nuclear-news

U.S. Media finally acknowledging Israel’s central role in Trump’s criminal war on Iran

11 April 2026 AIMN Editorial, By Walt Zlotow  , https://theaimn.net/u-s-media-finally-acknowledging-israels-central-role-in-trumps-criminal-war-on-iran/

For the first 5 weeks of President Trump’s criminal war on Iran, mainstream media pretended this was totally a US war to defend the Homeland by destroying Iran’s nuclear bomb capability and neutering its missile arsenal. Israel was barely mentioned tho they started the war by assassinating Iranian leader Ali Khamenei. Israel’s relentless bombing of Iran was largely ignored to focus on the devastating US bombing. Also ignored was Iran’s robust retaliation causing the greatest damage to Israel in its 78 year history.

The reality is that on February 28th Israel realized its three decade dream of getting a US President to serve as their proxy to destroy Iran as Israel’s last hegemonic rival in the Middle East. Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has spent the entire 21st century lobbying George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump in term one and Joe Biden to take out Iran. Netanyahu finally hit pay dirt with Donald Trump in term two. On February 11 Netanyahu met with Trump, assuring him that once Israel assassinated Iranian leader Ali Khamenei, the regime would collapse within a few days with Iran’s populous rallying around their US liberators.

Gigantic mistake. The Iranian populous coalesced around the regime which retaliated with devastating effectiveness, not only inflicting massive damage on US, Israeli resources but shutting down the Strait of Hormuz, inflicting worldwide economic decline.

Knowing he’s lost, Trump is seeking an off ramp to save his presidency. Netanyahu, the lead actor in this lost war, will have none of it. He’s sabotaging the ceasefire Trump agreed to which would have allowed Iran to survive, retain control of the Strait and keep its nuclear enrichment and its defensive missile arsenal. Netanyahu’s massive bombing of Lebanon, forbidden by Iran’s 10 Point peace plan, puts the ceasefire hanging by a thread.

Mainstream media has taken note, beginning to allow analysts to publicly state this was largely Netanyahu’s war, not Trump’s. MS NOW’s Jen Psaki gave former Secretary of State John Kerry, who negotiated the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement, extensive time to review Netanyahu’s endless demands that US presidents destroy Iran on their behalf. Kerry noted how Netanyahu hyped the imminent Iranian nuclear threat to each president which was swallowed whole only by President Trump. A nuclear agreement meant nothing to Netanyahu. Regime change in a failed state Iran was the sole goal.

The more mainstream media tells the truth about Israel’s central role in Trump’s lost war upending the world economy, the more Trump will be pressured to break with Israel. Whatever Netanyahu has on Trump, whether the hundreds of millions in campaign cash or scandalous Epstein secrets, must be disregarded if Trump has any chance of salvaging his presidency, and more importantly, the world economy.

Keep it up, mainstream news. Expose the dirty secret of Trump’s dirty war launched on orders of Benjamin Netanyahu. If Trump does cut off the weapons train, Israel’s rampage against Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Gaza and Yemen may be over. Time to force Israel to make peace with their neighbours, not endless war.

Mainstream news can assist that noble goal.

April 14, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | media, USA | Leave a comment

The Iranian people achieved decisive victory against America’s criminal war on them

Walt Zlotow West Suburban Peace Coalition Glen Ellyn IL, 10 Apr 26, https://theaimn.net/the-iranian-people-achieved-decisive-victory-against-americas-criminal-war-on-them/

The Chicago Tribune’s editorial ‘There has been no victory yet for the Iranian people’ represents an astonishing betrayal of the urgent need to condemn President’s criminal war on Iran. The Trib’s focus is not on the 42,000 Iranian buildings damaged or destroyed, of which 36,000 were residential homes. The No mention of the school bombed killing over 150 little girls, among over 3,000 dead Iranians Trump murdered in his senseless war. Absent was any mention the US began the war with a heinous war crime, greenlighting Israel’s assassinating Iranian ruler Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Stating the Trib was “relieved” Trump didn’t kill off Iranian civilization as threatened, a genocidal war crime, without the most urgent of condemnations is deplorable.

