Anti-Trumpism Is Driving the Media to Cheer Hostile Powers

By Becket Adams

Sunday, August 30, 2026

 

There’s a great scene in the 1991 film The Rocketeer in which the seemingly amoral gangster Eddie Valentine (Paul Sorvino) turns on the Hollywood star Neville Sinclair (Timothy Dalton) after learning the actor is a Nazi spy.

 

“I may not make an honest buck, but I’m a hundred percent American,” Sorvino growls, looking like an angry English bulldog. “And I don’t work for no two-bit Nazi.”

 

It was a rousing scene when the film debuted and for many years afterward, not least because it affirmed the noble belief that self-interest, like politics, stops at the water’s edge.

 

Today, Valentine’s pang of conscience feels quaint. This is because we now live in an era of total partisan warfare, worse than anything in the past several decades save for perhaps the quasi-religious political activism of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

 

It’s nothing new for the American commentariat to look overseas and compare the U.S. unfavorably, especially when the commentariat’s team is out of power. But in years past, its praise for foreign regimes would be at least somewhat moderated, couched in enough “to be sures” to bury a small town. This is no longer the case. For much of the pundit class, there is now only the party; there is only the movement. Everything else is an asset or an obstacle, depending on the moment. Even one’s own country.

 

This sad fact revealed itself again last weekend, when MS NOW’s Lawrence O’Donnell promoted Iranian state propaganda at the expense of the White House.

 

It’s the latest example of one of the more disheartening trends of the Trump era: the news and entertainment industries’ eagerness to elevate, normalize, and even aggrandize some of the world’s worst regimes, so long as doing so hurts the opposition.

 

The O’Donnell episode began amid the White House’s aimless war with Iran, when Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warned that the United States was “entering the endgame” and that “at dawn begins an economic D-Day” of crippling sanctions. Asked why he would not impose the sanctions at once, Bessent said, “Why would I want to blow up the global financial system?”

 

Handlers for Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, speaker of Iran’s parliament, replied on social media: “Him: ‘Economic D-Day.’ Also him, five seconds later: ‘[lol] why would I want to blow up the global financial system?’ Sir, this ain’t Normandy, this is improv night and you forgot your own script.” The post ended with a clown emoji.

 

O’Donnell didn’t treat the post as vapid bluster meant to needle the White House, nor did he notice the sloppiness of a metaphor involving a script at “improv night.” Rather, he was awed by its supposed moxie and tone; little surprise from a man partly responsible for what passed as dialogue on The West Wing.

 

“The most striking response to Scott Bessent’s childish threat came from the speaker of Iran’s parliament who taught Natalie Harp and Donald Trump a thing or two today about devastatingly effective social media posting,” O’Donnell gushed, “exhibiting a fluency in American culture that no one in the Trump White House has with Iranian culture.”

 

Intense partisan hatred is as old as the concept of governance, but O’Donnell’s gripes with the president should pale beside an Iranian regime that is worse by every measure.

 

“Should” being the operative word.

 

The cable anchor then turned the discussion over to former Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes, who once quipped that the idiots in the news media who take him at his word “literally know nothing.”

 

Truer words were never spoken.

 

Sadly, O’Donnell is not alone in his hunger to elevate anything anti-Republican, even a medieval death cult. He is merely one sample of that larger hyperpartisan sickness. And there are many samples from which to choose, including the media’s fawning over Kim Yo Jong, sister of Kim Jong-un, at the 2018 Winter Olympics merely because she gave Vice President Mike Pence the side-eye. There are also the heroic eulogies published after the death of the Iranian terrorist mastermind Qasem Soleimani.

 

But none is so egregious as the press’s mindless embrace of Chinese and Russian Covid-era propaganda.

 

China claimed in early April 2020 that, for the first time since January of that year, it had “no new coronavirus deaths.”

 

We were asked to believe that China, a country of 1.4 billion people, where the virus originated, where the Chinese Communist Party allowed international travel despite knowing the risks, and where the party worked feverishly to cover up the pandemic’s origins, going so far as to jail potential whistleblowers, went from an already questionable peak of 150 deaths in a single February day to none by early April.

 

A more responsible press would have questioned China’s alleged success. We are not so lucky as to have such a press. Instead, reporters and pundits in the U.S. swallowed the CCP’s slop whole, many of them marveling at China’s supposed super-governance while bemoaning the Trump administration’s incompetence.

 

“China has reacted to the outbreak of coronavirus in Italy by sending aid,” mused The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum. “The U.S. has reacted by suspending flights. Who is the superpower?”

 

At NBC News, then-anchor Chuck Todd asked, “How uncomfortable is it that perhaps China’s authoritarian ways did prevent this?”

 

The question made no sense. “China’s authoritarian ways” had not prevented the pandemic in the first place.

 

That same year, CNN published a report that was remarkably similar in spirit and tone to a CCP press release that praised the People’s Liberation Army Navy’s efforts to contain the coronavirus and contrasted them, unfavorably, with the U.S. Navy’s.

 

There was a lot of this to go around: the ludicrous idea that China was a model of responsible governance.

 

“China Bought the West Time. The West Squandered It,” read a New York Times opinion headline published in March 2020.

 

Chinese authorities were aware of the virus in December 2019, when it first appeared in Wuhan. Instead of taking precautions and sharing information and warnings, the Chinese government engaged in a massive cover-up, hoping to escape culpability for the spread of a virus that has so far killed some 7 million people worldwide. The CCP suppressed relevant information and arrested medical professionals who tried to warn that a SARS-like illness was spreading.

 

“This isn’t blanket praise for an authoritarian party-state,” Guardian columnist Bhaskar Sunkara said in 2020, “but thank God this pandemic started in a country with a strong state that took serious public health measures. Imagine if China was run by the GOP instead of the CCP.”

 

That is blanket praise.

 

CNN also reported uncritically in March 2020 on Russia’s claim that its efforts against the outbreak had been largely successful.

 

“Does Russia have coronavirus under control?” the network asked in a headline. “According to information released by Russian officials, Putin’s strategy seems to have worked.”

 

It is even worse — if only slightly — than when the Heritage Foundation sought to tear down President Obama by building up Russian strongman Vladimir Putin.

 

The willingness to prop up hostile regimes also speaks to a bigger problem: Partisan opposition today is not merely political. It’s cultural and civilizational. These people are so untethered that they will root against themselves and elevate those who want them dead so long as it displaces a stateside political opponent. They’ll even cheer brutal theocratic dictatorships and communist regimes with a record of human-rights violations Trump could hardly match even if he devoted every remaining minute in office to the endeavor.

 

It’s all rather ironic, given how much faux-patriotic chest-beating accompanied the ludicrous, multi-year “Russian collusion” saga that went nowhere.

 

It’s blind partisanship, it’s rank ignorance, and it’s all deeply destructive.