Media

During an early October broadcast of her SiriusXM show, former Fox News host Megyn Kelly attacked ex-MSNBC host Joy Reid and former CNN host Don Lemon for their recent comments on Black-on-Black crime. Kelly accused both Reid and Lemon of "racializing" crime statistics.

Reid discussed Kelly's comments during an appearance on Tommy Christopher's Substack show on Thursday, October 2, and she had some scathing words for the far-right SiriusXM star.

Reid noted that Kelly "took selfies with Alex Jones," adding, "She's become a troll. Her thing is just trolling…. She's basically the blonde Laura Loomer. That lady is saying who's a real journalist?"

The former MSNBC host noted that after leaving Fox News, Kelly "failed as a dayside host because they tried to make Megyn fun and approachable and girlfriend material —and clearly, she's not that."

Reid, in the past, has described Kelly as "the ultimate mean girl" — a description she doubled down on during her conversation with Christopher.

Reid told Christopher, "She's one of the angriest, most miserable rich people I've ever seen in my life. Like, she's so angry. I mean, I guess the premise of her show is: It's your angry ex-wife. What is the purpose of that show? The premise of it is: I'm the meanest blonde you've ever seen."

When Jen Psaki, now an MSNBC host, joined the Biden Administration as White House press secretary in January 2021, she made it clear that she welcomed tough questions from conservatives. Psaki was happy to debate right-wing Fox News reporter Peter Doocy during White House press conferences, for example, but she never discouraged him from attending.

In contrast, reporters who offend the second Trump Administration risk being excluded from press conferences. And in some cases, according to The Guardian's David Smith, they are being replaced by far-right MAGA media pundits.

Smith, in an article published on October 4, notes how obsequious some of these pundits are when asking Trump questions. For example, Brian Glenn of Real America's Voice told Trump, "I’ve often said: Trump could cure cancer and people would still criticize him."

"It was not the first time that Glenn, who works for the Real America's Voice platform and is the boyfriend of Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican congresswoman, has played the role of Trump sidekick — a useful foil guaranteed to lighten the atmosphere," Smith explains. "It was also a small but telling example of how the White House press corps has changed between Trump's first and second terms."

Smith continues, "Seasoned reporters from mainstream media outlets are still asking tough questions. But in the Oval Office, on Air Force One or in the press briefing room, there is no way to avoid the new contingent of MAGA (Make America Great Again) reporters, influencers and podcasters lobbing toothless queries or fawning comments at their favorite president."

Tara Setmayer, a Never Trump conservative and former GOP communications director, warns that when President Donald Trump surrounds himself with obsequious MAGA media figures at White House press conferences, it is right out of the "authoritarian" playbook.

Setmayer told The Guardian, "They're hand-picked to protect him, and once again, it's another emulation of authoritarian leaders around the world who suppress the free press in order to avoid accountability. (Trump) surrounds himself with sycophants who ask softball questions that allow him to drone on about nonsense and propaganda and disinformation."

Media Matters' Matt Gertz is also sounding the alarm about the abundance of Trump sycophants who are praising him during press conferences.

Gertz told The Guardian, "I don't want to be too glowing about the performance of the White House press corps and the way that they interacted with administrations in years past. But I think there was an understanding of sorts that reporters were on one side and the government was on the other — and the purpose of the reporters was to try to get information from the government and bring it back to their audience through tough questioning. What you have now is effectively an infiltration of the press corps by people who are more interested in helping the (Trump) Administration than they are in trying to get information out of it."

Read David Smith's full article for The Guardian at this link.

After the fatal shooting of Turning Point USA's Charlie Kirk, Fox News host Jesse Watters blamed the left for the killing and called for revenge.

Watters told viewers, "They are at war with us. Whether we want to accept it or not, they are at war with us. And what are we going to do about it?"

Watters' comments drew a lot of criticism. On X, formerly Twitter, Bayou Communications' Shannon Marie posted, "Dangerous f—— rhetoric."

In an article published on October 1, Salon's Sophia Tesfaye describes a pattern of violent rhetoric at Fox News.

On September 23, Watters joked about bombing the United Nations (UN).

Watters, on "The Five," told co-host Dana Perrino and others, "What we need to do is either leave the UN or we need to bomb it. Maybe gas it? We need to destroy it.”

Meanwhile, on Fox News' morning show, "Fox & Friends," host Brian Kilmeade called for homeless Americans to be given "involuntary lethal injection" — although he later apologized for his "extremely callous remark."