The Trib states both the US and Iran declaring victory is “hardly surprising.” That certainly applies to Trump’s America which can never admit defeat, but not Iran. They punched back with astonishing effectiveness. Their tens of thousands of well-hidden missiles shot down US planes, sent aircraft carriers scurrying beyond their range, badly damaged US Gulf States bases requiring thousands of US personnel to be relocated to hotels.
Result? Trump cried uncle and entered into a tenuous ceasefire without achieving a single of the shifting war objectives.

Worse yet? The US war failure shut down the Strait of Hormuz, cutting off a fifth of the worldwide oil supply. This has sent the world economy teetering toward recession, if not depression.

Trump’s acceptance of Iran’ s 10 point ceasefire plan as a basis for upcoming negotiations verifies Trump’s catastrophic loss. It requires end to US criminal war with no further attacks on Iran, Iranian nuclear enrichment facilities and defensive missile arsenal. US to leave the Middle East. US to end all sanctions on Iran. US to pay reparations for war damage.

Most disappointing in the Trib’s Iran war editorial is regurgitating Trump’s “three justifiable reasons….for this war” All three are nonsense. Did it occur to the Trib Editorial Board that if those reasons were truly justifiable, the Trib should be encouraging Trump to press on to total victory?

The editorial concludes “that inevitably leads us to an accounting that little has been achieved. A hollow victory at a heavy price.” Indeed, nothing was achieved but senseless death and destruction, the US possibly on the way out of the region, and the world economy in jeopardy from the US handing over the Strait of Hormuz to an emboldened and soon to be prosperous Iran.

Sure sounds like a resounding Iranian victory and US loss to this observer.

April 13, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | media, USA | Leave a comment

Washington Post Promotes Nuclear Agenda Tied to Bezos’ Investments

The piece contains no disclosure about Bezos’ financial ties to the nuclear energy sector, continuing a trend previously identified by FAIR (11/20/25). Bezos is the largest individual shareholder of Amazon, which has invested $500 million in small modular reactor nuclear (SMR) startup X-Energy. X-Energy recently signed a letter of intent to explore deployment in areas that include Illinois. Amazon is a member of the Nuclear Energy Institute, which advocated to end the state’s moratorium.

Peter Castagno, 1 April 26, https://fair.org/home/washington-post-promotes-nuclear-agenda-tied-to-bezos-investments/

The Washington Post has devoted four editorials to supporting the expansion of nuclear energy in the past three months, relying on factual errors and distortions to make the case for the Trump administration’s unprecedented cuts to nuclear safety regulation. The Post‘s owner, Jeff Bezos, is the chair of Amazon, a company dependent on electricity-guzzling data centers that invested more than $1 billion in nuclear energy last year.

The first of the editorials (1/15/26) was headlined “The Facts About Nuclear Energy Are Sinking In. Even in Illinois.” It lauded Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker’s decision to end the state’s moratorium on building new nuclear plants.

The piece contains no disclosure about Bezos’ financial ties to the nuclear energy sector, continuing a trend previously identified by FAIR (11/20/25). Bezos is the largest individual shareholder of Amazon, which has invested $500 million in small modular reactor nuclear (SMR) startup X-Energy. X-Energy recently signed a letter of intent to explore deployment in areas that include Illinois. Amazon is a member of the Nuclear Energy Institute, which advocated to end the state’s moratorium.

‘Clean energy’ (except the toxic waste)

The Washington Post editorial said of Pritzker:

The 2028 presidential hopeful personified the Democratic Party’s gradual realization that the country cannot meet its electricity needs—let alone combat climate change—without embracing the world’s largest source of clean energy.

