outlet in any way.”

This is preposterous. Their reporters write gushy books about Jill Biden. Wemple acknowledged that NewsBusters calls them “Associated Partisans,” and linked to our item on how AP suggested that when Republicans argued that the Biden-Harris campaign would end up as a President Harris campaign, it was “racist” and “misogynist.”

In CNN’s “Reliable Sources” newsletter, Brian Stelter accused Trump of become the “Word Police.” This is incredibly odd, since the AP has a Stylebook that is widely used in newsrooms where they are obviously the Word Police. In recent years, they have not only banned “illegal immigrant” and discouraged the term “late term abortion,” they were especially woke on transgenderism, arguing “A person’s sex and gender are usually assigned at birth by parents or attendants and can turn out to be inaccurate. Experts say gender is a spectrum, not a binary structure…” 

Stelter quoted New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof comparing Trump to dictators: “It boggles the mind that Trump can complain about censorship and then block the AP from access to the Oval Office unless the journalists use language he prefers. But AP reporters have stood up to dictators worldwide, even endured prison; they’re tougher than Trump.”

Enjoy the podcast below, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

On Tuesday night’s episode of MSNBC’s The 11th Hour, Stephanie Ruhle officiated over yet another session of commiseration about the actions of the new administration, with the usual heavy emphasis on Elon Musk and DOGE. Joining her was Reed Galen, author of The Home Front on Substack, who –without evidence – accused the administration and Musk, with media complicity, of leaning on recalcitrant officeholders in some vague and unspecified way.

During the nightly ritual of Trump/Musk/DOGE- bashing, Galen decided to pin the blame on Congress, including both parties, and said,

Republicans in Congress now are the lemmings, and Democrats are the headless chickens. There’s nobody…really minding the store over there…there used to be a time when Congress jealously guarded its place as a co-equal branch of government, and those days are over.

 

 

Apparently, in his assessment, Congress had not stopped “jealously guarding” that place back before the dawn of current living memory, allowing its powers to be eroded over many decades.

Rather, they had “jealously guard[ed]” away right up until Trump’s return to office last month, when their will to live as a legislative body had suddenly somehow just imploded. Even casual scrutiny of modern American history would have shown that Galen was presenting, at best, only a tiny sliver of the full picture. 

Ruhle grudgingly reminded Galen, “But…there has been some pushback from Republicans, when their constituents at home complain. Then they call the White House.”

Galen conceded the point, but claimed that such efforts were always stymied by the “right-wing media machine”:

We shouldn’t forget that the one thing that has been built up over the last 40 or 50 years, is an incredibly effective and efficient right-wing media machine that often blocks out a lot of those things, or overwhelms that kind of news, even when people start getting calls in their offices, whether it’s at the Capitol or at the district level or at the state level… And so, there’s always a way to counteract that.

At that moment, Galen was speaking on a major news network which had endlessly and unabashedly criticized, berated, cursed out, and thrown wild accusations at the current president, his administration, and the entire right side of the political spectrum in general, and which at that very moment was facing a $30 million defamation suit for a baseless story aired just to sensationalize a favorite left-wing narrative.

Notwithstanding, he went ahead and asked the world, with no evidence, and no specifics, to take him at his word that a “right-wing media machine” was suppressing the truth in America. 

Galen then got back around to the standard pet obsessions, saying that what most Republican officeholders really feared the most were “Trump’s personal ire, and Elon Musk’s bank account.”

He then addressed the Democratic side of the aisle, and stated that they seemed to have a naive idea that:

[W]e have to work with ‘Secretary X,’ because if we don’t, then that might hurt my constituents. And what I- what I try to tell my friends is: They are going to hurt you. They are going to hurt your constituents. And then they’re going to blame you for it. 

…[W]e should not be under any illusion…There is no good deed that can- is coming from these people because they feel like doing you a favor. It’s all transactional, and if they feel like they can make your life harder at the expense of your people in your state, your voters, your constituents, that’s what they’re going to do. They don’t care. And I’m not sure how much longer it’s going to take Democrats to figure that out, but they better figure it out soon.

