Fox national correspondent Bill Melugin — arguably the country’s foremost border reporter (alongside NewsNation’s Ali Bradley and the New York Post’s Jennie Taer) — absolutely cooked Axios’s Russell Contreras on Friday morning in reaction to this toolish X post seeking to defend President Biden’s handling of the border crisis:
Melugin quote tweeted over this X post and laid waste, starting with exasperation of “I cannot believe this was printed” and then noting Contreras was “the same guy who wrote Biden had the most secure border ever,” which we (and many, many others) dunked on back in August 2023.
His headline on that particular day? “Axios Explains: The myth of a U.S.-Mexico ‘open border.’”
Melugin added Contreras came along and decided to it’s “a ‘scoop’ that Biden's Border Patrol in November arrested more illegal migrants than Trump's is now.”
He then leveled the kill shot of a fact-check: “Yes, because illegal crossings have fallen to microscopic levels since Trump took office. There are far fewer people to arrest. And if you want to talk ICE data, the Trump admin ICE made more interior arrests in two weeks than Biden did in the entire month of November.”
In a second X post, Melugin reminded followers of the 2023 “gem” that “aged like milk”:
Contreras himself provided the perfect ending as, instead of engaging with Melugin, he blocked him.
A further examination of the NewsBusters archives revealed Jorge Bonilla tagged Contreras back in October 2021 for painting the murderous communist dictatorship of Fidel Castro should be billed as “Hispanic heritage.”
Back in the present, two of Contreras’s colleagues — Marc Caputo and spokesman Jake Wilkins — came to his defense by citing a passage from the article that made a similar point to Melugin in his fact-check.
In Wilkins’s case, Melugin clapped back: “So you knew that - and this was the headline and framing you went with?”
Jeremy Redfern from Governor Ron DeSantis’s (R-FL) team blasted this attempt to have everyone look past the headline: “Meanwhile, the rage-bait headline still exists. And he doesn’t have to pretend it’s a ‘possible reason.’ It’s rather obvious it’s true to anyone with eyes. This isn’t quantum chemistry. Reporters don’t have to ignore the obvious.”
If you come at the king, you better not miss!