"When Fox News figures casually invoke mass violence, whether through forced lethal injections or bombing international institutions, it's not just reckless rhetoric — it's a flirtation with incitement," Tesfaye argues. "These aren't fringe voices. They're amplified on one of the most-watched networks in the country, shaping public sentiment and policy discourse. But don't expect Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr to make much of a fuss about the network's dangerous musings. He is still denying the pressure campaign he publicly mounted against (late-night television host Jimmy) Kimmel for his comments following Kirk's killing."

Tesfaye adds, "'There was no threat made or suggested that if Jimmy Kimmel didn't get fired, that someone was going to lose their license,' Carr said on Tuesday. In a media landscape dotted with double standards, where the head enforcer is a partisan operative and fierce MAGA supporter, a 'kind of, sort of' apology is perhaps the best we can hope for from Fox News."

In a column in the conservative National Review, Fox News contributor and legal analyst Andy McCarthy says that President Donald Trump's Department of Justice indictment of former FBI Director James Comey is so devoid of facts that it should be tossed.

Comey was indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of making false statements to Congress and obstructing a congressional proceeding related to his handling of the FBI's investigation into Russian election interference and Hillary Clinton's emails.

Comey has said he is innocent and ready to go on trial, one which many legal experts predict will be found in his favor.

McCarthy's column, titled “With More Scrutiny, the Trump DOJ Indictment of Comey Gets Worse,” says that the case against Comey “is so ill-conceived that the longer one analyzes it, the worse it gets."

”It is incoherently drafted, such that it fails to fulfill an indictment’s constitutional purpose,"McCarthy adds.

McCarthy, an assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York who led the 1995 terrorism prosecution for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, analyzed the Comey case and came to the same conclusion as his colleagues on all sides of the aisle.

“There is no way the government could prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Senator [Ted] Cruz was asking Comey about someone other than [former FBI deputy director Andrew] McCabe, much less that Comey understood that Cruz was doing so and willfully lied about it," he explains.

"To summarize, there is no provable false-statements case against Comey," McCarthy writes.

After telling Fox News correspondent Molly Line last week that the case should never have been brought in the first place, McCarthy doubled down, saying, “The indictment is inadequately plead and factually without foundation. It should be dismissed."

Calling it a threat to free speech, The Wall Street Journal has asked a judge to toss out President Donald Trump's lawsuit over their blockbuster report tying him to the late convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, reports The Hill.

The lawsuit, in which Trump called the Rupert Murdoch-owned newspaper "third rate" was filed in July and alleged libel against Murdoch and WSJ parent company Dow Jones.

“In an affront to the First Amendment, the President of the United States brought this lawsuit to silence a newspaper for publishing speech that was subsequently proven true by documents released by Congress to the American public," wrote the newspaper's legal team in a Monday filing.

Trump, who claimed that his cartoon contribution to Epstein's 50th birthday book wasn't his and called it a "liberal hoax," has had a hard time distancing himself from the WSJ story.

After the Journal’s story was published, however, the Epstein estate released a copy of the letter to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committe

"This was in the Epstein estate since 2003. That'd be quite the long game to try to to get President Trump if this was indeed a hoax, to plant a birthday card more than two decades ago, and the Journal did a very good job," MSNBC's Jonathan Lemire said.

In its filing to dismiss the lawsuit, WSJ attorneys said that Trump "was trying to suppress journalism that is unflattering to him," saying, “By its very nature, this meritless lawsuit threatens to chill the speech of those who dare to publish content that the President does not like."

Although Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) is far from a Never Trumper, he found some common ground with the Never Trump right when he forcefully called out Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Brendan Carr — accusing him of sounding like a "mafia boss" when he threatened to revoke ABC's broadcast license if they didn't take action against late-night lost Jimmy Kimmel. Cruz argued that attacking the First Amendment in 2025 could could come back to haunt Republicans if a left-wing president comes to power in the future. And many Never Trump conservatives and libertarians responded that while they often disagree with Cruz, he was spot on this time.

But Brian Glenn — Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene's (R-Georgia) boyfriend and chief White House correspondent for Real America's Voice — is, according to Salon's Sophia Tesfaye, encouraging the Trump Administration's attacks on the First Amendment.

In an article published on September 22, Tesfaye stresses that Glenn "essential to" the Trump Administration's "calculated campaign to redefine what press freedom means in America."