Not for the first time on MSNBC, the casual attitude about shameless bias and baseless accusations, plus the complete lack of self-awareness about it, were staggering.

For full transcript, click ‘expand’ to read:

MSNBC’s The 11th Hour
02/19/2025
11:50 PM

[ON-SCREEN HEADLINE: CONGRESS CAN’T DO ANYTHING BUT COMPLAIN ABOUT MUSK FIRINGS]

(…)

REED GALEN (AUTHOR, THE HOME FRONT ON SUBSTACK): And I feel like Republicans in Congress now are the lemmings, and Democrats are the headless chickens. There’s nobody- you know- really minding the store over there. 

Uh- You know- there used to be a time when Congress jealously guarded its place as a co-equal branch of government, and those days are over.

STEPHANIE RUHLE: But- but let’s just stay on that, because there- there has been some pushback from Republicans, when their constituents at home complain. Then they call the White House.

GALEN: Well, that’s true, but also, we shouldn’t forget that the one thing that has been built up over the last 40 or 50 years, is an incredibly effective and efficient right-wing media machine that often blocks out a lot of those things, or overwhelms that kind of news, even when people start getting calls in their offices, whether it’s at the Capitol or at the district level or at the state level, if you’re a- let’s say- a legislator or a governor. And so, there’s always a way to counteract that. 

But remember, too, that a lot of these guys- and most of them are guys- are willing to go along with this because the thing they fear more, is Trump’s personal ire, and Elon Musk’s bank account, which would both serve as massive primary election voter- excuse me- drivers, should these people decide to get out of line, and I think that’s what you’re seeing.

Look, they’ve always been afraid. They’re just as afraid as they’ve ever been.

RUHLE: And headless chickens. Why do you have that assessment of Democrats? What do you think they should be doing?

GALEN: Well, I think what they should have been doing, it’s too late to do in most- in- for the most part- they should have had some sort of plan to get together and figure out how to slow down as much of these things as they could. 

They should have understood- as so many of us- and I- look- I did some very incredible work with people like the Brennan center for justice at NYU and a lot of very smart people around the table, who said, ‘this is what’s going to happen, these are the things that you can do.’ And a lot of them didn’t happen. 

[ON-SCREEN HEADLINE: MUSK, DOGE MOVE QUICKLY TO DISMANTLE FEDERAL AGENCIES] 

Now, look, I don’t know if there wasn’t consensus, if people were afraid- 

You know- I- I think that there’s still this fantasyland idea that, well, we have to work with ‘Secretary X,’ because if we don’t, then that might hurt my constituents. And what I- what I try to tell my friends is: They are going to hurt you. They are going to hurt your constituents. And then they’re going to blame you for it. 

Like- we should not be under any illusion, Stephanie, after- 10 years of this, right? There is no good deed that can- is coming from these people because they feel like doing you a favor. It’s all transactional, and if they feel like they can make your life harder at the expense of your people in your state, your voters, your constituents, that’s what they’re going to do. 

They don’t care. And I’m not sure how much longer it’s going to take Democrats to figure that out, but they better figure it out soon.

RUHLE: But don’t Democrats have a tricky needle to thread? Because they can’t be seen as simply defending the status quo? Because that’s also not what the American people want.

GALEN: Well, I think that’s right. But this is- you actually make an incredible point, which is, the things that so far they have been trying to defend- 

Look, I think USAID probably does incredible work across the world- I know that there are a lot of farmers who get USAID money to ship their- their products overseas. But if that’s the first thing that you’re going to cut and Dem- and the Democrats are going to jump on that bear trap is [sic] like- ‘this must be defended. This must be defended,’ both on the point of foreign aid and because Congress didn’t say you could do it, right? 

Those are process arguments, but also it gives one more hammer for Trump and those people to say, “See, they don’t really care about you. They’re happy to ship all that money that should be going to you.’ Or maybe ‘we shouldn’t be spending it all overseas.’ 

