CNN and MS NOW have spent the past week utterly captivated by the nine-month deployment of the USS Abraham Lincoln Navy aircraft carrier. Following the circulation of unappetizing photos of food circulating online and complaints by service members’ families about the unusually long deployment, talking heads on the left-wing cable networks immediately recognized the story some easy anti-Trump press, and the story was promptly catapulted to the top of the news cycle.
Depending on which show you’re watching, the fault for the conditions on the Lincoln lies either with whomever the anchor happens to dislike more: President Trump, or with Department of War Secretary Pete Hegseth.
The USS Abraham Lincoln is the leftist media's latest manufactured scandal. pic.twitter.com/dmqKvT8QbN
— Media Research Center (@theMRC) August 18, 2026
On MS NOW’s Deadline: White House — long understood to be a Trump derangement support session masquerading as a news show — host Nicolle Wallace predictably blamed the Commander in Chief. On the August 17 edition of her show, Wallace remarked with a gleeful grin that the story was “Getting better by the news cycle.”
She went on to claim that conditions aboard the vessel were emblematic of President Trump’s “betrayal of U.S. sailors.”
On Morning Joe, meanwhile, the show’s titular host instead laid into Secretary Hegseth. On Tuesday, August 18, Joe Scarborough bristled:
He attacks the media? He says the “American-hating media?” Well right now, he sounds like a troop-hating secretary of defense!
Both Scarborough’s rage at Hegseth’s criticism and Wallace’s evident enjoyment of the story’s poor optics betray the actual goal behind the media’s abrupt fascination with the USS Abraham Lincoln. The motivation is to report the latest “Trump = bad” story.
That’s not to say that none of these people have any actual empathy for the deployed service members. It’s not hard to feel for sailors who feel stuck on an extended deployment. Rather, the point is that the empathy is purely incidental, rather than the motivating factor behind the reporting.
