President Donald Trump highlighted his administration's accomplishments so far and identified next steps for the "renewal of the American dream" in an emotional Tuesday address to a joint session of Congress. As expected, the Democratic lawmakers who actually bothered to show up did their best to childishly disrupt Trump's speech.
Dressed in various protest costumes, congressional Democrats — whose approval rating hit an all-time low of 21% last month — heckled the president; booed his proposals to make life better for Americans; raised placards emblazoned with broad accusations and general condemnations; and refused to applaud throughout the speech, even when Trump helped a terminally ill boy realize his lifelong dream and honored the country.
To the extent that they listened to it, it was clear that Democrats did not enjoy the speech. The American people, on the other hand, apparently loved it.
According to a CBS News/YouGov survey of 1,207 American adults who watched the speech, 76% said they approved of Trump's remarks. Only 23% said they disapproved.
'It was a speech for the American people.'
A supermajority of respondents described Trump as "inspiring," "entertaining," and "presidential." While 62% characterized the president as "unifying" in his speech, a minority of respondents said that Trump was "divisive" — a term that the liberal media decided to run with Tuesday night.
Sixty-three percent of respondents said that Trump spent a lot of time discussing issues they cared about, and 28% said he spent a little time on issues important to them.
Whereas congressional Democrats — whose disapproval rating is 68%, according to a recent Quinnipiac poll — were visibly enraged by the speech, 68% of Americans surveyed told the pollsters that the speech made them hopeful and 54% said it made them feel proud. Only 16% of respondents said that the speech made them feel angry.
Before his removal by the sergeant at arms for repeated interruptions — a removal 76% of respondents said they approved of — Democratic Rep. Al Green of Texas shouted that Trump lacked a mandate, even though the president won the popular vote, beat his opponent by 86 Electoral College votes, and now enjoys relatively strong approval ratings.
The CBS News/YouGov poll provided additional indications that Green is wrong and that Americans are largely on board the Trump train.
Seventy-seven percent of respondents signaled support both for Trump's plans for cutting waste in government spending and for securing the border. When asked about Trump's plans regarding the Ukraine-Russia conflict, 73% signaled approval. A majority, 65%, also indicated they supported Trump's tariff strategy.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) provided an insight into why Trump's speech may have resonated with the American public but not with Democratic lawmakers, noting early Wednesday, "President Trump's speech wasn't a speech for the mainstream media, it was a speech for the American people."
"The way Democrats behaved was unserious and embarrassing. The contrast between our forward looking vision and their temper tantrums was on display for all of America to see," added Johnson.
Conservative normalcy advocate Robby Starbuck tweeted, "Democrats sat through the whole thing smug as can be while dishonoring the heroic people Trump highlighted and protesting the speech. Dumbest strategy of all time."
Democrats hinted at another departure from reality, characterizing the speech as a failure and Trump's remarks as fringe.
Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin — a former CIA analyst aggrieved on behalf of the bureaucratic dead weight the Trump administration has cut loose — suggested in Democrats' "rebuttal" to Trump's speech that were Trump in office in the 1980s, he "would have lost us the Cold War"; that the president has pitted Americans against each other; and that Trump is making government more responsive to Americans' needs in a "reckless way."
Ken Martin, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, characterized the speech as a failure from an unpopular president, stating, "Instead of using his Joint Address to offer solutions or rehabilitate his image for the American people, who — after only six weeks — have lost confidence in his presidency, he instead rehashed old grievances and evaded responsibility."
Democrat Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (N.H.) suggested that "President Trump's address this evening laid bare a cynical and profoundly dangerous approach to America's global leadership" and that his popular proposals were "dangerous."
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CBS News' Margaret Brennan did her apparent best last month to corner or to extract concessions from Vice President JD Vance. In the "Face the Nation" interview, Vance rejected both Brennan's dated liberal presumptions and the shaky premises shoring up her various lines of attack, proving the host's best was not good enough.
Brennan, evidently still committed to hitting Vance with a critique that sticks, attacked the vice president during her interview with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, which aired on Sunday. The CBS News host concern-mongered about the impact of Vance's Friday speech at the Munich Security Conference in Germany, particularly his criticism of European censorship, and suggested that free speech set the stage for the Holocaust.
Rubio, like Vance before him, refused to indulge Brennan's fantasy and instead pointed out the falsity of her revisionist history.
In his Friday speech, Vance blasted European nations for their ruthless suppression of political movements and ideas; their destructive mass migration policies; their dismissal of citizens' concerns; and their attacks on religious liberties. Vance further expressed concern that Europe is turning its back on the values that it once shared in common with America.
While largely well received on this side of the Atlantic, various European officials took umbrage at the vice president's fact-based observations.
