Category: News

It can’t be said that reporters don’t cover extensively cover Donald Trump, but it can be said that their coverage is often poor. Yesterday, Donald Trump posted on Truth Social a letter to the dictator of Egypt, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, about working to resolve a dispute with Ethiopia over Ethiopia’s Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam. The letter is bizarre if you believe the things that Donald Trump says, as he claimed last year to have already resolved that dispute and counts it as one the supposed wars he has ended. How it could be counted as a war is hard to fathom as there hasn’t been a military conflict, much less a war so far. Incredibly, prominent news outlets covered that letter, but ignored the whole ended a war aspect.

Here is how Donald Trump talked about ending the “war” in July:

And Egypt and Ethiopia, as you know, they’ve been fighting over the damn Ethiopia built a dam with United States money largely it’s one of the largest dams in the world and it has on little problem. It doesn’t allow much water going into the Nile River. So you can imagine Egypt’s not thrilled because they they they live off the Nile River. The Nile River, it’s it’s blood, it’s heart, it’s everything. And, uh, we think we have that one pretty well. taken care of. But that was that was a pretty bad thing. I I was watching this as it was going up. I get pictures and satellites and everything and I’m looking at this massive Dam and I’m saying, is that going to be blocking the water to the Nile? and, anyway, that should have never sort of happened the way it happened. but financed by the United States of America. The whole thing is a little crazy, but we got that solved. I think that’s going to be solved pretty long term.

(The US didn’t fund the dam, contrary to what he said there.)

Despite that, Reuters’ Trevor Hunnicutt wrote a piece titled “Trump offers to mediate Egypt-Ethiopia dispute on Nile River waters.” That makes no mention of Donald Trump claiming to have already resolved this or that he claimed there was a war he stopped.

It’s the same story with NBC News’ Freddie Clayton, who wrote a piece titled “Egypt welcomes Trump’s offer to mediate Nile River water dispute with Ethiopia.”

Over at ABC News, they published a story from the Associated Press’ Samy Magdy titled to “Egypt and Sudan welcome Trump’s offer to mediate Nile River dam dispute.” Again no mention of the whole “war” thing.

We should note that another Associated Press reporter Will Weissert did manage to cover the “war” element:

The president frequently boasts about ending eight wars around the world, though that claim is exaggerated. Egypt and Ethiopia are already on his list of wars he resolved, with Trump maintaining he stopped a conflict that might have led to fighting over issues that included the dam known as GERD.

Back in October, DHS Secretary, Kristi Noem claimed on Fox News there was an organized effort to target DHS law enforcement agents:

So our intelligence indicates that these people are organized. They’re getting more and more people on their team as far as attacking officers, and they’re making plans to ambush them and to kill them. We have specific officers and agents that have bounties that have been put out on their heads. It’s been $2000 to kidnap them, $10,000 to kill them. They’ve released their pictures, they’ve sent them between their networks. And it’s an extremely dangerous situation and unprecedented. So we’ve put protective detail around those individuals, changed some of our operations to keep our officers safe.

Border Patrol hype guy Gregory Bovino followed up the next day, also on Fox News, saying:

it’s a war zone out there. Secretary Noem mentioned a bounty on the heads of federal agents that $2000 to kidnap, $10,000 to kill senior Border Patrol officials and senior ICE officials here in Chicago.

As we covered at the time, a press release from DHS made this seem like less than was being claimed in those Fox News appearance. As the whole thing amounted to a Snapchat message about Gregory Bovino. Three months later, in court the story has been further reduced. The press release was titled, “Latin Kings Gang Member Arrested in Illinois After Placing Hit on Commander at Large Border Patrol Chief Bovino.” Jon Seidel of the Chicago Sun-Times reports that federal prosecutors are no longer claiming that man who sent the Snapchat message was a ranking member of the Latin Kings gang. Only that he had an “affinity” for the gang. The claim that he was ranking member of the gang came from an anonymous source:

The criminal complaint originally filed against Espinoza Martinez in October cited an anonymous“source of information,” who accused Espinoza Martinez of being a “ranking member of the Latin Kings.”

What comes across is that this was someone try to impress an anonymous informant in ways that don’t seem all that believable. For example, prosecutors say he wrote text messages that read “Chapo has our back bro. if they they take one its gunna be bad,” and “sinaloa dont f— around.” Chapo like being a reference to Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán who was the head of the Sinola cartel. He has been in US custody since 2017. And has been in the federal Florence supermax prison in Colorado since 2019.

