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'Don't Talk About It': Trump Tells Journalists to Stop Asking About Strait of Hormuz After Latest Closure
Despite the strait's closure, Trump insisted it was "open as far as we're concerned."
Jul 12, 2026
US President Donald Trump on Sunday twice told journalists to stop asking him about the status of the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran once again closed after the president declared an end to the ceasefire deal between the two countries.
The first instance came during an interview with NBC News' Kristen Welker, who pointed to conflicting statements from the Iranian government and US Central Command about the status of the strait, which is an essential shipping lane for global petroleum supplies.
Trump replied that "it's open, and I don't want to talk about it because I want to honor the life" of the late Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who died on Saturday from what his office described as "a brief and sudden illness."
"So I don't want to talk about it," Trump continued. "I told you that before the call."
WELKER: Iran says the Strait of Hormuz is closed. CENTCOM says it's open. Which is it?
TRUMP: It's open, and I don't want to talk about because I want to honor the life of Lindsey Graham, so I don't want to talk about it. I told you that before the call. pic.twitter.com/3ed7dN1bhK
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 12, 2026
Shortly after, during an interview with CNN's Jake Tapper, Trump was again asked whether the strait was still open.
"It's open as far as we're concerned," Trump told Tapper. "Don't talk about it. Talk about the reason you asked me to speak."
"Okay," Tapper replied. "We appreciate your time, sir."
TAPPER: Iran has declared the Strait of Hormuz closed. Is that true?
TRUMP: It's open as far as we're concerned. Don't talk about it. Talk about the reason you asked me to speak. pic.twitter.com/TwssTycQdF
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 12, 2026
Iran shut down shipping traffic in the strait after Trump launched an illegal war against the country in late February. The strait's closure resulted in spiking oil and gasoline prices, which coincided with further erosion in Trump's approval ratings.
Although traffic through the strait initially picked up in the wake of a June memorandum of understanding signed by the US and Iran, it has since slumped as the ceasefire between the two nations has fallen apart.
Ana Marie Cox, contributing editor at The New Republic, bashed both Welker and Tapper for heeding the president's requests and not pushing him to answer questions about the war he unlawfully started.
"Frankly astonished that supposed news sources agreed to terms to interview Trump and appeared to be deferential to them," Cox wrote in a social media post, "enough that they were apologetic in brining up other topics."
Cox's sentiment was echoed by Kai Ryssdal, host of NPR's Marketplace, who remarked that "the guy being interviewed doesn’t get to pick the questions."
Journalist Helen Kennedy challenged Trump's assertion that asking about the status of the Iran war was irrelevant when talking about Lindsey Graham.
"Making war with Iran was Lindsey Graham's favorite thing," Kennedy observed. "It's not like it's unrelated."
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Machine Gun-Toting Israeli Settlers Detain Ro Khanna During Trip to Occupied West Bank
"These hoodlums come in with machine guns—M4, an American-made machine gun—and they detain us. They block off the road."
Jul 11, 2026
Rep. Ro Khanna this week was detained by a group of Israeli settlers whom he described as "hoodlums... with machine guns" while making a visit to a Palestinian village in the occupied West Bank.
In an interview with Reuters published on Saturday, Khanna (D-Calif.) said he and his tour group were surrounded by armed settlers as they were traveling through the West Bank on Wednesday.
"We were at a village that Israeli settlers had destroyed, they had destroyed the school, they had destroyed that village, and we were just looking at it," said Khanna. "And these hoodlums come in with machine guns—M4, an American-made machine gun—and they detain us. They block off the road."
The California Democrat said that the settlers called in members of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to help them deal with him and his group.
"The IDF is on their side," Khanna remarked, "not on the side of the Americans."
Cameron Kasky, an aide to Khanna, told Reuters that the group was held for over an hour before officials whom he believed to be police intervened and secured their release.
The IDF told Reuters that both military troops and police officers dispersed the settlers who had set up a roadblock near the small Palestinian village of Khirbet Zanuta.
Khanna wasn't the only American to have a run-in with Israeli settlers this week, as CNN reported that four settlers attacked groups of journalists, including CNN reporters and crew, who were traveling through an area north of the Palestinian city of Ramallah on Saturday.
As the journalists were driving, four settlers blocked off the road with their cars and began attacking the reporters' vehicles with wooden clubs and metal rods.
"The settlers then began to jump on the vehicle behind CNN's—carrying another group of journalists—and smashed the windshield of that vehicle," the network reported. "Another group of settlers tried to block a separate exit route before chasing the journalists towards the town of Sinjil."
Israeli police arrived on the scene and arrested four settlers who were allegedly responsible for the attacks, CNN reported.
"The Israel Police and the IDF view any manifestation of violence or causing damage to property very seriously," the Israeli officers said after the arrests, "especially when it concerns media personnel performing their work."
Israeli settlers for years have carried out violent attacks on Palestinians living in the West Bank, and witnesses have regularly described IDF soldiers at the scene either standing by as the attacks occur or even actively helping the attackers.