"Under this administration," Tesfaye explains, "freedom of the press is a conditional privilege. If you praise the president, you're welcome. If you challenge him, you should expect retaliation. The White House feeds its preferred outlets — Real America's Voice, Right Side Broadcasting, Fox News, and a handful of right-wing influencers — while starving mainstream reporters of access and painting them as subversive threats. The president has encouraged lawsuits against journalists and media outlets for doing their jobs, and threatened to revoke the broadcast licenses of networks he dislikes."

Tesfaye continues, "Across the Potomac at the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has quietly rewritten guidelines on press access. In a matter of months, we've witnessed a quiet conversion of the American press corps into something more akin to state media. Access is granted on the condition of favorability — and no member of the press is more favored than Glenn."

Glenn, the Salon reporter warns, "masquerades as a White House correspondent while serving as a glorified PR agent for the (Trump) Administration."

"Many of Glenn’s questions for Trump are softballs," Tesfaye observes. "They parrot MAGA talking points and inject policy proposals straight from Greene's desk into the official press pool. When Glenn asked the president whether he would eliminate capital gains taxes on home sales — one of Greene's pet policy proposals — it wasn't an inquiry; it was a plant. The president joked about Glenn being Greene's boyfriend and moved on. But the question did its job. The congresswoman's bill made it into the headlines, and it reinforced the unspoken understanding that Glenn is not there to interrogate: He's there to assist. He is propaganda wrapped in a press pass."

After Turning Point USA's Charlie Kirk was fatally shot in Utah, Tesfaye notes, Glenn "pushed Trump to focus his ire on the transgender community." It was also Glenn who "asked Trump about banning Pride flags or dismantling protest encampments."

Tesfaye writes, "This isn’t how a free press functions. Dismantling a 40-year anti-nuclear protest in Lafayette Square after a single question from a friendly reporter? That's suppression. Entertaining the idea of banning Pride flags based on one loaded media prompt? That's soft authoritarianism. Refusing access to reporters who cover government abuses, while elevating influencers who openly promote administration propaganda? That's state capture. And it's all how autocracies operate."

Sofia Tesfaye's full article for Salon is available at this link.

President Donald Trump doubled down on his threats to silence his critics Thursday, telling reporters aboard Air Force One that outlets that give him “bad press” may have their broadcast licenses taken away.

The threat came just one day after his Federal Communications Commission (FCC) director, Brendan Carr, successfully pressured ABC into pulling Jimmy Kimmel’s show from the air by threatening the broadcast licenses of its affiliates over a comment the comedian made about the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk.

“I read someplace that the networks were 97% against me,” Trump told the press gaggle. “I get 97% negative, and yet I won it easily. I won all seven swing states, popular vote, I won everything. And they’re 97% against, they give me wholly bad publicity... I mean, they’re getting a license, I would think maybe their license should be taken away.”

“When you have a network and you have evening shows and all they do is hit Trump, that’s all they do,” the president continued. “If you go back, I guess they haven’t had a conservative on in years or something, somebody said, but when you go back and take a look, all they do is hit Trump. They’re licensed. They’re not allowed to do that.”

He said that the decision would be left up to Carr, who has threatened to take away licenses from networks that air what he called “distorted” content.

It is unclear where Trump’s statistic that networks have been “97% against” him originates, nor the claim that mainstream news networks “haven’t had a conservative on in years.”

But even if it were true, FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez says “the FCC doesn’t have the authority, the ability, or the constitutional right to revoke a license because of content.”

In comments made to Axios Thursday, Gomez—the lone Democrat on the five-member panel—said that the Trump administration was “weaponizing its licensing authority in order to bring broadcasters to heel,” as part of a “campaign of censorship and control.”

National news networks like ABC, CBS, and NBC do not have broadcasting licenses approved by the FCC, nor do cable networks like CNN, MSNBC, or Fox News. The licenses threatened by Carr are for local affiliates, which—despite having the branding of the big networks—are owned by less well-known companies like Nexstar Media Group and the Sinclair Broadcasting Group, both of which pushed in favor of ABC’s decision to ax Kimmel.

Gomez said that with Trump’s intimidation of broadcasters, the “threat is the point.”

“It is a very hard standard to meet to revoke a license, which is why it’s so rarely done, but broadcast license to the broadcasters are extremely valuable,” she said. “And so they don’t want to be dragged before the FCC either in order to answer to an enforcement complaint of some kind or under the threat of possible revocation.”