And so I think they just have to understand the nature of the fight they’re in- which, again, they’ve always had trouble with- but also understanding the nature of saying, ‘what are the battles we’re going to fight? What are the things we must protect? What are the things we can’t do? What are the things we can do?’ 

But they got to get on offense and they got to stay on offense between now and the next- you know- 22 months before an election, and every day that they’re going to be in a fight with this administration.

RUHLE: All right then Reed, thank you so much for joining me tonight.

(…)

The PBS News Hour, along with the rest of the liberal press, have certainly warmed up in recent years to the FBI, America’s chief domestic surveillance organization. Since Donald Trump came on the scene, a press eager to find criminal behavior within a loathed administration has behaved more like a present-day “Friends of the FBI” than the bulwark against government spying and surveillance it once fancied itself as being.

PBS has even run pro-FBI stories with a McCarthyite tinge, like one applauding the online liberal “sedition hunters” of January 6 scofflaws.

But the release from prison of an American Indian activist convicted of murdering two FBI agents in 1975 put the PBS News Hour in liberal reset mode on Tuesday evening. Co-anchor Amna Nawaz marked the occasion with a tone similar to hard-left groups like Amnesty International in celebrating the release of the infamous convicted killer Leonard Peltier. The now-80-year-old Peltier’s life sentence was commuted to home confinement by President Biden just hours before leaving office January 20.

FBI director Christopher Wray, whose words are usually taken seriously by the media, issued strong criticism of the commutation at the time, calling Peltier a “remorseless killer” and writing, “Granting Peltier any relief from his conviction or sentence is wholly unjustified and would be an affront to the rule of law.”

But never mind that. Co-anchor Amna Nawaz devoted 55 seconds of the show’s Tuesday news wrap to portraying Peltier through a throwback leftist prism of resistance to supposed government tyranny. There was no dissent allowed to the view that Peltier was a “symbol for human rights.”

Amna Nawaz : ….Native American activist Leonard Peltier was released from prison today after former President Joe Biden commuted his life sentence. Peltier was convicted of killing two FBI agents in 1975, and the agency has long opposed his commutation. The 80-year-old has always maintained his innocence, and Native Americans widely believe he was a political prisoner. Peltier left a federal prison in Florida today and is heading back to his reservation in North Dakota to live under home confinement. His supporters described him as a global symbol for human rights.

Tracker Gina Marie Rangel Quinones, Supporter of Leonard Peltier: His incarceration represented not only other political prisoners, but people who stand for — in solidarity for all humankind and humanity.

Nawaz: In a statement, Peltier said — quote — “Today, I am finally free. They may have imprisoned me, but they never took my spirit.”

So much for PBS’s congressional mandate to maintain “strict adherence to objectivity and balance in all programs or series of programs of a controversial nature.”

This one-sided segment was brought to you in part by BDO.

Google and Meta artificial intelligence stunningly seemed to defend CBS News anchor Margaret Brennan’s crazy assertion that free speech caused a genocide.

On her show Face the Nation Sunday, Brennan hysterically asserted to Secretary of State Marco Rubio that free speech was “weaponized” to trigger the Holocaust. So, MRC researchers asked six AI chatbots, “Did free speech cause the Holocaust?” GabAI, ChatGPT, Grok and even the new Chinese AI DeepSeek each provided arguments against Brennan’s claim, but MetaAI and Google’s Gemini attempted to defend it. Meta recently announced it was in the process of overhauling its platforms to be more pro-free speech, but it appears the reform has not yet reached the AI chatbot.

While Meta’s pledge to pursue a more pro-free speech approach is laudable, MetaAI gave a mystifying response to the question “Did free speech cause the Holocaust?” The chatbot began by diminishing the truth and calling it a “topic of debate.” It went on, refusing to give a straight answer and explaining that some, “like CBS journalist Margaret Brennan,” believe this to be true but “others have argued against this idea.”

Read the full blog on MRC Free Speech America’s site.

On Wednesday’s CBS Mornings, co-host, Obama family friend, and former Democratic Party donor Gayle King tried to tie Donald Trump and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to the recent high-profile aviation accidents in 2025 and ask the CEO of Delta Airlines whether he too has concern about air safety with Trump in power. Thankfully, Delta’s Ed Bastian wasn’t having any of it.

