The Media Falls for Trump’s Big Ugly Propaganda

House Republicans, including Speaker Mike Johnson, after the House passed Donald Trump’s tax-cuts-for-the-rich legislation on May 22. Francis Chung/ AP Images

The New York Times did a podcast on the “big ugly battle over the big beautiful bill.” The Today show aired a segment titled “How Trump and Musk’s Feud May Impact the ‘Big Beautiful Bill.’” CBS News reported, “Trump’s ‘one big beautiful bill’ continues GOP efforts to rollback Obamacare.” The BBC posted an article headlined, “A look at the key items in Trump’s ‘big beautiful bill.’” PBS’s Newshour ran a piece it called, “Breaking down Trump’s ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ and its impact on the deficit and national debt.’” An Axios headline declared, “Johnson was ‘disappointed’ by Musk’s big beautiful bill blowup.” An ABC News story was billed, “Here are taxes that Trump’s ‘big beautiful bill’ would repeal.”

Over and over, mainstream media outlets have adopted Donald Trump’s rhetoric when covering the massive tax-and-spending legislation he and his GOP comrades are pushing. True, sometimes they put that “big beautiful bill” description in quotes to note these are Trump’s words. But overall, they keep reinforcing Trump’s misleading characterization. This is a big, beautiful win for Trump.

One of the chief tools of a propagandist is repetition. In a 2021 paper for Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, Aumyo Hassan and Sarah Barber explained this simply: “Repetition can affect beliefs about truth. People tend to perceive claims as truer if they have been exposed to them before. This is known as the illusory truth effect, and it helps explain why advertisements and propaganda work, and also why people believe fake news to be true.” Trump understands this. He’s skilled in marketing. He comes up with simple slogans and nicknames—“Build the Wall,” “Make America Great Again,” “Crooked Hillary”—and he repeats the hell out of them. If he gets the media to amplify his one-liners, all the better.

He's done this with the tax-and-spending bill, giving it this absolutely ridiculous name. He even got his Republican flunkies in the House to officially title the measure the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Legislators and presidents often affix positive-sounding names to their proposed measures: the Affordable Care Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, the No Child Left Behind Act. That’s to be expected. But these titles are tethered to the topic at hand. Trump just went with adjectives that deflect from the enormous harm this measure would do, which includes decreasing spending for Medicaid by about $1 trillion and adding onerous work rules for Medicaid recipients. These provisions are projected to cause existential financial crises for hospitals (particularly rural hospitals) and lead to 11 million Americans losing their health insurance. That ain’t beautiful.

But the media has gone along with Trump’s scheme. Thus, news consumers have continuously been bombarded with Trump’s lie that this measure is fabulous. Even when headlines and reports using this term include critiques of the legislation, Trump’s positive message is conveyed.

The media has no obligation to accept his nonsense. Why not call it the help-the-rich-and-screw-the-poor bill? Or, the throw-millions-off-Medicaid bill? Or, the take-food-stamps-from-kids bill? There are so many ways to shorthand this measure. Trump and the Republicans are trying to pass a giant 1,000-page bill that would decrease taxes for plutocrats, raise taxes for some lower-income Americans, add about $3 trillion to the deficit, end crucial tax breaks for electric vehicles, give Big Tech free rein for AI, weaken the power of federal judges to enforce court orders, and more. Why make it any easier for them?

The use of language is key to politics. Authoritarians know this. Define reality and you can control reality. George Orwell taught us this decades ago. (“War is peace.”) And no politician in modern American history has relied on the power of lying more than Trump. Yet his excessive dishonesty has often confounded the media. It was a long time before the New York Times and other prominent news organizations would call a Trump lie a lie. After finally doing so, they still often approach his deceit gingerly.

The Washington Post Factchecker, to its credit, chronicled more than 30,000 false statements Trump uttered during his first presidency. And CNN reporter Daniel Dale has for years tracked Trump’s misrepresentations and prevarications. Yet much of that good work is neutralized when Trump is permitted to define the terms of the debate in such a disingenuous manner. No doubt, some in the media believe their use of the “big beautiful bill” phrase is irony tainted. Even if so, it bolsters Trump’s marketing connivery. This is a grotesque measure that will cause extensive damage. Reporting that doesn’t clearly convey the consequences aids and abets the huckster-in-chief.

Got anything to say about this item—or anything else? Email me at ourland.corn@gmail.com.

After the November election, when there was much chatter about Trump having fared better than previously with Latino voters, some pundits suggested that a political realignment had struck and these voters were now firmly in the GOP camp. This seemed a bit premature. An obvious question was what would happen if Trump followed through on his promise to mount mass deportations of undocumented people.