A week ago, the Trump Department of Justice released a small portion of the Epstein files. If it wasn’t clear enough already that the release looked to be an attempt to put the spotlight on Bill Clinton and avoid focus on Jeffrey Epstein’s longtime friend Donald Trump, today Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social “Democrats’ push for Epstein files boomeranged with Clinton featured prominently throughout.” That was also the title of a story from non-legitimate news outlet Just the News that he was linking to. That story starts out:

Democrats’ push for the release of documents surrounding convicted sex offender and disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein through a House vote appears to have backfired, as the disclosures intended to scrutinize Team Trump have instead spotlighted their own party’s connections, including former President Bill Clinton’s

The push for the release actually came through a bipartisan piece of legislation, which only had one vote against it in the House and passed unanimously through the Senate. And the members of Congress most interested in the release seem interested in the victims, not in partisan point scoring.

Later in the story one of the few significant files released gets put in to a partisan spin as well:

Adding to the headache for Democrats is the fact that, in this most recent tranche of formerly-classified documents, it’s been revealed that the first known opportunity to investigate, and possibly charge Epstein — with child pornography — was during Clinton’s time in office, but his Department of Justice (DOJ) declined to proceed.

The partisan nature of the choice of files released, shouldn’t be that surprising considering something that also happened last Friday. On Friday evening Donald Trump got on Air Force One and flew to North Carolina for a rally and then traveled to Mar-a-Lago. According to the White House, also traveling on the plane was Todd Blanche. That would be the Todd Blanche who previously Trump’s personal attorney and now is the Deputy Attorney General.

Todd Blanche then was staying with Donald Trump or at least nearby him, as on Sunday he appeared on Meet the Press from a studio in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, which is just up the road from Mar-a-Lago.

Some might remember the big brouhaha in 2016 when former President Bill Clinton simply met on a tarmac with the Attorney General Loretta Lynch. Now we have former personal attorney for the President as Deputy Attorney General traveling with the President as the Deputy AG is involved in releasing documents about a pedophile sex trafficker that was long the President’s friend.

On December 10, US District Court Judge Charles Breyer ordered the Trump administration to “end its deployment of federalized California National Guard troops in Los Angeles and return the troops to state control.” He delayed that order until December 15 at noon local time. On December 12, an appeals court upheld the removal of the troops from Los Angeles, but removed the requirement to return the troops to state control. So did the troops leave Los Angeles? While there was plenty of news coverage of Judge Breyer’s ruling, there has been inexplicably almost no coverage of what happened after that.

The Los Angeles Times did cover this, though, with a rather inconclusive answer:

Dozens of California National Guard troops under President Trump’s command apparently slipped out of Los Angeles under cover of darkness early Sunday morning, ahead of an appellate court’s order to be gone by noon Monday.

They said that “[a]dministration officials would not immediately confirm whether the troops had decamped.”

There doesn’t appear to be any other coverage by major outlets of what actually happened.

Yesterday, the bodies of the two US troops, Sgt William Howard and Sgt Edgar Torres Tovar of the Iowa National Guard, and one civilian, Ayad Mansoor Sakat from Michigan, killed in Syria on Saturday arrived at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. The White House posted on YouTube a video titled “President Trump and the First Lady Participate in a Dignified Transfer Ceremony” of the transfer of the bodies off a military transport plane. Melania Trump is nowhere to be seen. The title of video was later changed to “President Trump Participates in a Dignified Transfer Ceremony.” What happened?

The night before at 10:30 PM Eastern, the White House sent out the schedule for the next day which stated that Melania would attend the event, “THE PRESIDENT and FIRST LADY participate in a Dignified Transfer Ceremony.” An hour before the event, the White House Press pooler The Washington Times’ Jeff Mordock wrote this:

On background from a White House official

First lady Melania Trump will not be attending today’s transfer ceremony.

So somebody who didn’t want to attach their name to the comment said she wouldn’t be attending, but no explanation was given as to why. So far no explanation has been given. She doesn’t appear to have some serious issue, as the schedule for today says she will be attending a Christmas reception at the White House.

By skipping the reception of the bodies, she also skipped meeting with the families of the deceased.

At an Oval Office event today, Donald Trump made a claim that the number of people being killed by fentanyl was much higher than the official figure:

I believe they killed over the last five or six years per year, 200 to 300,000 people. You hear about 100,000, which is a lot of people, but the number is much higher than that. That’s been proven

He has made similar comments recently.

While he claimed that this has been proven, his claim runs against the US government numbers that are put out by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which haven’t been retracted since he took office. Their numbers say that total overdose deaths were around 100,000 in the past couple of years: “an estimated 80,391 drug overdose deaths in the United States during 2024—a decrease of 26.9% from the 110,037 deaths estimated in 2023.” Drug overdose death from opioids, which would encompass all fentanyl related deaths as well others, are only a portion of that, with the number at “an estimated 83,140 in 2023 to 54,743 in 2024.”

Around the time he said that, the White House put out a press release that at one point claims that “[t]he number of Americans dying from drugs has fallen every single month.” That links an X post from the White House Rapid Response account that is of a commercial released by the Department of Homeland Security, which cites the CDC as their source for their claim. So both the White House and the DHS think their numbers trustworthy, even if Donald Trump doesn’t.