 

 

After unsuccessful attempts by King and senior transportation correspondent Kris Van Cleave to have Bastian speak to what he knows about why a Delta Airlines flipped over Monday in Toronto, Canada, King came right out with the partisan line wondering if Trump’s “cuts worry you” to the point there will be “impacts” on “safety”:

You know, the Trump administration recently fired many employees of the FAA administration. Did those cuts, do those cuts worry you, and do you think that impacts the safety? I know you said it’s the safest way to travel, but after looking at these mishaps, a lot of people are nervous. Do these cuts affect you?

Leave it to King, who two months ago tried to sympathize and understand those enamored with the suspect in the murder of the UnitedHealthCare CEO.

Bastian wasn’t having any of this and promptly told King that “the cuts do not affect us” even though people “are raising questions” and he knows so because he’s “been in close communication with the secretary of transportation.”

He continued the fact-check by explaining the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) workforce is “over 50,000 people…and the cuts I understand were 300 people and they were in noncritical safety functions.”

“The Trump administration has committed to investing deeply in terms of improving the overall technologies that are used in the air traffic control systems and modernizing the skies. They’ve committed to hiring additional controllers and investigators and safety investigators. So no, I’m not concerned with that at all,” he added.

Van Cleave wasn’t as direct and zoomed out to the real fear Americans have of flying, but stayed tangentially on this theme by invoking Musk:

Ed, the administration has also called on Elon Musk to modernize air traffic control. From an airline standpoints, what needs to be done to make it better? And a quick follow-up, if I can, what do you say to the people nervous getting on airplanes right now?

Bastian showed understanding by saying he “can understand the concerns at the moment,” but emphasized “[t]he reality is it’s safer than the car ride I took this morning to get to my office” and “the safest form of transportation, period, and it’s safe because in our industry we all focus on safety” with competitors making each other aware of safety concerns.

To the contrary of the seemingly impenetrable wall of far-left partisans on social media (including their silly BlueSky), there were technically more aviation incidents in the early days of the Biden administration than under the Trump administration. 

To see the relevant CBS transcript from February 19, click “expand.”

CBS Mornings
February 19, 2025
7:33 a.m. Eastern

[ON-SCREEN HEADLINE: Exclusive; Delta Air Lines CEO Live; Ed Bastian Reacts to Toronto Plane Crash & Talks Investigation Latest]

GAYLE KING: You know, the Trump administration recently fired many employees of the FAA administration. Did those cuts, do those cuts worry you, and do you think that impacts the safety? I know you said it’s the safest way to travel, but after looking at these mishaps, a lot of people are nervous. Do these cuts affect you?

ED BASTIAN: The cuts do not affect us, Gayle. I’ve been in close communication with the secretary of transportation. I understand that the cuts at this time are something that are raising questions, but the reality is there’s over 50,000 people that work at the FAA, and the cuts I understand were 300 people and they were in noncritical safety functions. The Trump administration has committed to investing deeply in terms of improving the overall technologies that are used in the air traffic control systems and modernizing the skies. They’ve committed to hiring additional controllers and investigators and safety investigators. So no, I’m not concerned with that at all.

KING: Ed, the administration has also called on Elon Musk to modernize air traffic control. From an airline standpoints, what needs to be done to make it better? And a quick follow-up, if I can, what do you say to the people nervous getting on airplanes right now?

BASTIAN: Well, to the public I can understand the concerns at the moment. The reality is it’s safer than the car ride I took this morning to get to my office. It is the safest form of transportation, period. And it’s safe because in our industry we all focus on safety. We’re very competitive industry across the U.S. airlines. There’s one thing we do not compete on and that’s safety. We all work together, we learn from each other. Every single incident that happens, whether it’s reported or not, gets reported back to our teams that we share across the industry. So, we learn from each other and this incident, as — as terrible as it appears, was something that we’ll learn from that will make us better.

