Men in military fatigues loitered out of focus as Fox News national correspondent Griff Jenkins, in an understated, earth-toned shirt, somberly described the launch of a new, multi-agency operation in a city one of his colleagues had recently described as “a war zone.” Jenkins was on what Fox anchor Bill Hemmer referred to as an “exclusive ride-along,” embedded with militarized forces in tactical gear as they — in the words of their top commander — went hunting. 

“Operation Midway Blitz is fully underway,” Jenkins intoned during the September 9 segment. “They are surging in this elite team of ICE agents behind me, just moments ago executed a criminal arrest warrant for an illegal Mexican agent.” 

Although Jenkins was in Chicago, not the outskirts of Baghdad in 2003, the optics couldn’t have been any clearer if former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld were holding a special deck of 55 cards. Operation Midway Blitz was MAGA’s updated take on Operation Iraqi Freedom’s “shock and awe,” and compliant media were along for the ride.   

As former President George W. Bush launched his global war on terror after the attacks on 9/11, the U.S. military modernized its approach to journalistic access and created an embed program — attaching reporters to front-line units with the ultimate goal of selling the invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. While journalists had a modicum of freedom from military censorship during the Vietnam War, which resulted in negative coverage that the brass blamed for the U.S. failure there, the model was different by 2003. 

The new approach was to stymie critical reporting before it went public, what some researchers refer to as a “precensorship” regime. The predictable result was coverage that legitimized the Iraq War and deemphasized stories that centered on Iraqi victims and exposed the horrors of the occupation.  

Now, Fox News and the Trump administration are bringing that paradigm to U.S. cities as the wars on terror, drugs, and immigrants congeal into an all-purpose authoritarian campaign on domestic soil.

Trump hasn’t deployed National Guard troops to Chicago yet, though he has repeatedly made that threat. His new target is Memphis, Tennessee, in part because Republican Gov. Bill Lee supports the effort, which will include other federal agencies as well. Operation Midway Blitz, on the other hand, is an element of Trump’s mass deportation campaign, which is spearheaded by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The stakes for Trump’s militarized approach were made plain on September 12, when an ICE agent shot and killed a man after a vehicle stop just outside Chicago. 

Jenkins’ report was filed three days earlier, but it clearly showed how such stops and arrests can quickly escalate.

“Take a look at this video,” Jenkins said, describing the violent detention of a Chicago resident. “Early they captured him coming out of his house. He got into his vehicle and tried to hide in there.”

“The ICE agents were forced to break the window and extract him,” Jenkins continued over footage of agents wearing camouflage and body armor — some in masks — throwing the man to the ground and handcuffing him. 

“Griff, you saw some action — immediately,” Hemmer said to close out the segment.

Fox News helped bring the war on terror to the southern border

Jenkins’s stunt represents an escalation from Fox News in that it imposes the logic and aesthetics of foreign war reporting on a major U.S. city, but the network has a long history of working alongside armed agents of the state to produce what are essentially press releases, most recently as it pertains to immigration enforcement.

As the industrial base of the war on terror evolved to focus on the U.S. southern border, so too did the complimentary media coverage. The center of gravity for the right’s national security priorities shifted from places like Fallujah to places like Texas’ Eagle Pass, and Fox News reporters and producers could titillate their audiences with dramatic, war-like footage much closer to home.

Fox’s Bill Melugin, who served for years as a border correspondent, frequently embeds with ICE units and state law enforcement like the Texas Department of Public Safety. Like Fox’s recent Chicago footage, Melugin’s coverage has served to reinforce the right-wing argument that the border was a war zone where only a militarized response would suffice.

Melugin’s own reporting helps illustrate how the war on terror metastasized to fit the needs of the Republican Party — and Fox News — in the Trump era. As Media Matters previously reported:

In April 2022, Melugin co-bylined an article warning that “Border Patrol apprehended at least 23 people coming across the southern border whose names are on the terror watchlist in 2021.” The story served as the basis for at least seven segments the day it was published, part of a longrunning and false right-wing narrative that terrorists were widely attempting to infiltrate the United States through the southern border.

Fox News makes the war on terror great again

Jenkins’ embed is play-acting, another form of threat inflation that simultaneously casts Chicago as a war zone — despite the city’s historically low rates of gun violence — and Trump as its liberator. His performance is an attempt to legitimize Trump’s campaign, and to naturalize the full importation of war on terror logic to U.S. streets. Beyond Chicago, Fox has supported Trump’s threats to other cities, including sending in troops to Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, and New York City.

And if Melugin’s vague fearmongering about terrorists at the border in the early 2020s felt like an afterimage of the 9/11 era, Fox’s coverage of the first six months of Trump’s second term is more like a targeting scope coming into focus. The parallels between the heady days of the George W. Bush administration and Trump’s second term are everywhere, for those curious to look.

Fox anchor Harris Faulkner recently echoed Bush’s formulation that “either you are with us or with the terrorists” when she responded to Trump’s extrajudicial killing of 11 people on a boat off the coast of Venezuela on September 2. Addressing critics of Trump’s order, Faulkner asked: “Are they working against America and for the drug cartels?” (Trump has since targeted a second boat, killing three people, and claims to have “knocked off” a third without offering further details.)

Fox celebrated the initial strike itself and has been pushing for military escalation in Venezuela — up to and including regime change. The playbook is so familiar Fox’s Jesse Watters reanimated one of the key phrases used to sell the invasion of Iraq. “That drugged out dinghy was a floating weapon of mass destruction packed with enough poison to kill countless Americans,” Watters said on September 3.  

A range of Fox personalities celebrated Trump’s decision just days after taking office to send people to Guantanamo Bay, perhaps the defining symbol of both the beginning of the war on terror and its seeming permanence. Pete Hegseth, the former Fox & Friends Weekend co-host now serving as Trump’s secretary of the newly renamed Department of War, deployed to the Guantanamo detention camp with the National Guard following 9/11. Two decades later, he returned there in his official capacity “to speak to service members who are currently supporting the illegal alien holding operations being led by the Department of Homeland Security.”

The war on terror is back, and this time it's wearing a bright red MAGA hat. But for those not attached — in every sense of the word — to the government forces currently terrorizing U.S. cities, it’s clear the war never even ended at all.