Trump Regime Media Fail: MRC Less Than Enthusiastic About One Cabinet Nominee
Even the Media Research Center couldn't work up much enthusiasm for Matt Gaetz's nomination as attorney general. It did a little more for his replacement, Pam Bondi.
As a key member of the right-wing media — now the Trump Regime Media — the Media Research Center had a prime duty to promote Donald Trump’s cabinet picks and attack any critic of them, no matter the legitimacy of that criticism. Weirdly, though, it didn’t exactly rush to the defense of Matt Gaetz, the original nominee for attorney general. The first substantive mention of Gaetz same in a Nov. 16 column by Jeffrey Lord, but all he did is recite Gaetz’s resume:
Gaetz is a graduate of William and Mary Law School, belonged to a prestigious Florida law firm, and, as a member of the Florida legislature, served as chairman of the Florida House Criminal Justice Subcommittee. As a member of the U.S. House, Gaetz has been a member of the House Judiciary Committee.
He went on to insist that Gaetz, along with the others in the first crop of nominees, “are not only qualified for the jobs to which Trump has nominated them, they would bring the experience of their individual backgrounds to the task of running the departments they have been nominated to head.”
Bill D’Agostino whined in a Nov. 18 post that Gaetz and other picks were being criticized:
It’s difficult to quantify anguish, but it would appear the three cabinet picks who have most deeply upset the beltway journalists are Congressman Matt Gaetz (R-FL) for Attorney General, Tulsi Gabbard for Director of National Intelligence, and Fox News host Pete Hegseth to lead the Department of Defense. A case could also be made for RFK, Jr. being tapped as Trump’s HHS secretary, but he didn’t seem to elicit the quite same degree of sheer unadulterated horror.
The reaction to Gaetz was particularly priceless. On CNN’s The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer, White House correspondent Paula Reid solemnly remarked: “We’ve seen people today, our fellow reporters, crying, hugging in the hallways.” She later added, “No one is endorsing this.”
(If anyone actually has a video of CNN reporters weeping in each other’s arms about Matt Gaetz, please contact @banned_bill on X.)
During that same panel discussion, CNN commentator Elie Honig exclaimed: “This is a crazy pick! This is a dangerous pick! I wish there was a gentler way to say it, but there’s no use mincing words.”
Other objections to Gaetz’s nomination on CNN and MSNBC ranged from, “insane,” to “simply gobsmacking,” to “literally the worst pick in the world.”
D’Agostino didn’t refute any of that criticism.
Tim Graham complained that Gaetz’s creepy personal life was brought up:
CNN host Abby Phillip broke out the scolding on Wednesday night’s NewsNight when Bruce LeVell – the former executive director of Trump’s 2016 National Diversity Coalition used the apparently offensive word “dear” to Democrat [sic] strategist Julie Roginsky, in a “condescending tone.”
However, it was all right to accuse Matt Gaetz of “statutory rape.” Phillip didn’t mind that one bit.
As they discussed all the allegations of sexual impropriety against Gaetz, Roginsky said: “They have a responsibility to do the right thing here, which is to say to the president, Mr. President, you get to choose your cabinet, but we have advice and consent powers, and we do not consent to Matt Gaetz. Find somebody else of similar ideology who doesn’t have problems with potentially sleeping with underage girls, doing drugs and going to sex parties.”
Levell protested that after Gaetz was investigated, “The bottom line is the DOJ said there’s nothing there.” Roginsky protested that no, “they said they didn’t have enough to indict. That shouldn’t be the standard.” Put aside that this is typically the standard for Democrats like Bill Clinton.
Graham didn’t explain why his standard on sexual behavior suddenly changed when a Republican was being accused. Mark Finkelstein whined further about Gaetz’s sleaziness being exposed, even as he withdrew from consideration for the job:
Before Matt Gaetz withdrew from his Attorney General nomination today, Morning Joe was furiously kibitzing over how he could be unraveled over allegations of having sex with a minor and attending drug-fueled parties.
If they couldn’t obtain the House Ethics Committee report, the Senate would conduct its own investigation, bringing live witnesses to testify as to Gaetz’s activities–something that, Joe Scarborough argued, would be worse for the nominee.
That’s when MSNBC Republican Elise Jordan blew the lid off it, by claiming Gaetz was an “addict” twice over. It’s not simply an issue of morality.