As FAIR has previously noted, leading experts dispute the claim that nuclear energy is essential to address climate change. Describing it as “clean” obscures unresolved problems such as radioactive waste. More than 100,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel are stored in pools requiring active cooling and dry casks throughout the country—over 11,000 tons in Illinois alone, the largest stockpile of any state.

An expert report published the same day as the Post‘s Illinois editorial, co-authored by former NRC chair Allison Macfarlane, described the situation as a national imperative: The federal government has collected more than $50 billion from ratepayers for a waste repository it has never built, paid more than $12 billion to reactor owners in damages for failing to take the waste, and is projected to pay an additional $40 billion more.

Illinois’ 1987 moratorium was a bipartisan measure signed into law by a Republican governor that prohibited construction of new nuclear plants until the federal government identified and approved a means of disposing of radioactive waste. That condition has never been fulfilled. The Post omits the reason for the moratorium, instead characterizing nearly four decades of policy as a “perplexing attitude” driven by ideological environmental activists:

Illinois has suffered for decades from serious cognitive dissonance on nuclear energy. The state boasts the nation’s largest fleet of nuclear reactors, generating more than half its electricity from those plants. Yet lawmakers in Springfield followed the lead of environmental activists who regard the industry with open disdain…. That perplexing attitude is finally changing.

The Post also did not consider how the state’s years-long criminal nuclear scandal might affect its residents’ views. Since 2020, Illinois utility Exelon and its subsidiary Commonwealth Edison have agreed to more than $200 million in fines with federal authorities for bribing political figures to pass legislation that included roughly $2.35 billion in nuclear subsidies—the same subsidies Exelon has repeatedly stated it requires to keep its Illinois plants operating. The scandal is part of a broader pattern of corruption in the industry that the Post elided in other editorials.

Celebrating safety rollbacks

A month later, under the headline “America’s Nuclear Future,” the Washington Post editorial board (2/14/26) championed the Trump administration’s nuclear safety rollbacks:

Sometimes, regulators have even forced changes to designs mid-construction, as happened in 2009, when they required containment buildings for reactor developments in Georgia and South Carolina to be able to withstand direct aircraft strikes, driving up costs and delaying construction.

The editorial board invoked the Vogtle project in Georgia and the VC Summer project in South Carolina as cautionary tales about regulatory overreach. The Post did not mention that VC Summer’s failure in South Carolina was primarily caused by executive fraud and mismanagement (Power, 10/15/21).

Further, a senior representative of Southern Nuclear, the operator of  Georgia’s Vogtle reactors, recently attributed reactor construction delays to macroeconomic events and lead contractor Westinghouse’s bankruptcy rather than over-regulation. The new reactors cost $35 billion, more than twice the original estimate, and were completed seven years late in 2024.

The Post claimed the Nuclear Regulatory Commission forced changes while reactors were “mid-construction” in 2009, but physical construction for both projects did not begin until 2013, as noted by Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety for the Union of Concerned Scientists, and the pro-nuclear source they cited.

The Post made other misleading claims in the article regarding the science of radiation dangers. The editorial board expressed support for the Trump administration’s efforts to drastically weaken the NRC’s radiation guidelines, which are based on the Linear No-Threshold (LNT) model. LNT maintains cancer risk as proportional to radiation dose, with even tiny amounts causing small but real risks, particularly for infants and vulnerable populations. The Post wrote:

The science underpinning the radiation rule is mushy, at best. It’s based on a theory that because radiation poses a serious cancer risk at high doses, it must also pose a low risk at lower doses.

It is irresponsible for a reputable news outlet to describe the science supporting LNT as “mushy.” As the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (10/15/25) recently explained, the use of LNT model for radiation has been repeatedly affirmed by authoritative scientific bodies, including “the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, virtually all international scientific bodies, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the NRC itself.”

The Post did disclose Amazon’s nuclear energy investments in the February 14 piece, and in two following editorials. But those disclosures don’t convey the scope of their efforts to influence nuclear policy.