House Democrats issued an explosive statement attacking Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr, accusing him of a “corrupt abuse of power,” and calling for his resignation. Carr is being perceived by some as having pressured ABC to indefinitely suspend late-night host Jimmy Kimmel over his comments about Charlie Kirk and President Donald Trump.

“Mr. Carr, in an interview on a right-wing podcast on Wednesday, said that Mr. Kimmel’s remarks were part of a ‘concerted effort to lie to the American people,’ and that the F.C.C. was ‘going to have remedies that we can look at,'” The New York Times reported.

“Frankly, when you see stuff like this — I mean, we can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr told podcaster Benny Johnson. “These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the F.C.C. ahead.”

House Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and his leadership team blasted the controversial FCC Chair.

Carr has “engaged in the corrupt abuse of power,” Leader Jeffries alleged in a statement. “He has disgraced the office he holds by bullying ABC, the employer of Jimmy Kimmel, and forcing the company to bend the knee to the Trump administration. FCC Chair Brendan Carr should resign immediately.”

“Donald Trump and the Republican Party’s war on the First Amendment is blatantly inconsistent with American values,” Jeffries added. “The censoring of artists and cancellation of shows is an act of cowardice. It may also be part of a corrupt pay-to-play scheme.”

On Thursday, Carr said he fully supports the right of Sinclair Broadcast Group to ask Kimmel to make a personal donation to Kirk’s family and his foundation.

“I think Sinclair has every right to call for that,” Carr told CNBC on Thursday morning.

“If Sinclair affiliates with Disney, they take Disney contract, they have a contractual relationship with Disney, and that’s between the two of them to figure out, you know, what’s going to make sense to make both of them comfortable with the relationship going forward,” Carr said.

The Walt Disney Company is the parent company of ABC.

“But again,” he continued, “over the years, it would be unthinkable for Sinclair, for Nexstar, for local TV stations to actually say, ‘You know what? You know, we’re not gonna take this particular programming that’s coming out of New York and Hollywood and send it to Pennsylvania and Utah.'”

Carr called “the idea that local broadcasters feel like they can push back,” a “much healthier dynamic for the country right now.”

According to The Independent, “Sinclair Broadcasting Group and Nexstar Communications Group, who operate large numbers of ABC affiliates between them, announced they would pull the show from Wednesday, branding the comments ‘offensive’ and ‘inappropriate’. This led ABC to ‘indefinitely’ suspend production of Jimmy Kimmel Live! in a move that has attracted widespread backlash.”

As The Guardian reported, “Kimmel said ‘many in Maga land are working very hard to capitalize on the murder of Charlie Kirk’ and mocked Vice-President JD Vance’s guest hosting of Kirk’s podcast, saying Trump was ‘fanning the flames’ by attacking people on the left.”

“Within a day, Carr condemned Kimmel’s comments as ‘truly sick‘ and suggested ABC and its parent company, Disney, could face regulatory consequences for spreading misinformation. The FCC chair also argued the network had violated obligations to operate in the ‘public interest’ under federal broadcasting rules.”

Jimmy Kimmel drew the wrath of Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Brendan Carr in response to the late-night host's comments on the murder of MAGA activist and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk and the suspect in his shooting: 22-year-old Utah resident Tyler Robinson.

Kimmel argued that the suspect was part of the MAGA movement, not a leftist as President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance and others on the far right are saying. The late-night host never condoned the killing in any way, but rather, argued that the suspect had a MAGA ideology rather than a leftist ideology.

Disney, in response, suspended Kimmel's show indefinitely.

Now, according to Daily Beast reporter Cameron James, "America's largest ABC affiliate group," Sinclair, is saying that Kimmel must make a "meaningful personal donation" to Kirk's family.

"Media giant Sinclair also wants the comedian to 'issue a direct apology' to Kirk's family, claiming his suspension is not enough," James reports in an article published on September 18. "Kimmel has been suspended in a wave of MAGA anger, disguised as grief and decency, over comments made by the TV star about the murdered right-wing activist. Sinclair also announced they will air a tribute to Kirk in Kimmel’s Friday-night timeslot this week, and are offering the special to all ABC affiliates to air over the weekend."

James adds, "Sinclair's Vice Chairman Jason Smith called Kimmel's comments on Kirk 'inappropriate and deeply insensitive at a critical moment for our country.'"

In an official statement released on September 17, Sinclair said it "will not lift the suspension of 'Jimmy Kimmel Live' on our stations until formal discussions are held with ABC regarding the network's commitment to professionalism and accountability."