In an interview with CNN on Tuesday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that claims about settler violence have been "blown up beyond belief," describing attacks as being carried out by a small number of "juvenile delinquents."
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US Strike on Iranian School Came After Commanders 'Bypassed Warnings' About Outdated Target Info
Sources told CNN that warnings were ignored due to "expediency."
Jul 07, 2026
US military commanders "bypassed warnings" indicating that their database of strike targets inside Iran was badly out of date shortly before launching a deadly attack on an Iranian primary school in the city of Minab, according to a Tuesday report from CNN.
Three sources told CNN that senior military officials received messages informing them that the intelligence behind the target list had been gathered years ago and "needed to be re-vetted."
Regardless, the proposed Iranian targets were added to a strike list shortly before the US launched an attack on the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School, killing more than 150 schoolchildren along with over a dozen teachers.
Two of CNN's sources said senior commanders ignored the warnings out of "expediency," as they did not want to significantly delay providing target lists during the outset of the war, which Trump illegally launched in February without any authorization from the US Congress.
For months, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has repeatedly dodged questions about the strike on the school, insisting that he didn't want to comment on an ongoing Pentagon investigation.
However, one of CNN's sources said that US military officials "knew within days how the mistake happened," as the school was targeted based on "obviously old info."
CNN noted that old satellite images showed the school once belonged to the same compound as an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps facility. However, as recently as 2016, images showed "that a fence had been erected to separate the school from the rest of the base, and that a separate entrance to the school had been built."
Rutgers Law School Professor Adil Haque, noting that intelligence on many of the targets was more than a decade old, called the US decision to proceed with attacks "inexcusable."
The US Department of Defense has still not released its investigation into the bombing, drawing criticism from Palestinian-American policy analyst Yousef Munayyer, who reacted to the CNN report by describing the US military as being "quick to bomb, slow to investigate."
The slow pace of the investigation has also drawn criticism from Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), the ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee.
During a May congressional hearing, Smith grilled Adm. Brad Cooper about why the US hasn't taken responsibility for the school strike despite clear evidence that it was at fault.
"In the past, when we’ve had these type of mistakes, they’ve been quickly acknowledged," Smith said, "even if a further investigation is necessary to figure out prevention methods."
Smith also criticized Hegseth for showing a "callous disregard for any sort of rules of engagement or protecting of civilian life" during his tenure as defense secretary.
Last month, President Donald Trump brushed off responsibility for the strike on the school, stating that "mistakes are made" and "war is nasty."
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Assault on Journalists Shows How Israeli Military Acts 'In Service of The Settler Movement': CNN Reporter
"Messiah complexes, talk of revenge, and the use of force against journalists are just symptoms of what's been happening to the army over the past three years," said one Israeli journalist.
Mar 28, 2026
Soldiers in the Israel Defense Forces on Friday were caught on camera assaulting and detaining a crew of CNN journalists while they were reporting from the occupied West Bank.
A video of the incident posted on social media by CNN Jerusalem correspondent Jeremy Diamond shows the CNN crew walking near the Palestinian village of Tayasir, which in recent days has come under assault from Israeli settlers who established an illegal outpost in the area.
The crew are then accosted by armed members of the IDF, who order them to sit down. After the crew complies with their commands, the soldiers come to seize the journalists' cameras and phones that are being used to record the incident.
A soldier then puts CNN photojournalist Cyril Theophilos in a chokehold and forces him to the ground. Writing about the assault later, Theophilos said that the soldier "pushed and strangled me," adding that this kind of violence "is just a symptom of the IDF's actions in the West Bank."
According to Diamond, the CNN crew were subsequently detained for two hours. During that time, Diamond wrote, it became clear that the ideology of the Israeli settlers movement was "motivating many of the soldiers who operate in the occupied West Bank" and that the Israeli military regularly acts "in service of the settler movement."
For instance, one IDF soldier acknowledged during conversations with the CNN crew that the settler outpost near Tayasir was unlawful under both international and Israeli law, but insisted "this will be a legal settlement... slowly, slowly."
The soldier also said he wanted to exact "revenge" on local Palestinians for the death of 18-year-old Israeli settler Yehuda Sherman, who was killed last week by a Palestinian driver. Palestinians who witnessed Sherman's killing have said that the driver was trying to stop Sherman from stealing sheep.
The IDF issued an apology to CNN over the incident, insisting that "the actions and behavior of the soldiers in the incident are incompatible with what is expected of IDF soldiers."
However, this apology was deemed insufficient by Barak Ravid, global affairs correspondent for Axios.
"Apologies are not enough," he wrote on social media. "There is a need for clear accountability. 99.9% of the time there is zero accountability."
The soldiers' actions also drew condemnation from Haaretz reporter Bar Peleg, who argued that problems in the IDF have only grown worse under the far-right government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
"Messiah complexes, talk of revenge, and the use of force against journalists are just symptoms of what's been happening to the army over the past three years," Peleg said. "The chief of staff and the commanding general can write another thousand letters and wave flags all they want, but the process already seems irreversible."
