'Blunt political reality': Republican leadership won't be ditching Trump anytime soon
MAGA Fox ignores projected $500B IRS shortfall while celebrating meager DOGE savings.
Alarm over U.S. President Donald Trump's tariffs continues to grow, with stocks plummeting . Responding in, There Will Be Blood, head of global economic research Bruce Kasman and other experts at JPMorgan wrote that "the risk of recession in the global economy this year is raised to 60%, up from 40%."
Many economists, from former New York Times columnist Paul Krugman to the University of Michigan's Justin Wolfers, are warning that President Donald Trump's steep new tariffs will cause a wide range of imported goods — from food to computers to building materials — to become much more expensive. And according to Krugman, tariffs may be one of the Trump policies that pushes the United States into a recession.
Democratic lawmakers, including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York) and Sen. Cory Booker (D-New Jersey), are scathing critics of Trump's tariffs. And some GOP lawmakers are anti-tariffs as well, including Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) and former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky).
"This week," Rep. Ro Khann (D-Calif.) wrote, "19 factories had mass layoffs, 15 closed, and 4,134 factory workers across America lost their jobs. Cleveland-Cliffs laid off 1,200 workers in Michigan and Minnesota as they deal with the impact of Trump's tariffs on steel and auto imports."
For union leaders representing those workers at Cleveland-Cliffs, they said "chaos" was the operative word. "Chaos. You, know? A lot of questions. You've got a lot of people who worked there a long time that are potentially losing their job," Bill Wilhelm, a servicing representative and editor with UAW Local 600, told local ABC News affiliate WXYZ-Channel 7.
With public sector workers being fired in massive numbers nationwide due to the blitzkrieg unleashed by the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, private sector workers are no stranger to mass layoffs within a U.S. economy dominated by corporate interests and union density still at historic lows.
In a series of unhinged missives, President Donald Trump is declaring victory—ignoring the toll on American families and businesses of all sizes after U.S. markets lost $3.1 trillion on Thursday. The plunge, one of the largest in history, has been widely attributed to his heavily criticized tariff package, which has triggered outrage both domestically and internationally.
“To the many investors coming into the United States and investing massive amounts of money, my policies will never change. This is a great time to get rich, richer than ever before!!!” Trump proclaimed Friday morning in an all-caps post, just before the markets again took a massive nose dive, and after China announced it would impose a 34% tariff on U.S. goods.
Trump’s promise that his policies will “never change” is an apparent walk-back of his (and his son’s) suggestion that he would be open to negotiation, something the White House spent much of Thursday denying.
Fox News and Fox Business have seemingly ignored bombshell reporting from The Washington Post detailing how disruptions at the Internal Revenue Service created by the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency may result in the loss of half a trillion dollars of federal tax revenue this year.
This roughly $500 billion loss — which would represent nearly 10% of expected tax revenue to be gathered by the IRS by the April 15 tax filing deadline — dwarfs the alleged savings generated by DOGE from the firing of federal workers, closing of offices and agencies, and the cancellation of government contracts, which Fox personalities have enthusiastically promoted.
Fox’s refusal to inform viewers about how DOGE has crippled the IRS comes as no surprise given the network’s long track record of demagoguing against the agency.
Only five months ago, the head economist for Moody’s said the economy under Joe Biden was the best he’d seen. Mark Zandi said “this is among the best performing economies in my 35-plus years as an economist.”
“Economic growth is rip-roaring, with real GDP up 3 percent over the past year. Unemployment is low, at near 4 percent, consistent with full employment.
“Inflation is fast closing in on the Fed’s 2 percent target.
“Grocery prices, rents and gas prices are flat to down over the past more than a year. Households’ financial obligations are light, and set to get lighter with the Fed cutting rates.
“House prices have never been higher, and most homeowners have more equity in their homes than ever.
“Corporate profits are robust, and the stock market is hitting a record high on a seemingly daily basis.
And now?