On multiple days this week, staunchly racist Sunny Hostin put herself on a pedestal above all Americans and proclaimed to be part of the superior racial demographic: black woman. During the Tuesday and Wednesday episodes of ABC’s The View, Hostin repeatedly praised herself and other black woman for how they “voted to save the country” by supporting Vice President Kamala Harris’s backup bid for president.

While co-host Joy Behar was falsely whining about Elon Musk personally going through her Social Security records and IRS filings, during Tuesday’s show, Hostin bloviated about how she was “resting” and letting others deal with politics since she and other black woman already tried to save the country:

BEHAR: Why Musk is going into my Social Security and the IRS? Why is he doing that? Why is he doing that? Why is he firing people?

HOSTIN: Well, people should be concerned about that but I kind of agree with James Carville because I’m part of the 92 percent of black women that voted to save the rest of the country. But the country wanted something else, and the country is getting something else! So, I’m resting.

“It’s not the whole country,” Behar noted. To which Hostin reiterated: “I’m resting.”

During Wednesday’s episode, whiling taking over the moderation duties, Behar wanted to promote a far-left protest event which involved not spending money for a day. “It started in the black community actually because I’ve been not involved with it but gotten a lot of information on it,” Hostin boasted.

 

 

Being one that experiences chronic racial grievance, Hostin suggested that the event was something only black people could think of and organize:

And let’s face it, black people know how to organize outside of systems because we’ve been excluded form systems for so very long. And that’s why we were behind the Civil Rights movement. And when black people win and get rights like civil right, everybody does better and that’s something that the Democrats can take a page out of the book for.

She the parroted her self-aggrandizing claim that she and other black women were part of the superior demographic because of how they voted:

But, you know, I’m starting to think as I’ve said before, I’m one of the 92 percent of black women that voted for Kamala Harris and so I’m sort of in a resting place right now because I voted to save the country and the country didn’t vote with me. The majority of the country.

“A lot of the country,” co-host Sara Haines noted. “A lot of the country but the majority didn’t,” Hostin huffed.

Hostin was obviously still bitter about losing the election and was still acting like a sore loser. It mirrored comments she made no long after President Trump’s victory in November, when Hostin put her racial martyr complex on full display.

The transcript is below. Click “expand” to read:

ABC’s The View
February 18, 2025
11:30:07 a.m. Eastern

(…)

JOY BEHAR: Why Musk is going into my Social Security and the IRS? Why is he doing that? Why is he doing that? Why is he firing people?

SUNNY HOSTIN: Well, people should be concerned about that but I kind of agree with James Carville because I’m part of the 92 percent of black women that voted to save the rest of the country.

[Applause]

But the country wanted something else, and the country is getting something else! So, I’m resting.

BEHAR: It’s not the whole country.

HOSTIN: I’m resting.

(…)

February 19, 2025
11:17:30 a.m. Eastern

BEHAR: Sometimes you have to hit them in the economy, though. This is an interesting thing. There’s a movement right now on — for the end of this month, for people to – don’t spend any money at the – on one particular day, what day is it?

SUNNY HOSTIN: February 28.

[Applause]

BEHAR: Yes. Because uh – We’re not sure all this all started but that’s one way for the average person –

HOSTIN: It started in the black community actually because I’ve been not involved with it but gotten a lot of information on it.

And let’s face it, black people know how to organize outside of systems because we’ve been excluded form systems for so very long. And that’s why we were behind the Civil Rights movement. And when black people win and get rights like civil right, everybody does better and that’s something that the Democrats can take a page out of the book for.

But, you know, I’m starting to think as I’ve said before, I’m one of the 92 percent of black women that voted for Kamala Harris and so I’m sort of in a resting place right now because I voted to save the country and the country didn’t vote with me. The majority of the country.

SARA HAINES: A lot of the country.

HOSTIN: A lot of the country but the majority didn’t. So, I’m kind of in your phase that you described, the turtle phase, I think that the Republicans.

BEHAR: Let them eat each other?

HOSTIN: Yeah.