Read the full Daily Beast article at this link (subscription required).

Ahead of President Donald Trump's state visit to the UK on Tuesday, British TV network Channel 4, whose motto is "Channel 4 is Altogether Different. After all, what’s weird today is accepted tomorrow," will air an entire night dedicated to Trump's lies.

The visit, according to the New York Times, is the biggest security operation in the nation since King Charles's coronation, and is expected to be met with condemnation and, in some cases, British humor as seen in a Windsor Castle gift shop peddling Trump Epsteint tea cups.

The Channel 4 show, titled "Trump v The Truth," is described as an “unbroken catalogue of over 100 falsehoods, distortions and inaccuracies uttered or written by the US President since taking office in January,” will run over "several hours," and include "text-based fact-checks, which the network said will “offer viewers the truth behind the tweets, speeches and soundbites.”

READ MORE: Republicans discover what some of us already knew — the real danger is to their right

This, following the network's airing of the second part of a three-part documentary, "The Donald Trump Show," which "uses news footage from TV, podcasts and social media to tell the story of the last nine months of the presidency as an unfolding soap opera.”

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That soap opera will fold out in "Trump v The Truth" in the form of brutal fact checks, says Ian Katz, who oversees content for the Channel 4.

“Donald J Trump loves making history. So, on Wednesday Channel 4 will do just that: we’ll show what we believe to be the longest uninterrupted reel of untruths, falsehoods and distortions ever broadcast on television. We hope it will remind viewers how disorientating and dangerous the world becomes when the most powerful man on earth shows little regard for the truth. And if President Trump cares to watch along after the state banquet, he may even clear up a few misconceptions.”

The Wall Street Journal and other media outlets are facing widespread criticism after publishing a false report that the assassin who shot right-wing activist Charlie Kirk in Utah this week had left behind symbols of “transgender ideology” at the scene of the crime.

On Thursday, with the assassin still at large, the Journal published a news update stating that “investigators found ammunition engraved with expressions of transgender and antifascist ideology inside the rifle that authorities believe was used in the fatal shooting of Charlie Kirk.” The report did not identify what these markings were nor the source of the report, instead attributing it to “an internal law enforcement bulletin and a person familiar with the investigation.”

The New York Times reported hours later that the bulletin came from the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), but noted that “a senior law enforcement official with direct knowledge of the investigation cautioned that the report had not been verified by ATF analysts, did not match other summaries of the evidence, and might turn out to have been misread or misinterpreted.”

It was later revealed that the Wall Street Journal‘s source of the initial unconfirmed bulletin was Steven Crowder, another far-right influencer known for his antagonism of transgender people.

On Friday, officials revealed the identity of the suspect, a 22-year-old cisgender white man named Tyler Robinson, and Utah Gov. Spencer Cox (R) described the marked engravings in detail.

As Erin Reed, a transgender journalist who reports on LGBTQ+ rights, explained, “none were ‘transgender’ or ‘LGBTQ’ symbols”:

The bullet that killed Charlie Kirk was engraved with the phrase “notices bulges owo what’s this”—a furry and anime meme that has circulated online for a decade, generally meant as a joke about something unexpected. Three other unfired casings were recovered: “hey fascist! Catch! ↑ → ↓↓↓,” a reference to the Helldivers 2 video game code used to drop the 500kg bomb; “O bella ciao, bella ciao, ciao, ciao,” the Italian anti-fascist folk song; and “If you read this you are gay lmao,” a trolling insult common in meme subcultures. In other words: internet detritus. Not a single engraving had anything to do with “transgender symbols,” let alone the trans community.

Data shows transgender people are no more likely to commit acts of gun violence than any other group. According to data from the Gun Violence Archive from the past decade analyzed by The Trace in July, out of more than 5,300 mass shootings, just four of them were committed by a person who identified as transgender or nonbinary.

Despite this, many right-wing activists online have attempted to foment the narrative of a “transgender violence epidemic,” often preemptively blaming trans people for shootings that turn out to be perpetrated by others.

This narrative has reached the Trump administration, with the Department of Justice reportedly considering a policy to strip transgender people of the right to own firearms following a school shooting in Minneapolis in August, that was carried out by a transgender person.

Following Kirk’s assassination, Donald Trump Jr. said in a Fox News interview, “I frankly can’t name a mass shooting in the last year or two in America that wasn’t committed by a transgender lunatic that’s been pumped up on probably hormones since they were 3-year-olds.”

