Second Trump transition

“Donald Trump will be a tyrant!” So my neighbors claim. I live in Manhattan. Feel for me. Yes, Trump says wild things, like riffing about “terminating” parts of the U.S. Constitution. But I don’t think he means it. As Joe Rogan said to Trump when candidate Trump came on his show, “You say a lot of wild s—-!” In any case, podcaster Michael Malice, in my new video, says not to worry, “We have so…

On Thursday morning and after some cockamamie, tone-deaf reactions Wednesday night to President Biden’s farewell address, the major broadcast networks chose to double down with empty stenography for power with one network going to nonsensical links suggesting Biden could one day be compared to President George Washington, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson as one of the country’s…

CNN’s post-Biden speech analysis was decidedly much less sycophantic than MSNBC’s, by virtue of the fact that they had an actual conservative on the panel: Scott Jennings, who wasted absolutely no time laying waste both to Biden’s speech, and to his legacy.

Predictably, the prime time hosts at MSNBC oohed and aahed over President Joe Biden’s farewell address with a verve normally seen emanating from television production studios in Pyongyang. But in this case, they went above and beyond their customary cheerleading. They also worked hard to bolster the post-speech narrative of the perils of a Trump-adjacent oligarchy.

ABC, CBS, and NBC broke in Wednesday night for President Biden’s farewell address and, while they were never in total awe like they were with Barack Obama, they still showed their stripes in cheering the “advocate for working people” giving “very personal” “speech for the history books” and delivering an “extraordinary” message about the decline of “fact-checking” and an “oligarchy...that…

Wednesday afternoon brought us the final Biden White House press briefing and, by her own count, the 306th featuring the ever-inept Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. It featured Jean-Pierre emotionally patting herself on the back, plenty of unanswered questions (mostly stemming from the monumental Israel-Hamas ceasefire deal), the final Jacqui Time, and even Jean-Pierre doing her own…

ABC’s The View reacted as one would expect on Tuesday to Secretary of Defense-designate Pete Hegseth’s confirmation hearing the previous day. The table’s nominal Republican, Alyssa Farah Griffin, applauded Sen. Tammy Duckworth’s strange questioning about ASEAN while Joy Behar implied GOP Sen. Joni Ernst has betrayed her fellow sexual assault survivors by supporting Hegseth’s…

Comedy Central’s host of the week of The Daily Show, Jordan Klepper, unleashed two clunkers on Tuesday as he reacted to Secretary of Defense-designate Pete Hegseth’s Senate confirmation hearing. First, Klepper chopped off one of Hegseth’s answers mid-sentence to falsely claim Hegseth has flip-flopped and gone woke on women in combat. Second, Klepper claimed that Hegseth’s obsession…

A carefully elaborated media smear campaign, combining the worst elements of the Bork and Kavanaugh confirmation processes, crashed and burned. Defense Secretary nominee Pete Hegseth appears to have bolstered his confirmation chances, and the media were not thrilled to report that.

On Tuesday afternoon following Pete Hegseth’s five-hour-and-15-minute-long confirmation hearing to lead the Pentagon, CNN immediately made clear it was not having a good time, continuing to peddle the alcoholism and tattoo conspiracy theories about the “Kavanaugh-esque” Hegseth, suggested he was in over his head, and Democratic senators asked apt and thorough questions.

The media furor against the nomination of Pete Hegseth to lead the Department of Defense seemingly died down for the holidays. But the malicious spotlighting of Hegseth has picked up ahead of his Senate confirmation hearing.

Two-time Hack Madness champion, walking cartoon, fake conservative, and Washington Post columnist Jen Rubin quit the paper on Monday to launch an absurdly named site called The Contrarian with former Obama official Norm Eisen, which CNN’s Brian Stelter gushed wouldn’t simply be “anti-Trump” but “pro-democracy.” Rubin, a rich, Northern Virginia-based white woman, seems to have left The Post…