On Thursday Donald Trump claimed that the US would start paying off its debt, “we have $38 trillion in debt, which we’ll start paying off pretty soon with the tariff money coming in.” That isn’t true even close to being true.

On Wednesday, the Treasury Department said that tariff revenue was $30.75 billion in November. The month before that it was $31.35 billion. It was $31.36 billion two months ago. So it has been averaging about $31 billion a month. At that rate tariff revenue $372 billion a year. That would hardly make a dent in $38,000 billion in debt.

But it gets worse, as the debt is the accumulation of previous deficits. Deficits being the amount that US government spends in a year beyond the amount of revenue it takes in. According to the Treasury Department, in the fiscal year that ended in September, the US ran $1.775 trillion deficit even with months of Trump’s heightened tariffs. So instead of paying off debt, the US is going continue to increase its debt.

It’s unclear if Donald Trump really believes that the tariffs could pay off the debt or if this just to try to avoid being criticized for the growing debt under his Presidency.

On Friday, Donald Trump had one public event on his schedule. That was a billing signing that was publicly added to his schedule on the night before, as happening at 3:30 PM Eastern. It ended up starting 2 hours and 27 minutes later. That was by far the latest he was to a public event this month, but hardly the first time he was late.

On Thursday, what turned out to be his first public event was supposed to start at 4:45 PM, but according to Roll Call, started at 5:59 instead. He was only 20 minutes late to his second public event of the day, though.

On Wednesday, his public event was supposed to start 2 PM, but started an hour later.

On Tuesday, he showed up at his rally in Pennsylvanian 7:09 PM, which was 59 minutes after he was supposed to.

Monday, his public event was supposed to start at 2 PM, but the press only was brought in for the start of it 30 minutes later.

The only time Roll Call records him arriving early this month was for a dinner at the State Department on Saturday of last week.

Considering when in the days the events were happening, it isn’t the case that he slept in, unless he slept in in to the afternoon. His tardiness hardly helps with his attempt to push back on his very apparent low energy recently.

At Karoline Leavitt’s press briefing today she got fairly uncommon push back from a reporter. More striking, it was from White House correspondent from CBS News, which has recently come under Trump friendly ownership. CBS News’ Nancy Cordes following up on interaction between Leavitt and CNN’s Kaitlan Collins said, “just first very quickly clarifying uh Kaitlan’s question. You acknowledged that CPI in January when you took office was 3% and in September, the last month for which we have data, it was also 3%. So inflation” At that point Leavitt interjected “No, it’s 2.5%. Not in September it was 3%. 2.5%. The average CPI right now, I have it in front of me. In President Trump’s first eight months in office, inflation, as measured by the overall consumer price index, has slowed to a 2.5 average pace. This is down from the 2.9% inherited in January.”

To clarify those number, the CPI in December of last year was 2.9%, in January it was 3.0%, and in the latest month available, September, it was 3.0%. Karoline Leavitt’s 2.5% is a average across Trump’s term, which wouldn’t be the relevant comparison to one month under Biden. The reason to cite that figure is that it hides that inflation is basically unchanged in this Trump term so far to what it was at the tail end of the Biden administration.

This comes as CBS News’ parent Paramount is trying to buy CNN parent Warner Bros. Discovery after Paramount was recently acquired by the Ellison family. They are supposed to Trump friendly, but apparently not enough, as it was just on Monday that Trump was criticizing them on Truth Social over 60 Minutes interview with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. He wrote in part, “it was that the new ownership of 60 Minutes, Paramount, would allow a show like this to air.”

If a member of Congress in his late 60s or in his 70s was appearing at political rallies shirtless it seems like that would be newsworthy. If a President of the United States was falsely claiming that had happened, it would be newsworthy, if not raising question of invoking the 25th Amendment. And yet Donald Trump’s claim that 77-year-old Rep. Mike Kelly attending rallies shirtless has been ignored by the press. A press that intently focuses on all sorts of minutia surrounding Trump and his administration. On Wednesday, at an Oval Event about car emissions standards, Donald Trump said this:

Mike used to come to my rallies all the time and we’d have a rally. It was like zero degrees. It was freezing everywhere. And he’d sit there without a shirt on. And I didn’t need that. I didn’t say it was pretty, but he would sit there in the cold and he didn’t mind it at all. I said, “That’s one tough cookie, right?”

As he said that, Republican members of Congress laughed. Rep. Kelly responded, “You lit it up. We didn’t need any heat. You were there.”

We couldn’t find any evidence that is true, which it seems like there would be.

This isn’t the first time Donald Trump has made this type of claim. Here he was speaking at an event in Pennsylvania, which is the state Rep. Kelly represents a district in, in May:

Mike Kelly. Where’s Mike? He’s wearing a shirt today. A lot of times he doesn’t. If it’s cold, he doesn’t’ wear shirts. Thank you, Mike.