Even after law enforcement and the Journal had begun to walk back the initial report that “transgender ideology” had influenced Kirk’s murder, Reed wrote, “the damage was already done, with the falsehood ricocheting across the internet.” By this point, numerous media outlets, including the Daily Beast, the New York Post, The Telegraph, and others, had already repeated the claim.

As Reed noted, “conservative influencers flooded social media blaming the killing on transgender people,” in some cases using dehumanizing rhetoric.

One conservative activist, Joey Mannarino, who has nearly 640,000 followers on X, and often interacts with elected Republicans, wrote: “If the person who killed Charlie Kirk was a transgender, there can be no mercy for that species any longer. We’ve already tolerated far too much from those creatures.”

The falsehood even reached Capitol Hill. Even as law enforcement said Thursday it still had no identity for the shooter, Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) told reporters, “It sounds like the shooter was a tranny, or pro-tranny.”

Trump Jr., meanwhile, continued to assert that there was “trans paraphernalia written on the cartridges of this rifle that killed one of my dearest friends in life.” He described being transgender as “an absolute sickness.”

The Journal is now facing harsh criticism for spreading an unverified report that has further fueled the right’s demonization of transgender Americans.

“The FBI and Wall Street Journal doing a ‘whoops, our bad’ after spending a day saying they had evidence it was a trans antifa shooter is so deeply messed up,” wrote Ryan Grim of Drop Site News on X.

Charlotte Clymer, a transgender writer, called it a “truly disgusting week for American journalism.”

“Nearly 48 hours of relentless anti-trans propaganda and news reports over the murder of Charlie Kirk, and all of that for not a single shred of evidence that trans people or trans rights had anything to do with it,” Clymer said. “When do we get a retraction from the Wall Street Journal for erroneously claiming the assassination was related to trans people? When do we get apologies from every journalist who spread that disinformation?”

As criticism has continued to mount, the Journal added an editor’s note to the initial article, acknowledging that Cox “gave no indication that the ammunition included any transgender references.”

Jeet Heer, a columnist for The Nation wrote in response that the Journal’s reporting on this issue was “a scandal.”

“The news section of the Wall Street Journal has tarnished its great reputation,” Heer wrote. “The only way to recover is to appoint a public editor to review this and explain how it happened to readers.”

As disdainful as she is of White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, Salon's Amanda Marcotte acknowledges that Leavitt does her job well — a job Marcotte describes as "chief gaslighter of the nation." Leavitt, according to Marcotte, is a master of spin and deception.

But in an article published on September 12, Marcotte argues that with the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, Leavitt is facing a controversy that she can't spin.

"Leavitt consistently contradicts reality with ease — it's a skill that would cause mental collapse in a person with a conscience," Marcotte explains. "On Tuesday, this knack for playing dumb was on full display when she was asked by a reporter about a telling page from convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein's birthday book, which was revealed earlier this week by the Wall Street Journal."

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Marcotte continues, "The book, compiled by Epstein associate and convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, included a photo of Epstein holding what the Journal described as 'a poster board-sized check for $22,500.' Presented to him by Joel Pashcow, a businessman, Mar-a-Lago member and mutual friend of Epstein and Trump, the fake check was a sort of in-joke, made to appear as if Trump had sent it to Epstein. The caption said it was for a 'fully depreciated' woman that Epstein was selling to Trump."

But as hard as Leavitt tried to "ignore the obvious," Marcotte writes, this is one scandal that isn't going away — no matter how much Leavitt tries to spin new developments.

"Leavitt's efforts to maneuver her way around the implications of the check photo were slick enough, but undermined by two important points," Marcotte stresses. "First, the president's public attitudes about women are in keeping with the misogyny behind Pashcow's attempt at humor. Then, there are the experiences of at least three women who felt victimized in the world inhabited by Trump's close friend Epstein and those in his orbit…. These stories are all different, but they all offer us glimpses of the world Pashcow was referring to with his joke about Trump purchasing a 'depreciated' woman from Epstein…. When Karoline Leavitt gets behind the podium in the Brady Briefing Room and excuses, lies or otherwise deflects inquiry into Trump's association with Epstein, she's contributing to a system that allows women and girls to be abused every day without consequence."

Marcotte adds, "It's why her unblinking shamelessness is so unnerving. On some level, no matter what she tells herself at night, she is participating in the cover-up of details related to a reported sex trafficking ring. How does she even begin to sleep?"

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Amanda Marcotte's full article for Salon is available at this link.