“Your morality leads you to become compromised. And this is about not wanting a sex addict, not wanting a drug addict, having control of the nation’s top secrets at the end of the day.”
Jordan didn’t explain precisely what she meant by “compromised.” But presumably, she was suggesting that such a person would be vulnerable to blackmail. But would new information be compromising if the Democrats have already unloaded a ton of alleged dirt about him?
We don’t recall Finkelstein objecting when his MRC co-workers unloaded a ton of “alleged dirt” about Hunter Biden.
But it was only after Gaetz’s withdrawal that the MRC was allowed to speak the truth about him. A Nov. 22 post by Alex Christy noted that Gaetz “withdrew from the process amid a series of sex scandals,” then quickly moved on to defending his replacement.
Backing Pam Bondi
TheMRC was a little more enthused with Gaetz’s replacement as nominee, Pam Bondi. Alex Christy huffed in a Nov. 22 post:
Journalism Professor Jason Johnson joined MSNBC’s Ari Melber on Thursday’s episode of The Beat to react to President-elect Donald Trump nominating former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi to head the Justice Department after former Rep. Matt Gaetz withdrew from the process amid a series of sex scandals. Johnson fretted that Bondi will be “worse than” Gaetz because “she knows what she’s doing” and is therefore “dangerous and effective.”
Given that Bondi was also one of Trump’s lawyers during his first impeachment trial and he has also nominated his criminal defense lawyers for other top DOJ positions, Melber declared, “So, if this were the team and they have to go through vetting and confirmation, but if this were the team, this would be two of the most politically defensive lawyers of the personal capacity of an incoming president we’ve ever seen running DOJ at the same time.”
Johnson regrettably concurred, “Ari, I completely agree, and quite frankly, my thought is that after Gaetz dropped out it would be essentially from Trump’s legal team. It would be like a Jay Sekulow or somebody like that. I assumed that’s where he would get these people from. Unlike William Barr, even going back to when we were all kids and, like, Janet Reno, right, occasionally attorney generals try to behave like they are not the personal lawyer of the president of the United States. That is completely out the window.”
He added that Bondi “is exactly what I was saying in the last segment that we should fear because she’s competent. We may not agree with her ideologically, but she actually knows how to do this job. So, if anyone on the Democratic side or anyone who cared about liberty or justice was thinking, ‘Well, maybe Matt Gaetz will screw this up and that will give us some time.’”
[…]
Johnson’s comments are troublesome for two reasons. First, the journalism professor sounds like a liberal activist, which makes one wonder what kind of classes he is teaching. Second, the media can’t have it both ways: are Trump’s cabinet picks bad because they have no experience running large bureaucratic agencies or are they bad because they do and that makes them dangerously competent?
In his hate-watch of “The View” the same day, Nicholas Fondacaro played whataboutism to defend Bondi:
Oh how quickly folks in the liberal media forget their own misdeeds when it’s time to fling mud at the other side. That hypocrisy was again on full display during the Friday edition of ABC’s The View, when cloudy co-host Sunny Hostin lashed out at U.S. Attorney General nominee Pam Bondi. Hostin called Bondi an “election denier” when Trump was her client in 2020, that’s despite the fact that for six years, Hostin had maintained that President-elect Trump was an “illegitimate president” after his 2016 victory.
“I agree with you, Alyssa [Farah Griffin], [Matt Gaetz] would have been a very dangerous pick for the Department of Justice. But his new pick, Trump’s new pick, Pam Bondi. I believe she’s a dangerous pick, as well,” Hostin proclaimed. “She supported Trump’s false election claims. She was involved the efforts to overturn the results.”
Her evidence? Video of Bondi defending Trump’s candidacy the first two days after the election when many states had not finalized their vote counts.
Curtis Houck grumbled:
On Friday, ABC, CBS, and NBC used their flagship morning news shows to pivot away from former Congressman Matt Gaetz (R-FL) withdrawing from the nomination fight to lead President Trump’s Justice Department towards deriding the new pick Pam Bondi as merely a “Trump loyalist,” foreign lobbyist, and former Florida Attorney General whose “tenure [was] not without controversy.”
Unsurprisingly, the Trump-hating ABC had Good Morning America put chief Washington correspondent and three-time anti-Trump author Jonathan Karl on the case, who said the important fact about Bondi is he’s a reflection of Trump “showing once again that among the top qualifications he is seeking for his cabinet is personal loyalty.”
