The mainstream media keeps running interference for America’s enemies.
Trump caught them red-handed doing it again.
And what he told the Fox & Friends crew about the press is something every American needs to hear.
Trump Calls In From the Front Lines of the Media War
President Donald Trump phoned into Fox & Friends recently with a lot on his mind, and the American media establishment caught the full force of it.
This wasn’t a casual check-in. Trump had just posted to Truth Social that the United States would be striking Iran hard, and he wanted to talk about what the press was doing with that story.
What he said next is the kind of thing the legacy media desperately hopes their viewers never hear.
Trump went straight at the New York Times, CNN, the newly rebranded MS NOW, and even the Wall Street Journal, accusing all of them of painting a picture of Iran that has almost nothing to do with reality on the ground.
“They have no defense. They can’t do anything about it. The only thing they have is fake news,” Trump told the hosts.
And he wasn’t done.
“You know, they have the New York Times. [They] write stories like they’re doing great and they’re not, they’ve been wiped out. CNN and that MS NOW or whatever they call it nowadays, NBC had to get rid of it because it was bad for their reputation, but the publicity that they have is incredible. It’s almost like they’re doing well and they’re getting decimated, just decimated. And they’re dying to make a deal. They want to make a deal so badly.”
That last line is worth sitting with for a second. Iran is negotiating. Trump says so. Multiple reports confirm back-channel talks have intensified. But you’d never know it reading the front page of the Times.
He Went After the Wall Street Journal Too, Right to Their Faces
Fox News is owned by News Corp, which also owns the Wall Street Journal. Trump didn’t let that stop him.
“But you read the New York Times and you read the Wall Street Journal, which is so fake. I mean, I know you guys own it, but it’s a real piece of garbage,” Trump said bluntly.
The Wall Street Journal had run an editorial suggesting the U.S. wasn’t hitting Iran hard enough. Trump found that rich, given what American forces had just done the night before.
“We dropped $250 million worth of bombs on them last night,” Trump said. “The whole thing is crazy.”
The neoconservative editorial class has been pushing this line for months now — that no matter what Trump does militarily, it’s never quite enough. More bombs, more targets, more commitment. It’s the same playbook that gave America Iraq, Libya, and two decades of nation-building that cost thousands of American lives and trillions of dollars. Voters rejected that playbook in 2024. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board apparently didn’t get the memo.
Iran Is Telling Trump the American Press Is Their Best Asset
Here’s the part of the interview that should make every honest journalist in America stop and think.
Trump told the Fox & Friends hosts that Iranian officials themselves have privately acknowledged how well the American media has been treating them.
“Behind the scenes I will tell you — they won’t even dispute it, although they probably would because it makes sense — They’re very good at publicity, but they’re not good at fighting. They can’t believe the press they get. They can’t even believe it. And they told me. They said, ‘It’s amazing how well we’re doing in the papers.’ We’re not doing so well. They’re negotiating with us to make a deal.”
Read that again. Iranian officials, according to the President, are marveling at how well they’re being covered by American news outlets while their military gets decimated.
Now, the press will dispute that account. They always do. But the broader pattern isn’t really in dispute — the same outlets that spent years cheerleading for the foreign policy establishment are now running coverage that, whether intentionally or not, flatters a regime that has been firing missiles at American bases in Bahrain, Kuwait, and Jordan.
That’s not a coincidence. That’s a pattern.
Fox Was the Exception, and Trump Said So
Trump made a point to contrast the legacy media with Fox News, where he said the coverage has been honest and fair.
“Fox is great, and — all the anchors on Fox have been fantastic from Sean to Jesse, Laura, I mean they have all been great, everybody, every single anchor has been great,” Trump said.
Host Ainsley Earhardt told Trump that Fox viewers already know the real story — that Iran’s air defense systems are gone, their radar is destroyed, their Navy is at the bottom of the ocean. The American people who rely on Fox News aren’t getting the distorted picture that the Times and CNN are peddling.
But tens of millions of Americans still get their news from those other outlets. And what they’re getting, according to the President of the United States, is propaganda that serves the interests of a foreign adversary more than it serves the American public.
The Media Has Been Playing This Game for a Long Time
None of this is new, really. The same institutional press that buried the Hunter Biden laptop story weeks before the 2020 election — a story Big Tech actively suppressed and that turned out to be completely real — is the same press now running sympathetic framing for a regime that has spent decades chanting death to America.
The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal don’t see themselves as Iran’s publicity arm. They’d be furious at the suggestion. But when your coverage consistently makes a decimated enemy look stronger than it is, and when the enemy’s own officials are privately celebrating your work, the question of intent becomes somewhat beside the point.
Trump put it plainly. Iran is getting decimated. Iran wants a deal. And the American media is making it harder to see either of those things clearly.
The voters who sent Trump back to Washington in 2024 didn’t do it so the press could keep running the same plays. They did it because they were tired of being lied to. Tired of wars that never end, tired of enemies that get better coverage than American soldiers, and tired of a media class that treats its own country’s victories as something to be minimized.
Trump’s call into Fox & Friends wasn’t just venting. It was a President on record, telling the American people exactly what the press is doing and who it’s helping.
And the outlets he named don’t have a good answer for it.
Sources: Mediaite; Media Matters for America; Fox News Digital; Reuters/U.S. News & World Report; NPR; Daily Kos (Trump quotes via Fox & Friends transcript)