Germany's socialist defense minister Boris Pistorius, for instance, claimed that Vance's doubts about European democracy were "not acceptable," even though authorities in Pistorius' country have worked to ban, vilify, disarm, de-bank, and criminalize Alternative for Germany, a massively popular right-leaning populist party set for another electoral success later this month.
"He lectured about what he described as censorship, mainly focusing, though, on including more views from the right," Brennan told Rubio over the weekend. "He also met with the leader of a far-right party known as the AFD, which, as you know, is under investigation and monitoring by German intelligence because of extremism. What did all of this accomplish, other than irritating our allies?"
Rubio told Brennan that the European apoplexy over Vance's speech more or less proved the vice president's point.
'I have to disagree with you.'
"Why would our allies or anybody be irritated by free speech and by someone giving their opinion? We are, after all, democracies," said Rubio. "I think if anyone's angry about his words, they don't have to agree with him, but to be angry about it, I think, actually makes his point."
The secretary of state noted further that European leaders frequently criticize the United States, but "we don't go around throwing temper tantrums about it."
Brennan tried contextualizing European officials' irritation over Vance's speech with the help of a revisionist history, stating that Vance "was standing in a country where free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide, and he met with the head of a political party that has far-right views and some historic ties to extreme groups."
Rubio prevented the host from skating past the insinuation that Europeans, Germans in particular, are sensitive about critiques of censorship because the Holocaust was somehow the result of free speech.
"I have to disagree with you. Free speech was not used to conduct a genocide," said Rubio. "The genocide was conducted by an authoritarian Nazi regime that happened to also be genocidal because they hated Jews, and they hated minorities, and they hated those that they — they had a list of people they hated, but primarily the Jews."
"There was no free speech in Nazi Germany. There was none," continued Rubio. "There was also no opposition in Nazi Germany. They were a sole and only party that governed that country. So that's not an accurate reflection of history."
'People are losing their minds.'
According to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum's Holocaust Encyclopedia, the Nazi regime abolished freedom of speech and freedom of the press in the early 1930s, shuttering or seizing anti-Nazi publications and controlling all forms of media content, including burning books deemed un-German.
Not only was free speech virtually nonexistent when the Nazis ran Germany, but in the preceding years, there were numerous limitations on speech — certainly enough to torpedo a modified version of Brennan's thesis.
Responding to an argument from a critical race theory scholar that resembled Brennan's insinuation, Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression President Greg Lukianoff noted that nothing about the rise of Nazism or the Holocaust supports the claim that speech restraints could have prevented a genocide.
Lukianoff wrote:
Weimar Germany had laws banning hateful speech (particularly hateful speech directed at Jews), and top Nazis including Joseph Goebbels, Theodor Fritsch and Julius Streicher actually went to jail for violating them. The efforts of the Weimar Republic to suppress the speech of the Nazis are so well known in academic circles that one professor has described the idea that speech restrictions would have stopped the Nazis as "the Weimar Fallacy." The Weimar Republic not only shut down hundreds of Nazi newspapers — in a two-year period, they shut down 99 in Prussia alone — but they accelerated that crackdown on speech as the Nazis ascended to power. Hitler himself was banned from speaking in several German states from 1925 until 1927.
Critics blasted Brennan for her apparent historical illiteracy.
Vance wrote, "This is a crazy exchange. Does the media really think the holocaust was caused by free speech?"
Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) tweeted, "Free speech caused the Holocaust in an insanely stupid take."
"People are losing their minds," wrote investigative reporter Matt Taibbi. "It's mass hysteria."
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Liberal bias in the legacy press is nothing new, but conservatives rarely delve into the “how” and “why” behind it all. With the 2024 election — and the elite-media interference that accompanied it — behind us, the legacy press has shifted from protecting the Democratic Party to attacking it in certain cases. Three books on liberal media bias explain why the media elite’s misinformation machine may never cease.
Though it’s nearly 25 years old, Bernard Goldberg’s “Bias” remains a valuable resource. It was one of the first books to address this issue and gets to the heart of the problem within the journalism industry. The book, subtitled “A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News,” recounts Goldberg’s experience as a 28-year veteran reporter at CBS. He was fired after airing complaints to the Wall Street Journal about CBS’ growing leftward drift, including that of his boss, Dan Rather.
There is no fairness, balance, or impartiality — only straight advocacy for a hard-left agenda.
Goldberg recalls his years at CBS and elsewhere, noting that the industry attracts people who want to “change the world.” Conservatives, who value religion, heritage, nation, and family and generally do not seek to upend ancient institutions, are unlikely to fit this mold. This might explain what a friend recently told me: his graduating class of 100 at a top journalism school had about “two and a half conservatives,” himself included.