Amazon spent nearly $19 million on lobbying last year, including on nuclear energy–related issues. Amazon Data Services is a member of the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), the nation’s biggest trade group pushing to cut safety regulations—the same NEI that recently celebrated the Post’s inclusion of nuclear energy in its “25 Good Things That Happened in 2025.” In January, the Bezos Earth Fund donated $3.5 million to the Nuclear Scaling Initiative to help coordinate bulk purchases of standard reactor designs. Shannon Kellogg, vice president of public policy at Amazon, chairs the Data Center Coalition, another prominent lobby group that has pushed nuclear safety regulatory rollbacks.

Don’t mention the P-word

The Washington Post’s next pro-nuclear editorial (2/22/26)—headlined “Fixing America’s Broken Nuclear Supply”—advocated the practice of nuclear reprocessing, which refers to the separation of uranium and plutonium from spent fuel. The extracted materials are then repurposed for use as reactor fuel, but also can be used to create nuclear weapons.

The Post editorial did not contain the word “plutonium.” It glossed over the proliferation risk, the foremost historical concern with reprocessing, only mentioning it once:

President Jimmy Carter banned the practice out of fears of weapons proliferation. President Ronald Reagan later reversed that decision, but reprocessing never rebounded, mostly because nuclear companies decided that sourcing new uranium was more cost-effective.

Reprocessing was originally invented to develop plutonium for nuclear weapons. India used it to create a nuclear bomb from its atomic energy program in 1974, which Carter explicitly cited as the impetus for the ban. Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton also did not encourage reprocessing due to proliferation concerns.

‘Crucial to power AI’

In its most recent nuclear editorial—“The Government’s Freeze on Nuclear Energy Is Thawing”—the Washington Post (3/6/26) celebrated the NRC’s March approval of a construction permit for Bill Gates’ SMR startup TerraPower:

Something shocking happened this week: Bureaucrats approved a project ahead of schedule. Even better, it was for a nuclear project that promises to make energy production safer and cleaner than traditional reactors. The government still holds back America’s nuclear industry too much, but it’s a victory worth celebrating.

The Trump administration has taken unprecedented measures to accelerate new nuclear reactors. It has secretly overhauled nuclear safety rules, proposed to severely cut inspections and radiation standards, and exempted new reactors from environmental reviews. Over 400 NRC employees have left the agency since Trump took office. These developments were not concerning to the Post, however, which wrote “the government still holds back America’s nuclear industry too much.”

The Union of Concerned Scientists’ Lyman warned that the NRC’s fast-tracked review for TerraPower failed to address serious safety concerns inherent to its design. The Post’s claim about TerraPower’s safety ignores unresolved issues admitted to by the NRC in the agency’s December safety evaluation:

The staff did not come to a final determination on the adequacy and acceptability of functional containment performance due to the preliminary nature of the design and analysis.

Unlike traditional reactors, TerraPower’s design does not include a physical containment dome to guard against the release of radioactive material in the event of a meltdown.

The Post wrote:

The speed with which the NRC has been able to review the TerraPower project is a testament to growing bipartisan support for climate-friendly nuclear energy. In June 2024, shortly after the company submitted its application, Congress overwhelmingly passed a bill called the Advance Act to cut red tape. Those reforms were crucial given the surging demand for new energy to power artificial intelligence.

The Post presented TerraPower’s rapid review as a “testament to growing bipartisan support for climate-friendly nuclear energy.” It does not mention that Trump fired the former Democratic NRC chair for the first time in its agency’s history, and its two remaining Democratic commissioners told lawmakers they believe they could be fired for refusing to approve reactors for safety reasons. Multiple Democratic lawmakers who voted in favor of the Advance Act have lambasted the Trump administration’s actions to expedite reactor approvals as dangerous and illegal.