On March 30, before this week’s tariff news, Zandi said:
“I’m raising my odds that a recession will begin sometime this year to 40 percent, up from 15 percent at the start of the year. Last week’s economic data were disconcerting, including the slide in consumer confidence, punk consumer spending, and persistently high inflation. The intensifying trade war and DOGE cuts are behind all this and with last week’s announcement of big tariff increases on vehicle imports and the coming reciprocal tariffs, things are sure to get worse.”
Everything Trump claims to be doing – bringing jobs back home, supporting domestic industries, revitalizing infrastructure and investing in the future — Biden actually did. Most everyone prospered, including all those resentful people. As the former president was fond of saying, Trump talks a good game, but never built a damn thing.
Fox News and Fox Business have seemingly ignored all of this, including the disruptions at the Internal Revenue Service created by the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency may result in the loss of half a trillion dollars of federal tax revenue this year.
This roughly $500 billion loss — which would represent nearly 10% of expected tax revenue to be gathered by the IRS by the April 15 tax filing deadline — dwarfs the alleged savings generated by DOGE from the firing of federal workers, closing of offices and agencies, and the cancellation of government contracts, which Fox personalities have enthusiastically promoted.
Fox’s refusal to inform viewers about how DOGE has crippled the IRS comes as no surprise given the network’s long track record of demagoguing against the agency.
Senior tax officials are bracing for a sharp drop in revenue collected this spring, as an increasing number of individuals and businesses spurn filing their taxes or attempt to skip paying balances owed to the Internal Revenue Service, according to three people with knowledge of tax projections.
Treasury Department and IRS officials are predicting a decrease of more than 10 percent in tax receipts by the April 15 deadline compared with 2024, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share nonpublic data. That would amount to more than $500 billion in lost federal revenue; the IRS collected $5.1 trillion last year. For context, the U.S. government spent $825 billion on the Defense Department in fiscal 2024.
…
The prediction, officials say, is directly tied to changing taxpayer behavior and President Donald Trump’s rapid demolition of parts of the IRS.
Fox has repeatedly promoted the comparatively meager DOGE savings reportedly totaling $130 billion as of March 28, a figure that reporting makes clear is hugely exaggerated. But according to a Media Matters review, Fox News has not covered this Post story showing a staggering loss in revenue due in part to DOGE. In a review of transcripts on Fox News and Fox Business from March 22 - 27, we found that Fox failed to report on the Post’s exclusive.
Fox personalities have been eager to applaud DOGE’s efforts to upend much of the United States government, claiming the department is pursuing cost savings and efficiency.
Fox host Sean Hannity: “There’s $500 billion that was identified by Sen. Rand Paul … in previously approved spending that they believe they have the ability to cut. That's a big number.” Hannity continued, “We're getting into the trillions of dollars which was the goal originally.” [Fox News, Hannity, 3/5/25]
Fox host Jesse Watters celebrated “federal agencies getting DOGEd.” Watters emphasized that the DOGE “whiz kids” are “already saving a billion bucks a day.” [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 2/4/25]
Fox host Laura Ingraham: “DOGE ends the gravy train.” Ingraham asked, “Are there any sane Democrats left in Washington? Do any of them care about the billions being stolen from the U.S. taxpayers, stolen through waste, stolen through negligence, fraud, abuse?” Ingraham then celebrated an announcement of 167 contract cancellations. [Fox News, The Ingraham Angle, 2/14/25]
Fox & Friends hosts gushed over the supposed DOGE savings and supported a DOGE “dividend check” to Americans. [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 2/20/25]
Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo celebrated that “DOGE has exposed so much wasteful spending” before suggesting “digging into Medicare and Medicaid.” [Fox Business, Mornings with Maria Bartiromo, 3/10/25]
PBS’ News Hour: DOGE “has posted what it calls a wall of receipts on its Web site that claims it has saved billions by cutting certain federal contracts. But reports and government documents prove that many of these so-called savings are either misleading or incorrect.” PBS White House correspondent Laura Barrón-López explained: “As The New York Times first reported, five of DOGE's biggest contracts that they say have resulted in savings ended up being deleted from that wall of receipts after outlets pointed out that there were errors. And some of the biggest errors in savings are, as CBS first reported, a USAID contract for $650 million that was listed three times, as The Intercept first reported, a Social Security contract listed as $232 million, instead of $560,000, and an ICE contract that DOGE listed as $8 billion, when, in reality, it was $8 million.” [PBS, News Hour, 2/26/25]