Palestinian human rights activist Ihab Hassan argued that incidents like the one captured by CNN are all too common for the IDF.
"The Israeli army arrests and assaults journalists, while settlers who commit horrific crimes against Palestinian civilians enjoy total impunity," he wrote. "This is state-backed terrorism."
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‘Hegseth Wants State Media’: Pentagon Chief Says He Can’t Wait for Son of Pro-Trump Billionaire to Control CNN
In a tirade against media coverage of the Trump administration's illegal assault on Iran, Pentagon Secretary Pete Hegseth said, "The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better."
Mar 13, 2026
Pentagon Secretary Pete Hegseth used part of his Friday press conference to complain about what he described as negative and "fake" news stories about the administration's illegal war on Iran, openly pining for the day the son of billionaire Trump donor Larry Ellison takes control of CNN.
"The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better," said Hegseth, pointing specifically to CNN's report Thursday that "the Pentagon and National Security Council significantly underestimated Iran’s willingness to close the Strait of Hormuz in response to US military strikes while planning the ongoing operation."
"CNN doesn't think we thought of that," said Hegseth, a former Fox News host who is facing mounting backlash over the US military's bombing of an Iranian elementary school on the first day of the war and poor strategic planning overall.
"It's a fundamentally unserious report," Hegseth added.
Watch:
Hegseth: "Some in the press just can't stop. Allow me to make a few suggestions. People look at the TV and they see banners, headlines -- I used to be in that business, I know everything is written intentionally. For example, a banner -- 'Mideast War Intensifies.' What should the… pic.twitter.com/mbz70e7SsY
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 13, 2026
David Ellison is the CEO of Paramount Skydance, which is poised to acquire CNN owner Warner Bros. Discovery after a lengthy bidding war with Netflix. The deal still must receive regulatory approval from the Trump administration and in Europe, and some state attorneys general have vowed to closely scrutinize the agreement.
"Hysterical Hegseth wants state media," Jim Acosta, a former CNN anchor and White House correspondent, wrote in response to the Pentagon secretary's comments on the looming Ellison takeover.
Hegseth rejected as "patently ridiculous" the notion that the Trump administration—whose deadly incompetence has been on full display since the start of the war—would fail to adequately plan for Iran to retaliate against a military attack by closing the Strait of Hormuz, a route through which roughly 20% of the world's oil supply travels each year.
"Don't need to worry about it," Hegseth said Friday of the strait's closure, as oil prices skyrocket.
Hegseth's latest attack on the US media, which he called insufficiently "patriotic," came days after it was revealed that the Pentagon decided to bar press photographers from briefings about the Iran war after the secretary's staff reportedly deemed some of the photos taken during a March 2 briefing "unflattering."
"I, along with print photographers, have been denied entry to cover today’s Pentagon briefing," reported Nancy Youssef, a journalist with The Atlantic, on Friday morning. "All other media were allowed in."
Mark Schoeff Jr., president of the National Press Club, called the Pentagon's decision to bar photographers from briefings "deeply troubling," saying it "runs counter to the fundamental principles of transparency in a democratic society."
"A government confident in its actions welcomes scrutiny. It does not restrict it," said Schoeff. "When the government decides which images the public is allowed to see, transparency is replaced by control. Accountability doesn't take place behind closed doors."
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CNN Cuts Off Pelosi Primary Challenger's Discussion of NSPM-7
"Look how CNN shut down his question and moved on," said one viewer.
Oct 21, 2025
Saikat Chakrabarti, the progressive organizer who is challenging US Rep. Nancy Pelosi for the House seat she has held since 1987, was met with stone-faced stares and laughter on CNN when he spoke during a panel discussion Monday about the Trump administration national security memo that one journalist said amounts to a "declaration of war" on the president's political opponents.
Chakrabarti was joined by author and historian Max Boot, journalist Bata Ungar-Sargon, commentator and former Clinton White House aide Keith Boykin, and former spokesperson for the George W. Bush administration Pete Seat in a panel discussion hosted by Sara Sidner.
The discussion covered the weekend's No Kings rallies, racist texts attributed to a nominee of President Donald Trump, and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) raids in cities across the country before turning to the administration's recent strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea, which it says have been aimed at stopping drug trafficking and which have killed dozens of people.
Chakrabarti said the administration's policy of bombing boats in the Caribbean—vessels that, Vice President JD Vance admitted, could very well be fishing boats—to kill people the White House has claimed without evidence are "narco-terrorists," raises alarm about the president's push to unilaterally define who qualifies as a "terrorist."
Trump's policy in the Caribbean, Chakrabarti suggested, represents just one way in which the president is attempting to designate groups as terrorists. In the wake of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk's killing—which he baselessly blamed on left-wing groups—he signed an executive order in September designating "antifa"—an anti-fascist ideology embraced by autonomous groups and individuals—as a "domestic terrorist organization," despite the fact that there is no such legal designation in the US.
