Media outlets have labeled President Trump a dictator and tyrant who uses his office vindictively against critics. They accuse him of trying to shut down the media as retribution. But the fact is that President Trump has rightly accused the mainstream media of being biased, pushing a left-wing agenda while damaging the country’s reputation and citizen trust in government.
The consistent framing of ICE deportations as illegal and unjustified is one of the most concrete examples of how the media has twisted the narrative to make people hate the administration and to believe that federal law enforcement has no authority. Media stories consistently omit crucial details from their ICE-related reporting, such as the fact that the individual was a noncitizen.
In the case of Abrego Garcia, many people still believe he was a U.S. citizen because media outlets referred to him inconsistently as a Maryland man instead of an illegal alien. They omit other details, such as whether the individual is a gang member, has past convictions, has a current deportation order, or lacks legal status. Instead, they focus on the person being allegedly hard-working and on the timing of the arrest, such as the day before graduation or while on the way to the hospital to see a newborn baby.
This portrayal of ICE as an illegitimate Nazi force or “Gestapo” has emboldened citizens to form anti-ICE groups, to run advertisements on television and on the internet encouraging ICE resistance, and has been responsible for much of the violence and chaos associated with deportation policies.
Trump’s recent remarks about taking away ABC’s license were not intended to punish them for criticizing him. He argued that ABC lacked credibility, saying, “I think the licenses should be taken away from ABC because your news is so fake and it’s so wrong.” He elaborated: “When you’re 97% negative on Trump, and then Trump wins the election in a landslide, that means obviously your news is not credible.”
The context was an interview in which reporters pressed him on Jeffrey Epstein, despite the documented fact that Trump had expelled Epstein from his Mar-a-Lago club and was known to have disliked him. Trump also noted that multiple Democrats had received money from Epstein and had visited his island. He pointed out that the media refused to investigate these very real situations while continuing to hound President Trump about Epstein, despite there being no evidence of wrongdoing.
The media characterized Trump’s statement as a move to take away their license to criticize him, but that is not what he said.
The pattern of inaccurate negative predictions reinforces Trump’s credibility argument. Media outlets said he had no path to victory. He won all seven swing states, plus the popular vote and the electoral vote. They predicted thousands of American deaths in the Iran conflict. Fatalities remain below twenty. They forecast oil at $200 a barrel. It is roughly half that. They predicted Gulf allies would turn against the U.S. Those allies have been the most consistent supporters. They said BRICS nations would back Iran. BRICS has largely abandoned Iran. They said the stock market would crash. But it is up.
They described a counterterrorism operation conducted with the Nigerian government as bombing Nigeria. However, it was carried out in cooperation with the Nigerian government and supported by a grateful Christian population.
They said America was attacking Ecuador. But the joint counter-narcotrafficking operation was carried out with the support of Ecuador’s government.
They said that Trump threatened democracy by removing the democratically elected president of Venezuela, when the same media reported in 2024 that Nicolás Maduro had stolen the election and that most of the free world refused to acknowledge the win.
The election itself was widely disputed, with opposition figures and multiple countries rejecting the official results, and protests breaking out across Venezuela over alleged fraud.
The media demanded he be sent back to Venezuela rather than reporting on the protests against him and the support and gratitude toward the U.S. for removing the dictator. The media refused to interview Venezuelan people to find out what they actually wanted, which was for Maduro to be gone. They did the same with the Iran conflict.
They attacked Trump while declining to cover decades of IRGC repression, including executions, torture, and the detention of women, gay people, regime critics, and journalists. The media vacillated between claiming Iran had no nuclear program, that Iran did not want nuclear weapons, and that the U.S. had already destroyed its nuclear program, with some even arguing that Iran should have nuclear weapons to be fair.
They stopped reporting on the violence committed by Hamas, the Houthis, and Hezbollah, Iranian proxies. They told us that Reza Pahlavi had no internal support, even as thousands of Iranians were gunned down in the streets, many of them shouting “long live the king.” Instead of asking Iranians what they actually wanted, the media focused on a single school that was accidentally hit as proof that regime change in Iran was immoral.
And when the IRGC demanded payment for use of the Strait of Hormuz, the media blamed Trump rather than the IRGC, despite the fact that such tolls violate international norms on transit passage under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).
Meanwhile, much of the same press has worked to rehabilitate Xi Jinping, primary backer of Russia’s Ukraine invasion, primary state sponsor of the Tehran regime, and perpetrator of a documented genocide against Uyghur Muslims and cultural genocide against Tibetans and Mongolians, as a stabilizing force preferable to Trump. Media outlets have simultaneously denied that a Christian genocide is occurring in Nigeria despite a decade of documentation showing thousands murdered and thousands kidnapped by Islamist extremists.
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