The Post editorial did not mention the primary impetus for TerraPower’s rapid licensing process: a series of executive orders Trump signed last May. They directed the NRC to approve new reactors within 18 months, consult with DOGE on a wholesale revision of its regulations, and weaken radiation protections rooted in its “overly risk-averse culture.” A recent ProPublica investigation (3/20/26) revealed that nuclear firms were given the opportunity to offer edits for the EOs, many of which are financially connected to DOGE’s leadership.

‘Energy to cost less’

The Post went on to claim expanding nuclear energy will lower energy costs: “Anyone who wants energy to cost less should be excited about the US producing more of it.”

Yet as FAIR (4/21/16) explained in a 2016 analysis, Lazard investment bank’s widely cited, annual levelized cost of energy report has repeatedly found nuclear energy to be far more expensive than renewables, a finding that remains unchanged in its most recent report.

The Post claimed that the new generation of Silicon Valley–backed SMRs will be cheaper than traditional reactors, but the first expected commercial SMR project was canceled in 2023 due to repeated cost overruns that spent over $600 million in federal funds.

X-Energy, the SMR firm backed by Amazon, has also steeply increased its cost projections. In 2021, the Department of Energy awarded TerraPower around $2 billion, and gave $1.2 billion to X-Energy. X-Energy’s projected cost estimates have surged since then, from roughly $2.5 billion in 2021 to a range of $4.75–5.75 billion in 2023.

The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis warned these cost increases should serve as a “red flag” in a 2024 analysis. It concluded:

Investment in SMRs will take resources away from carbon-free and lower-cost renewable technologies that are available today and can push the transition from fossil fuels forward significantly in the coming 10 years

As physicist MV Ramana argues in his book Nuclear Is Not the Solution (2024), tech billionaires like Bezos are backing nuclear energy rather than doubling down on renewables for reasons of ideology, military and government alliances, and, crucially, profit opportunities. X-Energy filed for an IPO last month, giving Amazon the opportunity to leverage AI and nuclear hype into a higher opening valuation.

When the Post’s editorial board (10/15/25) hailed small reactors last year as a “worthy gamble” in an editorial headlined “The Military’s Big Gamble on Small Nuclear Reactors,” it did not mention its owner stood to profit from that wager.

April 4, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | media, USA | Leave a comment

Inspiring the Authentic Journalist: The Pentagon’s Renewed attack on Press Credentials

1 April 2026 Dr Binoy Kampmark AIM Extra, https://theaimn.net/inspiring-the-authentic-journalist-the-pentagons-renewed-attack-on-press-credentials/

On March 20, 2026, US District Senior Judge Paul Friedman found for The New York Times in a ruling deeming the Pentagon’s media access policy in breach of the US Constitution. Central to the policy was the requirement that all credentialled journalists sign a pledge that officials would not be asked for information they were not authorised to release. The Pentagon Facilities Alternative Credentials (PFACs) policy was found to have violated the First Amendment for its lack of reasonableness and being “viewpoint-discriminatory,” and the Fifth Amendment for not outlining clear standards governing cases when press credentials can be denied.

The judge thought the policy’s purpose was rooted in notions of removing “disfavoured journalists” while filling, in their emptied ranks, those “favourable to or spoon-fed by department leadership.” Indeed, that happened, with an exodus of main stable news organisations refusing to take up the pledge, leaving those friendly to the administration to take their place in mild leisure and bigoted sympathy.

The irony there is that the Pentagon media pack do not, for the most part, need to be encouraged by such feeding practices. They normally swallow the slop and staple whole. Truly intrepid reporters wedded to sharp if ugly authenticity are rarely seen at press gatherings conducted and managed by officialdom in the capital cities of the world, certainly those in the business of defence and security. The issue is not the correctitude of the ruling that the PFAC policy breached the Constitution but the curious sense that the Fourth Estate was necessarily better informed for sharing desks in situ, or near officials, moving through corridors without invigilation and having what is known as “access” to aides and advisers

The judge certainly gave little thought in examining that premise, taking the evidence at face value that the “presence of PFAC holders at the Pentagon has enhanced the ability of journalists and news organizations to keep Americans informed about the US military while posing no security or safety risk to Department property or personnel.” (In what way?) The environs of the building also offered chances for press briefings, even those called at short notice, and opportunities to question officials at, before or after such briefings. Semi-formal and informal opportunities to question personnel also helped identify “the context and detail needed to report accurately and effectively about defense policy and military operations.”