[…]
He later fretted that Bondi’s selection means Trump’s picks to lead the top three spots at the Justice Department (Bondi, Todd Blanche, and Emil Bove) and Solicitor General (John Sauer) have “all…worked in some way as his personal lawyer” and now will work for the American people.
Co-host Michael Strahan — who was picked given his stardom as an NFL player — kvetched in response that “it seems like he has a lot of personal relationships with everyone he is having join him.”
Houck seems not to understand that being a TV host is not the same as being the attorney general. He continued to whine that Bondi’s status as a Trump loyalist was called out:
O’Keefe resurfaced on CBS Mornings Plus and doubled down and, when he did bring up her time in Tallahassee, he argued the Trump “loyalist” used her post to go after ObamaCare and lobbying post-AG’s office.
Christy returned the next day to lay a Heathering job on conservative commentator David Brooks for being a unquestioning shill for Trump and Bondi:
On CBS Mornings, co-host Gayle King also tagged her as “one of his most loyal defenders, including his first impeachment trial” and political correspondent Ed O’Keefe led the characteristic of “longtime defender” before even getting to her past as the Sunshine State’s attorney general.
“The former two-term Florida attorney general defended Trump during his first impeachment trial and is now being asked to carry out his legal agenda,” he said.
It should be noted that the Post story also says looking at 2020 is “not at the top of the list” of priorities. As for Pam Bondi, she was Attorney General of Florida for eight years, so she is not some random, inexperienced hack. Nevertheless, Brooks agreed she will do what Nawaz feared, although he never mentioned her name in a rambling response, “Yes. These are anti-institutionalists. That’s the theme of the whole group of people.”
Despite the fact that the question was about Bondi and that she has no scandals swirling around her, Brooks claimed Trump wants people with scandals around him, “And so many have scandals because they are outside the pale of polite society. So there are not going to be a lot of the Trump appointees like Jim Mattis, who want to be liked, who want to do a responsible job for the government. When you pick somebody who has a sex scandal or a financial scandal, they are totally on your side, because they have no other route to a career in their lives.”
Mark Finkelstein had a meltdown over one particular commentator:
What’s next, MSNBC? Will you bring in Michael Avenatti, on a Zoom from his federal prison cell, as your expert on lawyer-client ethics?
The question arises because, of all the 330 million people in the United States, Saturdays’ edition of MSNBC’s The Weekend chose Marc Elias to attack Pam Bondi — Trump’s AG nominee — as a 2020 “election denier,” and someone who had suggested the existence of “fake ballots.”
This is the same Marc Elias who is fresh from his failure to steal the Pennsylvania senatorial election for his client, Democrat Bob Casey. As the National Review described it, “Casey’s strategy — spearheaded by his counsel, Democratic superlawyer Marc Elias — has turned to seeking to count illegal ballots.”
In service of Elias’s larcenous strategy, three counties counted ballots that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court had ruled to be illegal.
[…]
Prior to Elias’s comments, the show rolled a 2020 clip of Bondi on Fox News, in an exchange with Steve Doocy, saying she would fight till Trump was declared the winner of Pennsylvania, and suggesting there could have been fake ballots cast there. So the irony and hypocrisy of inviting Elias—of all people—to condemn Bondi as an election denier is compounded by the fact that the very state where he acted to steal an election by relying on illegal ballots was . . . Pennsylvania!
Elias had the chutzpah to declare that, now more than ever, Dems need to speak with “moral clarity.”
The Weekend hosts, predictably, were way too diplomatic to mention Elias’s attempt to steal the Pennsylvania election, and his nerve in accusing anyone else of being an election denier relying on fake ballots.
Finkelstein then melted down over another criticism of Bondi:
This was not the only bit of stunning hypocrisy during the segment’s attack on Bondi. Co-host Alicia Menendez quoted Stephen Colbert to the effect that Bondi “is the only person to ever make money off Trump University.”
That was a reference to the Trump family foundation having made a $25,000 to Bondi’s campaign for a second term as Florida AG at a time her office was deciding whether to investigate Trump University, something her office ultimately decided not to do.
So Menendez, via Colbert, was unsubtly accusing Bondi of accepting a bribe.
Needless to say, that’s exactly what Finkelstein would call it if Bondi and Trump were Democrats, making that same unsubtle allegation.
None of these MRC writers, by the way, disputed that Bondi was an election denier — they were just angry she was called out on it.