Days later, Trump signed National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), which focuses on left-wing and anti-fascist organizations and mandates a “national strategy to investigate and disrupt networks, entities, and organizations that foment political violence so that law enforcement can intervene in criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts.”
The memo has recently garnered outrage from Democratic lawmakers, more than 30 of whom signed a letter condemning Trump's threats against progressive groups and organizers, but it has received little attention in the corporate media, and Chakrabarti's fellow guests on CNN Monday displayed little recognition of what he was talking about when he raised alarm about NSPM-7.
"Here's what concerns me—Trump is saying, 'I can define who's a terrorist, and that means I can kill him.' At the same time, we're seeing executive orders defining whole parts of Democratic Party as domestic terrorists," said Chakrabarti. "Here we're seeing NSPM-7, which says any anti-American or anti-capitalist or anti-Christian speech, is extremist speech."
While claiming to protect the US from drug traffickers, he added, the administration has created "a task force of 4,000 agents who are being taken off of drug trafficking and human trafficking, and the actual crime, and being put on prosecuting those people who are saying anti-capitalist things."
"Do you think that's okay?" he asked the other panelists. "Can you put two and two together about what's going on here?"
Pelosi primary challenger @saikatc raises NSPM-7 on CNN just now:
"NSPM-7, which says any anti-American or anti-capitalist or anti-Christian speech is extremist speech. We have a task force of 4,000 agents...being put on prosecuting those people who are saying anti-capitalist… pic.twitter.com/3lj26pRIQh
— Ken Klippenstein (NSPM-7 Compliant) (@kenklippenstein) October 21, 2025
None of the other guests responded, and Seat looked blankly at Chakrabarti before Sidner said the show was going to a commercial break.
"We will answer that question, coming up," Sidner said, laughing. "We're going to leave it there for that conversation."
When the show returned, the conversation turned to Ukraine and Russia.
"Look how CNN shut down his question and moved on," said commentator Guy Christensen.
Ken Klippenstein, who has reported on NSPM-7 and tracked mentions of the memo in the corporate press—some of which have downplayed the threat—expressed alarm that "the moment NSPM-7 comes up, [the] CNN anchor laughs nervously and ends the segment."
On Tuesday, however, Klippenstein reported that the "NSPM-7 dam" in the corporate media was continuing to break, with CNN airing a second segment that mentioned the memo.
The NSPM-7 dam continues to break, with a second CNN segment referencing the directive.
Former homeland security chief of staff @MilesTaylorUSA says: " NSPM-7 that was issued by the White House last month says that people who directly or indirectly support those domestic… pic.twitter.com/CXEVWxJpOu
— Ken Klippenstein (NSPM-7 Compliant) (@kenklippenstein) October 21, 2025
"This would be like if George W. Bush had said CodePink was al-Qaeda," explained former national security official Miles Taylor, "or people protesting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were associated with the Islamic State."
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Sanders, AOC Blast GOP Sabotage of US Healthcare During Shutdown Town Hall
"What we will not accept is for the ACA premiums to skyrocket on the American people," said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. "And what we will not accept is allowing the teetering of this system to collapse."
Oct 16, 2025
Two weeks into the government shutdown that was triggered when Democrats in Congress refused to help the Republican Party rip healthcare subsidies and coverage away from millions of Americans, two of the top progressive lawmakers in the US were resolute Wednesday night at a town hall held by CNN.
Democrats, said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) "need to see ink on paper"—legislation that is passed in the House and Senate and signed by President Donald Trump to extend Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies—before they agree to a spending package to reopen the government.
"I don't accept IOUs, I don't accept pinky promises, that's not the business that I'm in," said Ocasio-Cortez when CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins asked her and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) whether Democrats would accept "commitments from the White House and Republicans," who have claimed they will hold votes on healthcare after the government reopens.
These losers — the leaders of the Democrat Party — are not serious people. They don't have any clue what they're talking about other than demanding free health care for illegals to vote to re-open the government.
Shame on them. pic.twitter.com/IdygxnEB8r
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) October 16, 2025
Ocasio-Cortez added that she would not support a Republican proposal for a one-year extension of the subsidies, which help millions of Americans pay for monthly health insurance premiums for coverage purchased through the ACA marketplace. Once the subsidies expire—as they are currently set to at the end of 2025—KFF has estimated that the average ACA premium will more than double.
Whether at the end of this year or after next year's midterm elections, said the congresswoman, "what we will not accept is for the ACA premiums to skyrocket on the American people."
"What we will not accept is the doubling of these premiums. And what we will not accept is allowing the teetering of this system to collapse right before everyone’s eyes,” she said.
Republicans have persisted in repeating the baseless claim that instead of opposing skyrocketing health insurance costs, Democrats are refusing to vote for a continuing resolution to reopen the government—which needs 60 votes to pass in the Senate—because they want to give "free healthcare" to undocumented immigrants.