The Pentagon promised to both appeal the ruling and introduce a revised restrictive policy as stridently buffoonish as its first one. Instead of abiding by the ruling to re-credential the Times reporters and permitting those who had refused to sign the pledge to have their passes restored, the department shut down access to most of the building. The intention is to house these bought scribblers in a new, and yet unbuilt annex. The decades-old Correspondents’ Corridor has been shut down, and journalists given limited unescorted access to a library at the complex’s periphery.

With The Times again taking the matter to court, Judge Friedman found these arrangements “weird.” “Is this a Catch-22? Is this Kafka?” Hardly. Had Franz Kafka advised this peculiar administration, he would have informed them about bureaucracy’s innumerable options of control regarding the media message in war. The press would have been given the grand review and assessment on battles and engagements, curated, scrupulously controlled. No wrinkles, no frowns. Questions would have been near irrelevant, lies, generously scattered and sprinkled.

At the hearing itself, Justice Department attorney Sarah Welch weakly suggested to Friedman that the information given to the paper may have been outdated: journalists could access a designated, temporary workspace directly from the Pentagon parking lot, or take the shuttle. Such is the nature of Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s thin and ever thinning charity.

In addition to issues of access, Friedman was also concerned that a journalist’s credentials might be revoked if anonymity is offered to sources of information known to be classified or barred from release by statute. Merely asking a question cannot constitute grounds of punishment. “I thought I answered that question,” he explained in the hearing. “A journalist can always ask and they can ask anybody.”

The lawyer representing the Times, Ted Boutrous, pursued the obvious line that the revised interim policy was intended to “purge the Pentagon of reporters who are engaged in independent reporting.” This policy of sheer “gibberish” was merely a form of “gaslighting.” The Pentagon had “made the press credential we fought so hard to get back into a meaningless piece of plastic.” But did it really have much meaning to begin with?

Reporters were subsequently told by Commander Timothy Parlatore that any stern reviewing of credentials would ignore published work, focusing instead on journalists daring to sniff out classified or legally barred information. “Anytime a person with a security clearance has somebody that approaches them trying to solicit information, they’re supposed to report that.” The First Amendment was a relic farthest from his mind as he expressed satisfaction that the “constant leaks and constant reports about classified things” had “largely stopped.” The missions in Venezuela and Iran had been executed to perfection “without the same worry of the classified leaks.” His news is obviously of that unique variety: unchallenged and unverified.

Trump and his simian henchmen, some slobbering in sanguineous yearning and prayer (Hegseth again), would be surprised by the notion that the Fourth Estate is not to be bullied but seduced, not to be ridiculed but praised. Vanity in searching for a source often blights the searcher: confirmation bias and dreams of the scoop are imbibed with the establishment cocktail. Give the press pack a story, however, true, and they will run with it. Once the information limps to the newsroom, broadsheet or podcast, it will have been managed and mangled into spectral irrelevance, lost in the short-term stutters and moist mutterings of social media. It would have become just another establishment story.

In this context, leaks become more imperative than ever. As the Iran War groans on, the hunger for such disclosures is bound to be stimulated. Showing a stunning lack of foresight, the Trump administration’s attempt to control information through removing credentials or barring reporters’ access to most of the Pentagon may well encourage journalists to finally seek richer, more reliable alternatives. The public will get the copy it deserves, unmanaged and unspun by the media magicians in the department and the pliant regurgitators of the Pentagon Press Set.

April 4, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | media, USA | Leave a comment

Fox News’ united front in support of Trump’s Iran war may be breaking down.