Goldberg writes that these “change the world” types don’t see themselves as biased when attacking conservative policies or opinions. They view their preferences as simply “common sense” — a phrase Rather used in a conversation with Goldberg. But considering how sheltered journalists’ lives are, far removed from 99% of America, the question is: common with whom?
Goldberg notes that his colleagues were fine with lying to their audience if they believed it would draw attention to an important cause and lead to “positive change.” One example of what he calls a “noble embellishment” involved reporters in the 1980s and '90s attempting to portray heterosexuals as equally susceptible to AIDS. This tactic, designed to alarm straight people, ignored the reality that AIDS was primarily a problem among gay males. Goldberg points to an article headlined “40% of AIDS sufferers are heterosexual.” But the story failed to acknowledge that most of the 40% were intravenous drug users, with few actually contracting the disease through heterosexual sex.
“Bias” does an excellent job of exposing media do-gooders’ moral blindness. Goldberg recounts how Rather and his colleagues were furious after he accused CBS News of bias in the Wall Street Journal. One of them even compared reading the piece to discovering his wife had been raped. Such sensitivity is, of course, rich coming from an industry that supposedly supports whistleblowers and whose entire existence revolves around interfering with other industries — never mind invading people's private lives. Consider former Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz, who cried after being criticized for doxxing the social media influencer "Libs of TikTok."
Matt Taibbi’s 2019 book “Hate, Inc.” also exposes the media’s hypocritical oversensitivity. While on the campaign trail in 2004, for example, Taibbi recalls receiving a complaint from the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz after apparently breaking an unwritten rule by taking video of the press section without permission. Once again, the media establishment feels aggrieved over something it does all the time.
Taibbi’s book, subtitled “Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another,” shifts from the media’s fake alarmism over liberal causes to the newer, more damaging phenomenon of “manufacturing discontent” between Republicans and Democrats. Taibbi describes this as “selling siloed anger” to attract more clicks and views. He writes that today’s mass-media consumer is often given content that simply confirms their prejudices, “about whatever or whoever the villains of the day happened to be: foreigners, minorities, terrorists, the Clintons, Republicans, even corporations.”
Taibbi harshly criticizes figures like Sean Hannity and Rachel Maddow (each featured on his book’s cover). He especially criticizes Maddow, a former friend, for pushing the “Russiagate” conspiracy theory to cope with Donald Trump’s 2016 win. Taibbi’s friend Glenn Greenwald has commented on the seriousness of pushing such a pernicious lie, noting that it likely still fuels Democrats’ bloodlust for Russia’s defeat in its conflict with Ukraine.
Outlets like Maddow’s MSNBC essentially sell a “consumer product” to people, Taibbi notes. They offer viewers a “political safe space” that aligns with a specific political party. Media studies professor Andrey Mir explores this in his 2020 book “Postjournalism and the Death of Newspapers,” where he details how the media’s business model has changed in the post-internet era, altering how news is selected and reported.
Previously, leftist media analysts like Noam Chomsky argued that the establishment press skewed coverage to placate the wealthy elite (advertisers’ most coveted demographic). Now, the press skews coverage to cater to its activist readership. With advertisers moving to more efficient technologies like Facebook and Google — which control 80% of the advertising market — newspapers have turned to what Mir calls paid-up “members” and donors for revenue. These people, like everyone else, can read the news online for free but choose to give their money to outlets because they like what they say.
Treating such outlets as advocacy groups, Mir explains, means that only the largest publications — such as the New York Times and the Washington Post, the ones most capable of spreading the message — will attract support. What these “advocacy group members” are paying for, then, is not just to stay informed, but to push the outlet’s message and shape public opinion in the way they want it to be.
Previously beholden to corporate advertisers (again, Chomsky’s view), the legacy press is now dependent on the activists who fund it. As a result, daily story selection is driven by “the most resonating pressing social issues that could justify fundraising and stimulate readers to donate.” This process incentivizes journalism to “mutate into propaganda.” There is no fairness, balance, or impartiality — only straight advocacy for a hard-left agenda.
What it means for “save-the-world” types to now work for other “save-the-world” types is that expectations for the elite media to change should be even lower. To any conservative expecting the corporate left-wing media to come to their senses after Kamala Harris’ recent defeat and perhaps reduce their bias: It’s unlikely to happen any time soon.
By trying to discredit Bongino's law enforcement career, the press hopes to undermine any legitimate efforts Bongino takes to hold the FBI accountable.
CBS News’ Margaret Brennan claimed Sunday that free speech was to blame for the Holocaust. During an interview with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Brennan spun a wild theory that free speech in Germany paved the way for the Holocaust, arguing that Vice President J.D. Vance’s criticisms of European attacks on free speech were problematic […]
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