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While Donald Trump recently instituted and paused hefty tariffs, sparking a trade war and chaos in financial markets, most of the country’s conservative media either applauded the US president or critiqued the policy but not the person behind it, according to journalists and observers of conservative media.
Meanwhile, economists, business leaders, Democrats and even some Republicans warned that the tariffs, which prompted the largest American stock market drop since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, could cause a recession.
“News is what impacts the greatest number of people,” like tariffs and “the evaporation of wealth and the ripple effect on not just the US economy, but the global economy”, said Howard Polskin, president of The Righting, a newsletter and website that monitors conservative media. “By any stretch of imagination, that should be a lead story.”
But the chaos of last week posed a serious challenge to many aspects of rightwing US media, which often acts as a largely unquestioning cheerleader for Trump and his Maga movement. The story was sometimes played down, sometimes cheered but rarely seriously questioned – even amid warnings of price rises, recession and cratering investments, especially precious 401(k) retirement accounts.
The most popular conservative news source in the United States is Fox News, which has a much larger audience than CNN and the leftwing MSNBC network. Its hosts, such as Sean Hannity and Jesse Watters, consistently praise Trump and bolster his inaccurate claims.
But Fox News has faced new competition from Newsmax and One American News Network (OANN), networks that positioned themselves as even more reliable Trump supporters. The Wall Street Journal, which has the same owner as Fox News, features a right-leaning opinion section, but also has done lengthy investigations into Trump and Joe Biden and is a favorite among people in the financial sector.
Rightwing commentators such as Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro also command a large audience through podcasts and social media.
After Trump declared 2 April “liberation day” and announced that the country would on 5 April institute a 10% universal tariff on all imported goods and on 9 April start “reciprocal tariffs” on some of its largest trading partners, including a 34% tariff on imports from China and a 20% tariff on goods from the European Union, Hannity described it as “a day that will be remembered as a turning point and the start, I hope for every American, of a new golden age”.
China retaliated with a 34% tariff. Global stock markets fell sharply; the Dow Jones industrial average declined more than 2,000 points over the next two days.
Economists and leaders of financial institutions said that the tariffs increased the likelihood of a recession and inflation. Most Republican lawmakers stood behind the president; a minority, like Senators Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, expressed opposition and said the tariffs amounted to a tax increase for Americans.
While Fox Business, a sibling network, had guests who criticized the tariffs, Fox News personalities told viewers nervous about their investments that everything would work out well. A Fox News spokesperson did not respond to the Guardian’s requests for an interview.
“I don’t really care about my 401(k) today,” Jeanine Pirro said on 3 April on the show The Five. “We’ve got to have manufacturing in this country … and Donald Trump is the only one who could do it because he’s got the biggest consumer base in the world. He’s not afraid of anybody.”
Despite the market upheaval, the Fox News commentators were “in too deep” to break with Trump, said Matt Gertz, a senior fellow at Media Matters for America, a leftwing advocacy group.
“They have, for nearly a decade now, sold their audience on the sense that Donald Trump would be a good president,” Gertz said 7 April. “Now he is single-handedly causing a worldwide market collapse,” but “they can’t abandon him”.
Other conservative news organizations opted to focus on other issues. At one point on 8 April, the only story on tariffs on the OANN frontpage concerned the former speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi and her comments on tariffs in 1996.
The network did interview Arthur Laffer, a conservative economist who Trump awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Laffer said that if Trump kept the tariffs, he didn’t see how the country could avoid a recession, but he still “could not think of one person on Earth that I would prefer more to be president”.
On 9 April at Newsmax, the headline of their main story read, “Trump: Tariffs Bring in $2 Billion a Day.”
The actual number this month was about $200m, Reuters reported.
“A lot of times it feels more like propaganda,” Polskin said of the cable networks’ coverage. “I find it all extremely alarming, the stock market and that consumers of rightwing media could be misled so egregiously.”
Newsmax did not respond to the Guardian’s request for an interview.
There are exceptions in the conservative media sphere. The Journal has criticized Trump and his tariff policy.
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“Trump Owns the Economy Now. He can try to blame the Fed, but the tariff blunder is his alone,” was the headline of a recent editorial.
Their editorial pages have been “characterized through the years as sort of the bastion of conservatism”, said Rick Edmonds, media business analyst for the Poynter Institute. “They are not at all sympathetic to the tariff actions.”
Shapiro, the rightwing pundit and a founder of the Daily Wire, devoted much of his podcasts after “liberation day” to scrutinizing the tariffs and questioned whether they could actually bring manufacturers back to the United States.
But Shapiro reassured listeners that he supported the president.
“What exactly is this designed to do?” Shapiro said of the tariffs during a 3 April episode of his podcast. “It is predicated on a bad idea of how international trade works. I’ve said this a thousand times: this is not coming from a place of I want Trump to fail.”
Shapiro called for Trump to fire Peter Navarro, the White House trade adviser who reportedly shaped the tariffs strategy. But, of course, it was Trump who instituted them.
“In general, the rightwing media, they are like Republican politicians. They don’t want to cross Trump,” Edmonds said.
Still, Aaron Rupar, a journalist who tracks speeches and interviews Trump and his officials give to conservative media, thought their coverage of the tariffs was “a little more honest” than their coverage of events like the January 6 attack on the Capitol or the trials Trump faced when he was out of office.
“With financial data, it’s a little harder to gaslight people,” he said.
Ultimately, hours after the reciprocal tariffs took effect, Trump announced a 90-day pause on them, except for China, whose tariff he increased to 125%.
“Many of you in the media clearly missed The Art of the Deal,” the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said afterwards, referring to Trump’s book. “You clearly failed to see what President Trump is doing here.”
A day later, with stocks still down significantly from before “liberation day”, Ainsley Earhardt, a Fox News host, reiterated Leavitt’s point.
“This is the art of the deal,” she said. “This shows how strong our president is.”