Host Laura Ingraham warns escalation could produce “cascading problems for the region,” political turmoil for the GOP

by Matt Gertz, MEDIA MATTERS 03/26/26 

Four weeks after President Donald Trump launched a poorly conceived war of choice against Iran, the lockstep support for the conflict that has characterized coverage from Fox News’ star hosts is beginning to fray. The power struggle is significant — it is not an exaggeration to suggest the course of the war might hinge on which Fox shows the president is watching.

Trump is clearly approaching a decision point over whether to further escalate the war. U.S. and Israeli forces have done a lot of damage to Iranian military targets, but its regime is intact, still controls its stockpiles of enriched uranium, and has closed the Strait of Hormuz, threatening the global trade in oil, natural gas, and fertilizer. The Pentagon is sending thousands of troops to the region and reportedly prepping options for a “final blow” — some of which would involve deploying U.S. forces on Iranian soil.

When Trump is considering policy options, he often takes guidance from his loyal propagandists at Fox. This Fox-Trump feedback loop has in recent months played a role in the president’s decisions to send White House border czar Tom Homan to oversee immigration enforcement in Minnesota; prioritize the SAVE Act over all other legislation; order the deployment of ICE agents to airports; and start the war against Iran.

Against that backdrop, Fox News host Laura Ingraham warned on Wednesday’s show that further U.S. action could produce devastating unintended consequences and suggested that Trump should refocus his attention on the domestic economy and political situation. 

“Iran knows it cannot win militarily, so it’s using the leverage it has by prolonging the conflict,” she said during her monologue at the top of the show. “Now, what do they want to do? They want to inflict maximum economic pain on the region, on the U.S., [on] the global economy as much as possible until they think Trump relents. But the White House doesn’t seem to be blinking.”

The host then aired a clip of White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt warning at her press briefing that day that “President Trump does not bluff, and he is prepared to unleash hell” against Iran. 

Ingraham did not seem impressed by Leavitt’s rhetoric.

“Well, the problem is obviously unleashing hell means destroying infrastructure, which itself causes a series of cascading problems for the region, including maybe outside the region — political problems for the president in a midterm election year,” she said.

Her air of skepticism continued throughout the show. 

While interviewing Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), she noted Pentagon reports of thousands of successful missions but commented, “I mean, this is a devastating blow, yet you know, we’re still there.”

“It’s not even a month old, obviously,” she continued, before asking, “But are you concerned about the public and people? Again, very short attention spans, very impatient for victory, as is President Trump, I might add. But in an election year, it’s easy to say politics don’t matter, but at some point politics do come into play.”

And in a third segment, she highlighted the disastrous polling on the Iran war, commenting, “It looks like people are pretty impatient. The American people are sending a message to President Trump that it’s time to put the focus back on the home front.”

Ingraham is inching toward the type of dissent that has been virtually absent from Fox’s coverage of the war, even as the broader right-wing media has split. Her colleagues have played key roles in convincing Trump to attack in the first place and are pushing for risky escalations. Ingraham herself briefly quibbled with Trump’s handling of an apparent U.S. strike that leveled an Iranian school, killing scores of children, but had supported the war itself, which she declared three weeks ago that Trump had already won. 

But if Ingraham is getting cold feet and trying to convince Trump not to escalate a war the public has soured on, she remains an outlier at the network. Indeed, if the president tuned in for the two hours following Ingraham’s program, he saw her prime-time colleagues Jesse Watters and Sean Hannity argue not only that the war is going well and that Trump will inevitably lead the U.S. to victory, but that anyone who disagrees must want America to lose the war because they hate the president.

Watters began his show with a 10-minute monologue whose thesis was that “the Iranian regime is losing leverage fast as we continue to carry out thousands of sorties over enemy airspace.” After detailing various tactical victories, he touted a potential escalation………………………………………………. https://www.mediamatters.org/us-iran-relations/fox-news-united-front-support-trumps-iran-war-may-be-breaking-down

March 30, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | media, USA | Leave a comment