Well, now we know. At least regarding one Latino voter. Ileana Garcia, a Republican Florida state senator and a co-founder of Latinos for Trump, this weekend released a statement condemning Trump’s deportation crusade and his recent immigration enforcement efforts. “I have always supported Trump, through thick and thin,” she stated. “However, this is unacceptable and inhumane.” She added, “This is not we voted for.”

Really?

The Republican National Convention in Milwaukee on July 17, 2024. Francis Chung/AP Images

How could Garcia have missed that?

She declared, “I understand the importance of deporting criminal aliens, but what we are witnessing are arbitrary measures to hunt down people who are complying with their immigration hearings—in many cases, with credible fear of persecution claims—all driven by a [Stephen] Miller-like desire to satisfy a self-fabricated deportation goal. This undermines the sense of fairness and justice that the American people value.”

It was always clear that the mass deportation of 10 million people would extend far beyond rounding up criminals and entail the sort of measures now being deployed. Anyone who helped put Trump into power owns this. That includes Garcia.

Konstantin Malofeev is a Russian oligarch and media baron who’s pals with Vladimir Putin and who advocates the establishment of a monarchy in Russia. He was sanctioned by the United States in 2014 for supporting Russian forces in eastern Ukraine and indicted by the US in 2022 for allegedly conspiring to violate US sanctions. An institute associated with his media company this week held a conference in Moscow titled “Forum of the Future 2050” that, according to the event’s website, gathered speakers to ponder weighty topics, such as “fighting for souls and mind,” the “ideology of sovereign Russia,” “AI in the service of Russia,” “great powers” and Russian foreign policy, and the “Race for Mars.” Featured speakers included Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov, who ought to be considered a war criminal, and many members of Putin’s ruling class. The event reportedly was led by Alexander Dugin, the far-right Russian ideologue who’s been called a neo-fascist.

None of this is surprising. But the speaker’s list had a few eyebrow-raising participants, including Errol Musk, the onetime South African politician and businessman and father of Elon; Alex Jones, the wacko conspiracy-monger; Jeffrey Sachs, an American economist who has questioned US support for Ukraine; Max Blumenthal, a journalist who edits The Grayzone, a site known for its harsh criticism of US foreign policy and apologist coverage of Russia; and Larry Johnson, a CIA analyst for several years in the 1980s who has become a critic of US intelligence and an advocate for Russia—and a promoter of conspiracy theories. 

When Musk the Elder arrived in Moscow for the gathering, he was, according to the Kyiv Independent,  quoted by TASS saying, “I am eager to meet everyone. As far as I know, Russians are among the most intelligent people on the planet. It would be foolish not to ask their opinion on all sorts of issues.” In April, the senior Musk told the BBC that within his family there was admiration of Putin, noting, “If you look at Putin as a man, and not in the context of international politics, it is difficult not to have respect for him.” In that interview, he refused to acknowledge that Russia had started the war with Ukraine: “Only time will tell who really started it.”

Sins of the father ought not to be dumped on sons and daughters, and Elon Musk has referred to his estranged father as a “terrible human being” and “evil.” So the elder Musk’s presence at this affair may not work as a Russian ploy to gain favor with Elon. Yet Daddy Musk’s positive attitude toward the Russian tyrant is intriguing, given Elon’s own (once secret) relationship with Putin.

This conference shows how Moscow uses Americans (and others) to dress up its propaganda. Like Johnson. Last September, Voice of America reported that leading Russian state media outfits had cited or referred to him more than 1,000 times in the previous 12 months, as he often predicted Ukraine was about to suffer a major setback or even lose the war. In 2023, he contended that US intelligence was scheming to murder Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy and make it appear he had been killed in a Russian airstrike. Citing his claim, RIA Novosti, the Russian-state-owned news agency, declared that “U.S. intelligence agencies are planning to assassinate Zelenskyy.” Attending this event with Lavrov, Johnson, Jones, and the others, Musk’s father was adding the family name to the list of Putin’s useful idiots.

Pee-wee as Himself. Is it possible for an actor to so thoroughly inhabit a role that he loses his own identity? That’s one of many intriguing questions that animates Pee-wee as Himself, the new HBO documentary that chronicles the life and career of Paul Reubens, the comic actor and performing artist who became rich and famous in the 1980s as Pee-wee Herman, the bowtie wearing, sweet, smart-alecky, and absurdist children’s TV show host. Pee-wee was not just a character for Reubens; he was an alter ego. And as Reubens—née Paul Rubenfeld—explains, he broke the fourth wall by taking Pee-wee from the confines of the television set and his big-screen adventures into the real world by appearing on talk shows not as himself (the actor who played Pee-wee) but as Pee-wee. For Reubens, who grew up, no surprise, an artsy oddball teen watching Andy Warhol’s experimental films, this was performance art. Pee-wee was not merely a character; he was a concept that played games with our media-shaped reality.