I think the Republicans and the people that voted for Trump and now they also voted for co-president Musk, now they realize that the forest ranger just got fired. Somebody in the Foreign Service, you know, his wife couldn’t get medevacked because they got fired, all the federal workers are getting fired. I think that they will turn on the Republican Party and they will come back to the Democratic Party!

(…)

MSNBC Morning Joe co-host Joe Scarborough was the latest in a list of dishonorable media figures to tie President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s budget-cutting efforts to the idea of additional plane crashes. Unlike other analyses, Scarborough’s ramblings come from someone who likes to style himself as one of the few remaining principled conservatives.

Addressing Axios’s Mike Allen, Scarborough falsely declared, “Mike, you and I have been in Washington long enough to know this. It’s one thing to go against Donald Trump’s tax cuts for the rich in 2017, as Democrats call them, and by the way, in so doing, they won the House and the Senate in 2018, made big gains in 2018.”

 

 

Fact-check: Republicans increased their Senate majority in 2018.

Nevertheless, Scarborough rolled on, “It’s one thing if you do that and say they’re going to cut this, cut taxes for billionaires like Elon Musk and Donald Trump, and then they’re going to be all these cuts down the line.”

Scarborough then got to specific cuts:

What the Trump Administration is providing Democrats right now are those cuts. They’re giving them the punchline to, ‘Oh, they’re going to cut billionaires tax cuts, but guess what they’re going to do. They’re going to take away medical research that saved your daughter or saved somebody in your family. They’re going to take away and fire people in the FAA. So, those plane crashes that you’re seeing, you’re going to see more of them, and in fact, the United States record of no plane crashes since 2009, we’re going to look back on that as the good old days. You’re going to see cuts in food safety, in water safety, in air safety. They’re going to see cuts.’

Scarborough meant commercial plane crashes, not total plane crashes. More importantly, however, there is no commonality between all the recent crashes.

Not quite done, Scarborough continued, “As Mika said, when we’re talking about fighting the bird flu or other possible pandemics. Right now, they’re doing, it’s just like they’re giving this to Democrats saying, ‘Here, take this punchline. This is what we’re cutting, cutting, tax cuts for billionaires for.’ And then they can go down this list that we’re seeing on the front page of the newspapers every day. Mike, it is political. It is political negligence and malfeasance. Plus, it’s hurting people every day.

For a show that likes to say that truth matters and how it is their job to correct falsehoods, Scarborough was quite comfortable helping Democrats spin a false narrative about how dangerous air travel is becoming.

Here is a transcript for the February 19 show:

MSNBC Morning Joe

2/19/2025

6:41 AM ET

JOE SCARBOROUGH: Mike, you and I have been in Washington long enough to know this. It’s one thing to go against Donald Trump’s tax cuts for the rich in 2017, as Democrats call them, and by the way, in so doing, they won the House and the Senate in 2018, made big gains in 2018.

It’s one thing if you do that and say they’re going to cut this, cut taxes for billionaires like Elon Musk and Donald Trump, and then they’re going to be all these cuts down the line.

What the Trump Administration is providing Democrats right now are those cuts. They’re giving them the punchline to, “Oh, they’re going to cut billionaires tax cuts, but guess what they’re going to do. They’re going to take away medical research that saved your daughter or saved somebody in your family. They’re going to take away and fire people in the FAA. So, those plane crashes that you’re seeing, you’re going to see more of them, and in fact, the United States record of no plane crashes since 2009, we’re going to look back on that as the good old days. You’re going to see cuts in food safety, in water safety, in air safety. They’re going to see cuts.”

As Mika said, when we’re talking about fighting the bird flu or other possible pandemics. Right now, they’re doing, it’s just like they’re giving this to Democrats saying, “Here, take this punchline. This is what we’re cutting, cutting, tax cuts for billionaires for.”

And then they can go down this list that we’re seeing on the front page of the newspapers every day. Mike, it is political. It is political negligence and malfeasance. Plus, it’s hurting people every day.

