Of course the corporate media were going to melt down over President-elect Trump’s cabinet picks. But the sheer intensity of their panic over the past week has been enough to surprise even their most cynical critics.
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.”
The reaction to Tulsi Gabbard being tapped as DNI was perhaps less absurd, though barely. Every talking head who objected to her nomination vaguely accused her of spreading “Russian disinformation” or “Russian propaganda.” Former White House Press Secretary and current MSNBC host Jen Psaki went so far as to pretend that Gabbard might herself be a deep-cover Russian agent:
“Russian television, which is a propaganda machine, has joked that she’s a Russian asset. I don’t know that for a fact, but that is something they’ve talked about.”
As far as Pete Hegseth was concerned, most of the TV news denizens’ ire stemmed from Hegseth also being a TV news personality. In human psychology, this is commonly known as “jealousy.” There was also a dumber contingent of critics who suggested that some of his tattoos were symbols of “white supremacy”. Sherrilyn Ifill, the cousin of late PBS reporter Gwen Ifill, took things a step further, venturing into the land of potentially outright slander: “This is someone who, you know, is know to be a white supremacist.”
The corporate media are certainly making their thoughts on these cabins appointments known. But given their serial dishonesty, rank partisanship, and deeply incestuous relationships with the so-called deep state, it’s hard to see their misgivings as anything but an endorsement of the highest order.