Undocumented immigrants are not eligible for coverage under the ACA, Medicaid, or Medicare. The Republicans' massive, broadly unpopular One Big Beautiful Bill Act stripped legal asylum recipients, green-card holders, and other legal permanent residents of their eligibility for those healthcare programs, a provision which Democrats have called to reverse.
When asked whether the US should provide healthcare for undocumented immigrants at the town hall, Ocasio-Cortez took aim at the "common lie" that's been spread by GOP leaders including Vice President JD Vance—and vehemently defended the established statute, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, which requires all hospitals that participate in Medicare to provide emergency treatment to anyone who needs it, regardless of immigration status.
"I don't know about you, but me, as a human being, I don't want to live in a world where if a human being is struck by a car or is getting rushed into a hospital, that people in the ER surgical room are asking for your insurance information or asking for documents before they save your life," said the congresswoman.
Rep. @AOC: “This is a common lie Republicans - especially JD Vance (+ @RepTimBurchett) - keep repeating… undocumented people can’t be covered by federal insurance… and federal law says everyone gets treated in the ER. As it should be.” pic.twitter.com/TYqmiYswP4
— The Tennessee Holler (@TheTNHoller) October 16, 2025
Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez expressed empathy with federal workers who are missing paychecks as a result of the shutdown, and told audience members who are unable to obtain government-backed loans to buy a home or struggling with a loss of income that they aim for the shutdown to end "as quickly as possible."
But Ocasio-Cortez rejected one suggestion from an audience member who pointed out that about 80% of people who benefit from ACA subsidies live in states that voted for Trump and in "rural, mostly Republican areas."
"If the Republicans are so insistent on sticking it to their own voters on this issue, why don't the Democrats just let them?" asked the town hall participant.
The question illustrated how Trump is "dividing this country," said Sanders, who pointed out that he and Ocasio-Cortez have spoken to large crowds in rural, conservative areas as part of his Fighting Oligarchy Tour.
Q: “Most hospitals + people who will lose insurance are in rural areas. If Trump & Republicans are so intent on sticking it to their own voters, why not let them?”@AOC: “That’s the difference between us & Trump. I don’t care if you voted for me, I want you to have health care.” pic.twitter.com/OvUjAcZWLD
— The Tennessee Holler (@TheTNHoller) October 16, 2025
"It also speaks to a big difference between someone like Trump and someone like me, and someone like Bernie," said Ocasio-Cortez. "Trump believes that if you don't vote for him, he doesn't have to be your leader... I don't care if someone voted for me or not. I don't care if someone is a Republican or an independent or a Democrat... That will never change the fact that I'm going to fight for them to have healthcare."
"And that is the difference," she said, "between a strongman and an authoritarian, and a leader of a democracy."
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Media Faces Reckoning After Helping Trump Downplay Project 2025 on Campaign Trail
"A Trump denial is not a fact," said one media critic.
Oct 03, 2025
As President Donald Trump openly embraces Project 2025, mainstream media outlets are facing criticism for their role in helping him downplay his ties to the wildly unpopular far-right governing playbook in the lead-up to his reelection last year.
After she became the Democratic nominee in July, former Vice President Kamala Harris made the Heritage Foundation's over 900-page manifesto for “the next conservative president” central to her case against Trump during the 2024 election, often referring to it as "Trump's Project 2025."
She and other Democrats warned that if he retook power, he would swiftly enact many of its most extreme and unpopular proposals and dramatically expand executive power while doing it.
Among those proposals were steep cuts to social safety net programs like Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the "mass deportations" of millions of immigrants, the elimination of the Department of Education, new restrictions on abortions, the gutting of climate protections, and the replacement of career civil servants with political appointees, among many others.
Democrats amplified the plan's danger at the Democratic National Convention and in campaign ads, and Trump began to distance himself from the platform. Despite the fact that as many as 140 people who'd worked in his first administration—including Paul Dans, Heritage's director of Project 2025—had a hand in its creation, Trump said: "I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it."
This was demonstrably untrue, even at the time. Media Matters for America dug up a clip from as far back as May 2023 of Dans stating that "President Trump's very bought in with this," speaking of the program.
Project 2025 was almost inconceivably unpopular. An NBC News poll from September 2024 showed that while 57% of registered voters viewed the plan negatively, just 4% viewed it positively.
But in the critical months leading up to the election, many media outlets took Trump's denial at face value, publishing fact checks and other commentary that painted Democrats' warnings about his connection to the plan as alarmist or misleading.
Responding to a social media post in July stating that "Trump has made his authoritarian intentions quite clear with his Project 2025 plan," a fact check by USA Today rated the statement "false," because, as the headline said, "Project 2025 is an effort by the Heritage Foundation, not Donald Trump."
In September, after Harris confronted Trump about Project 2025 at the first and only debate between the two, the paper published another fact-check with the headline: "Harris repeats claim that Project 2025 is Trump's plan. That's still not right."
In response to Harris' claim during the debate that Project 2025 was "a detailed and dangerous plan... that the former president intends on implementing if he were elected,” Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler, whose coverage received a fair bit of criticism during the 2024 cycle, reported in bold text that "Project 2025 is not an official campaign document."
