• The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh said Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar (R-FL) is “not American” and should “go back to Cuba” — she was born in Miami. Walsh has also said Minneapolis mayoral candidate Omar Fateh “was born in America, but is not actually an American.”  
• Fox’s Greg Gutfeld said women were more skilled before DEI because “they had to be better than everybody else.”

• Mike Flynn said former President Barack Obama's passport must be revoked and his home raided by federal authorities. 

• Newsmax’s Greg Kelly tried to rehabilitate Newsmax board member Alex Acosta’s sweetheart plea deal for Jeffrey Epstein.
• Fox’s Jesse Watters instructed his viewers “don’t take the bait” on the Epstein story. 
• Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk on Ghislaine Maxwell: “Maybe some kind of deal could be reached for information. We will see.”  
• Many in the QAnon world are trying to find a way to give Trump a pass for dismissing the Epstein filings. 
• Matt Walsh said Trump’s push to change the Washington Commander’s name is an “unsubtle attempt to change the subject” from Epstein. 
• Ben Shapiro condemned “pseudo-MAGA” figures for pushing Epstein disclosures.
• In March, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin denied New York Times reporting that the agency would eliminate its research arm. Last Friday, the EPA did just that.

On July 18, amid a Trump administration effort to stave off a MAGA revolt over its handling of disclosures related to 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. Trump piled on in his remarks 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. 

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. Right-wing media figures have been demanding or predicting that Obama be charged for “treason” and “seditious conspiracy” in a “military tribunal” or accusing him of orchestrating a “three-year project to overturn the will of the American people and to destroy an administration.” 

This all follows on the heels of Trump’s unprecedented and authoritarian lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal for reporting that a “bawdy” letter bearing Trump’s signature was included in an album created for Epstein’s 50th birthday. 

Trump and his MAGA media allies are trying to restore unity in his base after fractures emerged related to Epstein by pointing to common enemies — Obama and the press.

In an apparent effort to shift the focus away from Epstein and the ongoing saga related to the Trump administration’s handling of the so-called “Epstein files,” Fox News has returned its focus to the familiar boogeyman of Barack Obama. 

Fox News has mentioned Obama over three times more than it mentioned Epstein in the past several days — and it mentioned Epstein much less than the other cable news networks have. 

Fox is seemingly following the example set by Trump, who is also attempting to deflect from Epstein questions, eagerly glomming onto Tulsi Gabbard’s inaccurate and misleading attempt to accuse Obama and others in his administration of treason following the declassification and release of new intelligence documents. 

From July 18 through noon July 23, Fox mentioned Obama more than Epstein every single day. In total, Fox mentioned Obama 445 times, in comparison to the network’s 127 mentions of Epstein.

Right-wing media spent months advocating for Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which paired historic cuts to the social safety net with the equally unprecedented tax giveaways for the wealthy, all while funneling more money to immigrant detention than the entire federal prison system receives. Once the bill became law, many conservative pundits downplayed the harm it would inflict or simply stopped discussing it all together. 

Support for Trump's bill was essentially ubiquitous among conservatives. From the administration’s earliest days, right-wing media pushed false narratives to support the legislation, arguing that harsh paperwork requirements would only affect so-called “able-bodied men,” blaming immigrants instead of funding cuts for bankrupting hospitals, and even denying that the bill cut Medicaid at all. In other cases, right-wing media outlets and figures simply ignored analysis of the bill’s projected harms. 

Now, as Trump’s law upends the lives of working people, right-wing media have continued to minimize the pain it will cause. The top 0.1% of households, on the other hand, will average a handout of about $100,000 annually in tax benefits. 

Media Matters' John Knefel wrote this great overview of how the bill is already harming Americans and how right-wing media is ignoring that harm. I invite you to read it here.