AP: “Nearly 40% of the federal contracts that President Donald Trump’s administration claims to have canceled as part of its signature cost-cutting program aren’t expected to save the government any money.” A February analysis by The Associated Press found that “more than one-third of the contract cancellations, 794 in all, are expected to yield no savings.” [The Associated Press, 2/25/25]
Gizmodo: “DOGE Just Keeps Deleting Its ‘Savings.’” Gizmodo reported on March 3 that DOGE “has repeatedly had to pull examples of so-called savings down after it was revealed that it actually didn’t save taxpayers anything.” According to the article, DOGE “changed or removed more than 40% of the more than 1,000 contracts it claimed to have canceled over the previous week, according to the New York Times. Included in that overnight alteration was the outright removal of five of the seven largest contracts it claimed to have cut.” [Gizmodo, 3/3/25]
NY Times: DOGE removed identifying information from its website to make its claimed savings harder to fact-check, before reversing course. The New York Times reported that DOGE “began making its new mistakes harder to find” following news outlets’ reporting on the group’s “error-filled data that inflated its success at saving taxpayer money.” The Times reported that DOGE began posting claims of new cuts without identifying information, and that it later removed the identifying information from the publicly available source code, making its claims nearly impossible to verify. The Times reported in a later story that DOGE “added some of the missing details,” allowing the public to check its claims of savings again. [The New York Times, 3/13/25, 3/18/25]
Fox has long demagogued against the IRS
Fox pushed a lie about increased IRS funding in the Inflation Reduction Act hundreds of times. In August 2022, Fox promoted the false claim that the IRA added 87,000 employees to the IRS at least 203 times, and House Republicans used these lies to justify a push to cut billions in enforcement funding from the agency. Some of the funding was successfully used to collect taxes owed by the richest Americans who otherwise may not have paid what they owed. [Media Matters, 6/7/24]
Fox also pushed unhinged demagoguery about the extra IRS funding, claiming that it would fund a militia to “hunt down and kill middle class taxpayers.” Then-Fox host Tucker Carlson claimed, “They're hiring another 87,000 armed IRS agents just to make sure that you obey. Got it?” Others on Fox described the potential wave of IRS hiring as an “economic, financial militia against regular people” deployed by those who “want to control you”; a “new army”; a “new Gestapo” Biden will use in an “abusive, corrupt manner”; “a Praetorian Guard that will be unleashed again” to “grab all the cash they can by any means necessary”; and “part of an orchestrated campaign to target Americans and have the federal government be at war with those Americans.” [Media Matters, 8/16/22]
During the Obama administration, Fox manufactured a scandal over the IRS scrutinizing political nonprofits. Before it came out that the IRS had also investigated progressive-aligned nonprofit organizations, Fox worked in concert with Republican politicians in an attempt to manufacture a scandal about the IRS supposedly targeting conservative nonprofits. [Media Matters, 8/20/13]
Batya Ungar-Sargon, a journalist describing herself as a "MAGA lefty," told Fox News that President Donald Trump's tariffs would help bring manly jobs back to America's working class that is facing a "crisis in masculinity."
"It's not just the destruction of the economic vitality of the working class," she explained during a Sunday interview with host Rachel Campos-Duffy, "but there has been a spiritual decimation that has come along that, a crisis in masculinity because we shipped jobs that gave men who work with their hands for a living and rely on brawn and physicality off to other countries to build up their middle class."
"And then we imported millions and millions of illegals to work in construction, to work in, yes, manufacturing what's left here, to work in landscaping, to work in janitorial services, to work in jobs that used to give men access to the American dream," she continued. "So Donald Trump is saying no more to this and to the crisis in masculinity, which is of course why young men feel so attracted to what he's offering."
Campos-Duffy agreed: "And when young men are not doing well, it's not good for young women either."
But having your rapist’s baby is fine.