A CNN fact check of the Harris campaign's social media in September remarked that one account "frequently invokes Project 2025," before caveating that "Project 2025 is not Trump’s initiative, and he has said he disagrees with some of its proposals."
In an October interview on CBS's "Face the Nation," anchor Norah O'Donnell, Harris attempted to warn about Project 2025, before O'Donnell responded: "You know that Donald Trump has disavowed Project 2025. He says that is not his campaign plan."
After nine months back in power, the website Project 2025 Tracker estimates that Trump has already implemented approximately 48% of the objectives outlined in the policy document.
In addition to his key campaign promises many of his second administration's policies are highly specific to Project 2025, such as his pledge to abolish the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), his efforts to privatize the National Weather Service (NWS), his reconfiguration of Title X funding to promote pregnancy, and his elimination of the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties.
Trump is no longer hiding his connection to Project 2025, having brought in many of its hiring picks and authors to staff his administration almost immediately after his victory last November.
This week, he began to boast about it openly. As his Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director, Russ Vought, one of Project 2025's architects, began using the current government shutdown to unilaterally cut off funding to infrastructure projects in blue states and cities, Trump lauded him as "he of PROJECT 2025 Fame."
"This was always the plan," Harris responded on social media.
While many commentators expressed outrage that Trump blatantly lied about his connections to Project 2025, others dredged up old clips of newspapers and anchors taking him at his word.
"All those 2024 media fact checks that said, 'Donald Trump and the Trump campaign deny any connection to Project 2025' look pretty ridiculous right now," said MeidasTouch editor-in-chief Ron Filipkowski. "A Trump denial is not a fact. You just used his lies to 'debunk' a reality that was obvious to anyone paying attention."
Mehdi Hasan, the founder of the independent media company Zeteo, highlighted the CBS interview, saying Trump's embrace of Project 2025 was "embarrassing not just for Norah O'Donnell but a whole host of leading American anchors and reporters who echoed Trump’s false denials."
"Nothing showed the difference between mainstream and independent media better than the response to Trump’s obvious lie about not knowing anything about Project 2025," said David Pepper, author of the book Saving Democracy: A User's Manual. "Most mainstream media started fact-checking those who claimed a connection to be somehow false. Others 'both sides'ed' it. Far more in independent media called it out as a whopping lie."
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Pro-Trump Billionaires Want to Control What You Watch
The Ellison duo taking over both CBS and CNN, as well as controlling a major social media network like TikTok, would be dangerous for democracy.
Sep 23, 2025
Larry Ellison, founder of the software firm Oracle, is the second-richest billionaire in both the US and the world, and for a brief moment was No. 1 in the world (AP, 9/11/25). But for a long time, unlike many of his peers, he was unable to boast that he controlled a chunk of the news and opinion reaching the American public.
On Forbes‘ US list, he is sandwiched between Elon Musk, No. 1, who bought the social media network Twitter and rebranded it as X, and Mark Zuckerberg, who runs Meta, which operates Facebook and Instagram. Jeff Bezos, at No. 4, has the Washington Post. Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google, Nos. 5 and 6, operate the leading search engine as well as one of the most important news aggregators, Google News. Michael Bloomberg, at No. 13, the former New York City mayor, has Bloomberg and its various outlets.
Ellison seems to have joined the club, as TikTok, under US government coercion (FAIR.org, 1/23/25), is selling 80% of its US operations to an investor consortium that includes Oracle, along with investment firms Silver Lake and Andreessen Horowitz (Reuters, 9/16/25).
Ellison is a big Trumper, joining in the reactionary denial of the 2020 presidential elections (Washington Post, 5/20/22). Like some of the others in the deal, he is part of the inner circle of Trump’s favorite corporate ideologues. This TikTok deal is not just about money. It’s about control of the political narrative.
‘CBS Shifts to Appease Right’
But owning a big chunk of the US’ leading short-form video platform is not Ellison’s only claim to being a media mogul. Eyeing the corporate media throne, you can almost hear Ellison channeling Seinfeld’s Frank Costanza, confronted with the daunting prospect of competing in computer sales against IBM and Microsoft, declaring: “I’ve got a secret weapon. My son.”
Enter Larry’s son David Ellison, who was born into the kind of riches most can barely dream of. As I wrote for FAIR (7/24/25), the younger Ellison is the CEO of Skydance, which recently merged with Paramount, giving him control over CBS. David’s campaign contributions trend more to the Democratic establishment, but it’s his father’s politics that seem to be reshaping the newly bought network: “CBS Shifts to Appease the Right Under New Owner,” as an NPR headline (9/12/25) put it.
The space for semi-skeptical media is shrinking as the space for regime-friendly broadcasters (Fox News still beats out both CNN and CBS in terms of viewers) is growing.