This two-day blast of posts, by the way, was pretty much the extent of the MRC’s defense of Bondi, which is not much more than it did to defend Gaetz.
More defenses
the MRC also served up generalized defenses of the nominees and attacks on those who criticize them. Finkelstein huffed in a Nov. 17 post:
For a network that can barely breathe the name Donald Trump without calling him a “convicted felon,” you’d think MSNBC might be careful about having convicted felons as honored guests on their shows!
And yet . . .
In a segment devoted to commenting on Trump nominees, Sunday’s edition of MSNBC’s The Weekend had on Democrat strategist Chuck Rocha.
Co-host Symone Sanders expressed concern over the implications for the “rule of law” of Trump’s nominations.
Rocha certainly has experience in problems with the rule of law. In his previous position as a senior union official with authority over a $30 million budget, Rocha was convicted of one count of felony embezzlement, and “acknowledged responsibility for the other 17 counts.”
Shouldn’t the ethical bar to be a Cabinet nominee be higher than that of a TV commentator?
Jorge Bonilla grumbled in a post the same day:
The 2024 presidential election has left the media reeling and plunged into a period of self-doubt and introspection. But for a few fleeting moments on NBC’s Meet the Depressed, the media forgot that they got shellacked.
Watch as the Regime journalists (including former Obama and Biden spokesmouth Jen Psaki and taxpayer-funded Amna Nawaz of PBS) on the show’s panel plot a pressure campaign against Republicans considering confirmation of President Elect Donald Trump’s Cabinet picks:
[…]
The most telling part of the exchange? When Psaki interjects to caution the panel that they should “pick one” Trump nominee to pick off via the pressure campaign, followed by Daniels’ agreement that “we can’t do all of them.” A literal Alynskyite (13th Rule for Radicals) strategy session, live on NBC air.
This exchange may lead reasonable individuals to imagine that there is zero daylight between Democrat communications types and their pals in the media. There certainly can’t be, when they feel comfortable laying out a pressure campaign against Republican Cabinet nominees on the air.
Clay Waters fretted over another show’s criticism in yet another post that day:
PBS’s weekly political roundtable Washington Week with the Atlantic gathered for the second time since Donald Trump’s reelection and showed revulsion to his proposed cabinet picks. Particularly put out was veteran liberal New York Times Washington Bureau Chief Elisabeth Bumiller, who used aggressively antagonistic language to describe two picks. It’s a “rogues’ gallery,” including Tulsi Gabbard, a “girlfriend” of the Russians.
The dictionary defines “rogues’ gallery” as “a collection of pictures of persons arrested as criminals.” Which of the cabinet picks are criminals?
Well, Matt Gaetz certainly seems to be one, what with his predeliction for underage girls.
Finkelstein returned to complain in a Nov. 20 post:
[CNN host Kasie] Hunt promptly segued into calling Trump’s nominees a “made-for-TV cast of characters,” and rolled video clips of a number of them (some of them quite dated) making unusual, shall we say, statements! She also quoted liberal Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.) quipping “we’re becoming the world’s first nuclear-armed reality television show.”
Hunt began the segment by saying “it’s increasingly clear it is Donald Trump’s world, and we’re just living in it.”
That’s a far cry from what you might have imagined an MSM host saying just a few weeks ago. Something along the lines: “We risk being plunged into a Trumpian hellscape in which neither we as individuals, nor the republic itself, are likely to survive!”
And, of course, Rich Noyes served up a biased “flashback” item on the subject:
It’s been less than two weeks since former President Donald Trump vanquished Vice President Kamala Harris, setting the stage for his return to the White House in January. Yet even though their preferred candidate lost both the popular vote and the Electoral College, the liberal media are already taking swipes at Trump’s initial Cabinet picks, an early indication that the press plans to hound the new President’s every move.
And if you’re feeling a little deja vu, it’s because we saw the exact same thing eight years ago, after Trump beat Hillary Clinton in 2016. As NewsBusters carefully documented at the time, liberal reporters and commentators savaged Trump’s first group of appointees as “radical” and “racist” “ignoramuses” who “disdain the missions of their assigned agencies.”
Noyes didn’t dispute the accuracy of any of those assessments. Instead, he made sure to stay on his assigned message: ” It suggests we’re in for another four years of hyper-drama, with the media elite once again engaged in daily fistfights with a White House aiming to bust up the old establishment’s grip on power.”