The two-part documentary is a fascinating study of Reubens’ creative process and his driving ambition to succeed in the world of mainstream entertainment while staying true to his subversive instincts. At the start of his comedy career, he was gay and out of the closet. But as he began to achieve success as Pee-wee, he returned to closet, and the film conveys a sadness as we watch Reubens smother and sacrifice his personal life to serve his intense career goals. Gay culture was evident in Pee-wee’s Playhouse, his hyper-imaginative kids show, which ran for five years on CBS, and in his movies, yet off-screen Reubens felt forced to play it straight.

Pee-wee as Himself is filled with tension between director Matt Wolf and his subject. Wolf conducted hours of interviews with Reubens before Reubens died in 2023 of cancer—an ailment he kept secret from Wolf and many of his own friends and associates. And there is much parrying between the two, regarding whether they can trust each other. Throughout these interviews, Reubens alternates between coyness and candidness. As he did as a performer, he keeps the audience off-balance. Yet with these chats, interviews with others (including Reubens’ sister and his longtime assistant), and archival footage, Wolf delivers a well-rounded portrait of an artist.

Wolf addresses the two scandals that enveloped Reubens and taint his legacy. In 1991, he was arrested at an adult theater and charged with indecent exposure for “manipulating his genitalia.” He claimed the charges were bogus, but he pleaded no contest, and within years he was able to revive his career, playing parts other than Pee-wee, such as the vampire bad-guy in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and a bisexual hairdresser/drug dealer in Blow.

Then came another tribulation. The police raided his house and seized his enormous collection of vintage gay erotica. He was charged with misdemeanor possession of obscene material that depicted a child in sexual conduct. As Reubens, an obsessive collector of kitsch, toys, and curios, and his lawyer contended, he had purchased entire collections of gay material and did not know every image they contained. The Los Angeles country district attorney apparently agreed and found no grounds to proceed with the case. But the city attorney went ahead with a prosecution that reeked of politics. A deal was finally cut: The city attorney dropped the child pornography charges, and Reuben, looking to avoid the awful publicity of a trial, pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor obscenity charge.

Wolf notes in the documentary that Reubens backed out of their final interview, which was to focus on these cases. But in a recording Reubens made himself the day before he died, he painfully recounts the experience of being publicly cast as a pedophile—for which there has never been any public evidence—and notes he wanted to have this documentary made to counter that accusation. “I knew,” he says, “it was going to change everything moving forwards and backwards…..To be labeled a pariah, to have people scared of you…I wanted people to understand that occasionally where there is smoke there isn’t always fire….My whole career, everything I ever did and wrote was based in love and my desire to entertain and bring glee and creativity to young people and to everyone.” Despite all his complications and foibles as a person, the film shows how he succeeded in doing that.

David Lowery, Fathers, Sons and Brothers. David Lowery was in two cool bands. In the 1980s, it was Camper Van Beethoven, which had notable singles with “Take the Skinheads Bowling” and a cover of Status Quo’s “Pictures of Matchstick Men.” A few years later, it was Cracker, which helped define the sound of 1990s rock with several wry hits, including “Teen Angst (What the World Needs Now)”, “Low,” and “Euro-Trash Girl.”  Lowery was also a champion of musicians’ rights in the age of internet. He brought a class-action suit against Spotify accusing it of not paying certain royalties, and the streaming service settled in 2017 and set up a fund of $40 million to compensate songwriters.

In March, Lowery released an Americana triple-album of autobiographical tunes called Fathers, Sons and Brothers that includes online-only disks he released in recent years as well as a few new songs. It’s a lovely listen. It includes “It Don’t Last Long,” a melancholic track that recounts Lowery’s rise to stardom: “I came out of oblivion with two hit MTV songs.” He notes he became “way too cocky” and there was some “bad behavior” that “didn’t really cost me selling 5K every week.” But then things took a turn: “I taught the audience to sing the record company president’s direct line telephone number / We were dropped in just a week.” I don’t know if that really happened. But there’s a moral here about success: “I should have got down on my knees and thanked the Lord. ‘Cause it don’t last long. Enjoy it while you can.” He sings that from the heart.

“Margaritaville,” Fed Up!. There are few songs that can’t be punkified. Remember Sid Vicious singing “My Way”? (“To think, I killed a cat.”) The other day, I stumbled across a rather amusing punk cover of Jimmy Buffet’s “Margaritaville” by Fed Up!, a group once described as “a straight edge hardcore and Krishna Conscious band,” which was active in the late 1980s. Enjoy.