Anti-woke zealot Bari Weiss is nearing “a top role at CBS News,” which “left-leaning staffers at the network fret could amount to ‘dropping a grenade’ in the newsroom,” the New York Post (9/10/25) reported. It added that the network “is weighing naming Weiss editor in chief or copresident of the network,” and that Ellison is looking to buy her “news site, the Free Press, in a deal valued at upwards of $100 million.” According to Reuters (9/15/25), it was David Ellison who “installed Kenneth Weinstein—a supporter of President Donald Trump and the former CEO of conservative think tank Hudson Institute—as ombudsman of CBS News.” (See FAIR.org, 9/9/25.)
‘Pretty Hard to Be Optimistic’
The New York Post (9/11/25) reports that Ellison father and son are now looking to buy Warner Brothers Discovery, which carries with it CNN, creating an unprecedented level of media consolidation. While the Post said such a purchase could be difficult, because Warner Brothers “has a market cap of around $38 billion,” that might not matter, as “Larry Ellison’s net worth leaped by $100 billion following Oracle’s latest blowout earnings report.” He is “closing in on being the richest dude in the world, with a net worth… of more than $370 billion.”
CNN reports 1.8 million viewers, and CBS reports an average total audience of 1.4 million viewers, for a combined 3.2 million, which eclipses ABC’s 2.3 million, NBC’s 1.4 million, and MSNBC’s 1.2 million viewers (Forbes, 7/24/25).
The CNN/CBS combo would reach far more Americans through online news, with CNN.com‘s 276 million visits per month already making it the nation’s second-biggest news site. Add CBSNews.com‘s 63 million visits, and you’ll have an entity that edges closer to the heretofore undisputed leader, NYTimes.com, with its 425 million visits a month.
Former CBS Evening News star Dan Rather (Hollywood Reporter, 9/15/25) said Americans “have to be concerned about the consolidation of huge billionaires getting control of nearly all of the major news outlets.” Rather added, “It’s pretty hard to be optimistic about the possibilities of the Ellisons buying CNN.”
‘Not a Sign of a Healthy Democracy’
Fast Company (9/16/25) summarized the dangerous nature of the deal this way:
If the Warner Bros. Discovery deal were to go through, Ellison would control streaming services with a combined 200 million-plus subscribers, says Barclays (though there will be overlap between the Paramount+, HBO Max, and Pluto services). It’s something Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren warned against on X on September 11. The deal with Warner Bros. Discovery, she wrote, “must be blocked as a dangerous concentration of power.” Add TikTok’s 170 million-plus users and one of the hottest properties in the social space, and you get to a position of dominance in the media….
“It is not a sign of a healthy democracy when billionaires are buying up all of the means of cultural consumption,” says Steven Buckley, lecturer in media and digital sociology at City St George’s, University of London. Others have pointed out that the potential playbook, if this were to go ahead, draws comparisons with Elon Musk’s takeover of a social platform to dominate public discourse. Musk has previously taken credit for helping Trump secure the White House in 2024 through his positioning of X as a supportive social network…
“It is naive to think that over time [Ellison’s] business and political philosophy, combined with the external political pressures from this and future administrations, wouldn’t have an impact on how the American public experience TikTok,” Buckley says.
Conservative Media Capture
The United States has seen a tremendous amount of conservative media capture since Donald Trump returned to the White House. Bezos has moved to cull viewpoints at the Washington Post that might offend Trump (BBC, 2/26/25), Zuckerberg has taken steps to make Facebook friendlier to MAGA (NBC, 1/8/25), and Musk has turned X into a vehicle for his far-right politics (AP, 8/13/24; NBC, 2/16/25). All three men sat together at Trump’s inauguration.
The Los Angeles Times under billionaire owner Patrick Soon-Shiong has also made strenuous efforts to be more Trump-friendly (FAIR.org, 10/24/24; Independent, 12/17/24; NPR, 2/3/25; Guardian, 3/5/25).
Both Ellisons, the Hollywood Reporter (9/15/25) said, “have shown support for Trump in the past,” and they certainly buck the rising outrage against Israel’s genocide in Gaza. “Paramount, under its new owner, David Ellison, has become the first major Hollywood studio to condemn a boycott of Israeli film institutions that more than 4,000 actors and directors now support,” the New York Times (9/13/25) said.
With the Trump regime shutting down the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds NPR and PBS (FAIR.org, 4/25/25; NPR, 8/1/25), the space for semi-skeptical media is shrinking as the space for regime-friendly broadcasters (Fox News still beats out both CNN and CBS in terms of viewers) is growing.
As for social media, given that Andreessen Horowitz’s cofounders are also Trump supporters, it seems that, along with Ellison, these oligarchs could steer TikTok in the same direction as Facebook and X (TechCrunch, 7/16/24).
Worse, critics of TikTok’s Chinese ownership fretted that data collection of American users eventually led to surveillance by the Chinese government. Data collection is a given with social media generally, but now that power rests partly with Ellison, who has gotten rich off such technology. Fortune (9/17/24) reported, “Oracle founder Larry Ellison… sees a growing opportunity for his company to help authorities analyze real-time data from millions of surveillance cameras.” And funnily enough, an AP investigation (9/9/25) showed that Oracle was among the many Silicon Valley firms whose technologies have supported Chinese surveillance systems.