In an lengthy interview with Elon Musk that aired Tuesday on the Fox News Channel with Sean Hannity (and taped late last week), President Trump unsurprisingly found time to lambaste the “bad,” “dangerous,” “horrible” liberal media as he and Musk have stood up the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to shrink and tame the leviathan that is the federal government.

Musk led into this by explaining Trump winning has presented “really the opportunity to fix the system” and “restore the power of democracy and people,” which shouldn’t be confused with “fixing the system.”

 

 

Citing the irony of the left’s attacks against DOGE employees as unelected tyrants when that’s what many powerful bureaucrats are themselves, Trump called them “a con job” and “so bad for the country, so dangerous and so bad and the media is so bad.”

Trump then launched head-on into the liberal press, starting with MSNBC: “When I watch MSNBC, which I don’t watch much, but you have to watch the enemy on occasion, the level of arrogance and — and cheating and — they’re just horrible people. These are horrible people. They’re liars.”

He correctly added they’ve suddenly started talking about the Constitution but, in reality, “[t]hey couldn’t care less about the Constitution.” 

If one is going to talk about MSNBC, it wouldn’t be a surprise to know CNN wasn’t far behind. Trump astutely took notice of CNN’s arrogant tone:

CNN likewise — I mean, I watch them asking questions with, you know, the hatred with the — you know, I said, why are you asking the question with such anger? You’re asking me a normal question, but you see the bias. The bias is so incredible and those two are bad. 

Not to be left out, he cited the Associated Press and government-funded PBS as also “bad” people while “CBS is terrible.”

Also unsurprisingly, Trump invoking CBS meant he had to bring up their 60 Minutes scandal with their Kamala Harris interviews

I mean, CBS now, they changed an answer in Kamala. They asked her some questions. She answered them like a, you know, low-I.Q. person, the opposite of him — the absolute opposite, but she gave a horrible answer. They took the entire answer out and they put another answer that she gave 20 minutes later into the — into — as the answer. I’ve never even heard of that. I thought I heard of it all.

After Hannity brought up “the outrageous amounts of money being spent abroad, like USAID,” Musk argued Trump will do the opposite with the new Air Force One’s budget being proof (click “expand”):

MUSK: Well, I guess, at a high level, I think it’s what the President mentioned earlier, which is that, in order to save taxpayer money, it comes down to two things, competence and caring.

TRUMP: That’s right.

MUSK: And when — when the President was shown the outrageous bill for the new Air Force One, and — and then negotiated it down, if he had — if the President had not applied competence and caring, the price would have been 50 percent higher, literally 50 percent higher. The President cared, the President was competent, the price was not 50 percent higher as a result and so, when you add more competence and caring, you get a better deal for the American people.

TRUMP: But we could take — we were talking about this yesterday, I could take — give me thousands of bills, any — I could pick any one of them.

MUSK: Yes, exactly.

TRUMP: And I could take all thousand and let’s say it’s a bill for $5,000, just $5,000, and it’s done by some bureaucrat and if he would say, I’ll give you three, I don’t want to pay you five, it’s too high, I’ll give you three, but they don’t do that. If a guy sends in a bill for 5,000, they pay 5,000. They expect to be cut. Everybody expects to be cut. When you send in a bill, you expect to be cut. They send in the bill higher for the most part. This is true with lawyers, legal fees. When they send in legal fees, you — I can cut — I wish I had the time. I would save so — but I could cut these bills in half, much better than half.

MUSK: Yeah.

TRUMP: But you offer people a much lower number because you know — they actually put fat. I’m not even saying, it’s like a way of business. They put more on because they expect to be negotiated. When you send in a bill to the government, there’s nobody to negotiate.

MUSK: Yes.

TRUMP: You send in a bill for $10,000 and they send you a check back for $10,000. If you would call them and say, we’ll give you 5,000. No, no, no, I need more than five, we’ll give you five. I’m not going to pay any more than five. Well, make it six. No, I’m not going to make it six and you’ll settle for $5,500. You’ve just cut the bill almost in half and it took like two minutes, but none of that stuff.

To see the relevant FNC transcript from February 18, click here.