• In August, Fox Business host Jackie DeAngelis denied that Donald Trump’s tariffs were contributing to inflation, asking, “Where’s the tariff inflation?” Well, apparently we now have an answer. This week, Fox & Friends finally admitted that “coffee prices are soaring” due to Trump’s tariffs. 
• Fox’s Jesse Watters: “I like conspiracy theories. I seek them out and they’re usually right.”

President Donald Trump has escalated his efforts to deploy National Guard troops to Democrat-led cities, now attempting to send troops to Portland, Oregon, and Chicago, Illinois, in an effort to fight allegedly rampant crime in those cities and enforce federal immigration law. Right-wing media, naturally, have been supporting Trump’s efforts, including possibly invoking the Insurrection Act, following a pattern that started with their celebration of the National Guard’s deployment to Washington, D.C., this summer. 

Right-wing media figures have claimed that Trump is acting within his rights to deploy the National Guard. Podcaster Benny Johnson claimed that Portland has been “conquered by antifa.” Fox’s Kayleigh McEnany said there is a “pretty clear rebellion” in the city. And former Acting ICE Director Jonathan Fahey declared, “Donald Trump is exactly right to bring in the National Guard to Oregon.” 

Right-wing media figures have also claimed that deployments of the National Guard to places like Portland and Chicago are necessary to “clean up” the cities. Fox’s Jesse Watters said the National Guard is “on the way to do the job Portland police won’t do.” Fox Noticias host Julie Banderas said the federal deployment in Democratic cities “should be permanent.” And Fox News legal analyst Jonathan Turley said, “We need federal personnel [in Chicago] there because we cannot rely upon Democratic leaders to maintain law and order.”

On the ground coverage in Portland paints a wildly different picture from right-wing media’s assessment of the protests, with multiple local broadcast outlets reporting that the protests are relatively small and peaceful. The Wall Street Journal reported that “a sergeant from the Portland Police Bureau filed his daily observations of the demonstrations outside an ICE facility. 'Saw 8 people out front and couldn’t even get one of them to flip me the bird,' he wrote. 'Very low energy.'” Check out this great video we made demonstrating this point.  

MAGA media are celebrating and defending the Trump administration’s fascist agenda to invade American cities. Their words make it clear that no American polity is safe from the president’s coercion. War Room host Steve Bannon put a fine point on this by stating that Portland, Chicago, Memphis, and Los Angeles are “not part of the United States right now.”

• On Thursday, New York Attorney General Letitia James was indicted in a federal court on charges of bank fraud and false statements following Trump’s relentless demonization campaign against her. Fox’s Laura Ingraham responded to the indictment by saying it’s “like Christmas morning” and Newsmax’s Rob Schmitt said, “They're calling this retribution. And sure, why not? Let's call it retribution.” 
• Responding to a federal judge temporarily blocking Trump’s move to send the National Guard into Oregon, The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh said Trump “has no good choice but to openly defy these activist judges.”

This week, right-wing pundits loudly proclaimed that former special counsel Jack Smith allegedly spied on the phone calls of several Republican senators. The claim began with an October 6 article from Fox News Digital based on a document “recently discovered by FBI Director Kash Patel and exclusively obtained by Fox News Digital.” The article, which claimed Smith “was allegedly tracking the private communications and phone calls of nearly a dozen Republican senators" and included quotes from FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino, appeared just a day before Attorney General Pam Bondi testified in front of Congress. Right-wing promotion of the allegations then acted as a neat shield for Bondi. 

In reality, the FBI needed to review the toll records of senators in order to establish who Trump and his alleged co-conspirators were trying to contact before and during the January 6 insurrection. As Politico’s Kyle Cheney noted: “It actually seems sort of obvious that if you’re investigating a former president of the United States for trying to subvert an election, you’d probe some of contacts he and alleged co-conspirators had with people he was trying to enlist/pressure to overturn the results.” 

One funny exchange from this week came courtesy of Newsmax’s Rob Schmitt who, while interviewing Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) said, “You had your phone tapped by Jack Smith.” Johnson gently corrected Schmitt, saying that investigators had only obtained “metadata,” before claiming that the report “should shock and outrage every American.” 

Right-wing media pundits have already been stepping up their calls for retribution against Smith and others who investigated and prosecuted those involved in the January 6 attempted insurrection. As Media Matters’ Matt Gertz writes: “For this administration and the propagandists who support it, those who tried to get accountability for January 6 are the saga’s true villains.”

• Right-wing media hosts are ramping up their accusations that Democrats are treasonous. This week, Fox’s Jesse Watters said Democrats are “flirting with secession,” and Fox’s Mark Levin called Democrats “the enemy within.”

On Wednesday, former FBI Director James Comey pleaded not guilty to charges that he allegedly lied to and obstructed Congress after Lindsey Halligan, a Trump loyalist with no prosecutorial experience, was installed as a federal prosecutor and secured the charges. 

The Department of Justice’s crusade against Comey unearthed a familiar character in the right-wing media ecosystem — former special counsel John Durham. His investigation was promoted and then wildly supported by Fox News, particularly by host Sean Hannity. Ultimately, though, despite promising results to the MAGA audience, Durham’s investigation led to only three indictments — one that resulted in a relatively minor guilty plea and two that were unsuccessful. None of MAGA’s central enemies, including Comey and Hillary Clinton, were ever charged. 

Durham’s investigation did not lead to any basis for charging Comey, and Durham made that explicit this summer when he told federal prosecutors that he was unable to find any evidence to support the Department of Justice’s charges of obstruction or false statements against Comey. The Department of Justice ignored Durham and charged Comey anyway. After relentlessly promoting him during his investigation, MAGA media are now pretending that Durham’s investigation never happened. 

Media Matters’ President Angelo Carusone provided a great analysis of the role Durham is playing in Comey’s indictment. I invite you to watch the clip here. 

Newsmax’s Rob Schmitt summed up the MAGA motivations well when he said, regarding the Comey indictment, it “does feel like retribution, does feel like they saw a man and they looked for a crime. And that’s likely happening.”