Just imagine what he could do with a large social media network like TikTok.
Rather and others are right that the Ellison duo taking over both CBS and CNN, as well as controlling a major social media network like TikTok, would be dangerous for democracy. And given their closeness to the Trump regime, that seems to be the point.
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Trump Brokering Deal to Hand TikTok Over to Right-Wing Billionaires Andreessen and Ellison
"The TikTok ban wasn’t primarily about national security or influence... but rather political control," one tech columnist wrote.
Sep 17, 2025
President Donald Trump is pushing to finalize a deal that would hand majority control of TikTok over to a consortium that includes two of his closest billionaire allies.
On Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that under the planned deal, 80% of the stake will be controlled by a group of American investors, while the remaining 20% will remain with Chinese firms.
The American companies include the investment firm Silver Lake, the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, and the technology company Oracle. The latter two are controlled by some of Trump's most prolific supporters.
Marc Andreessen and his partner Ben Horowitz each donated $2.5 million to Trump's super PAC during the 2024 election.
Andreessen, who said at the end of 2024 he was spending roughly "half" his time at Mar-a-Lago, was tapped as an economic adviser to Trump earlier this year, where he helped to recruit staffers to Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). After unleashing a bevy of false claims, Andreessen led the charge for DOGE to virtually kill the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which he'd long loathed for its investigations into his investment firms.
Oracle, meanwhile, was founded by Larry Ellison—one of Trump's earliest backers in the Silicon Valley world—who reportedly advised the president during his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss. Over the next five years, Ellison accumulated enough wealth to briefly overtake Musk as the world's richest person and has used those riches to consolidate control over the media. After taking office in January for his second term, Trump began to champion Ellison as the man to take over TikTok.
In August—with the help of Trump's Federal Communications Commission (FCC)— SkyDance, owned by Ellison's son David, purchased Paramount, which owns CBS News. The younger Ellison quickly began making moves to reshape the network's politics, most notably by planning to purchase the "anti-woke" publication the Free Press and recruiting its founder, Bari Weiss, to a senior editorial role, which has left newsroom staffers fearing for their editorial independence. Ellison also has designs on a $70 billion deal to acquire Warner Bros., which would give him control over CNN as well.
Matthew Gertz of Media Matters for America warns that soon, "one Trump-aligned billionaire family could end up controlling CBS News, CNN, and TikTok."
Gertz noted that TikTok would join a media ecosystem that is increasingly bowing to the president, with X and Meta controlled by Trump-aligned billionaires and the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times shifting their coverage to flatter his worldview. Meanwhile, nominal holdouts like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal have been slapped with multibillion-dollar lawsuits, as Trump has accused them of trying to harm him with negative coverage.
Trump said that he plans to speak with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Friday to finalize the sale of TikTok, which is currently owned by the Chinese firm ByteDance.
The sale of the platform was set into motion in 2024 under President Joe Biden, who signed legislation banning TikTok in the United States unless it was sold to a US company. Congress justified the decision at the time by claiming that China was using the app to surveil Americans and using the platform's algorithm to feed them propaganda, though free press advocates criticized the ban as an effort to censor opinions and information unfavorable to the US government.
One persistent gripe from advocates for the ban was that the platform had become a major source for videos depicting the visceral horrors of Israel's military assault on Gaza. In one infamous exchange, then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken and then-Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) pointed to TikTok as a reason why “the PR has been so awful” for Israel since the war began and said that this was a primary motivation behind the ban among legislators.
Its soon-to-be new partial-owner, Ellison, however, is one of Israel's staunchest supporters. He has donated at least $26 million to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) via a nonprofit called "Friends of the IDF" and once offered a seat on Oracle's board to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Independent journalist Jack Poulson also reported this week that David Ellison once coordinated with former Israeli military commander-in-chief Benny Gantz on an effort to spy on and disrupt American activists for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement.
"The panic over TikTok was always in part because it is a prime source for factually accurate coverage of the Gaza genocide," said Nathan J. Robinson, the editor-in-chief of Current Affairs magazine, on X. "Now one of the leading pro-Israel fanatics is set to take control and ensure that young people don't keep getting videos telling the truth about Palestine."
According to the Journal, TikTok's new proprietors will not be reconstructing the app's much-maligned algorithm from the ground up. Rather, "TikTok engineers will re-create a set of content-recommendation algorithms for the app, using technology licensed from TikTok’s parent ByteDance."
As tech columnist John Herrman points out for New York magazine, this deal doesn't resolve the "stated reasons" for the ban, since it still gives its Chinese owners a stake in the company and uses their underlying technology.
"When it comes to the TikTok ban, though, 'stated reasons' were never especially useful," Herrman wrote. "In the end, the TikTok ban wasn’t primarily about national security or influence—although this new arrangement will have implications for both—but rather political control, and the demonstration thereof."
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