Media Elitists Trash Trump’s SOTU, Fearmonger Over Iran

Geoffrey Dickens
March 7th, 2026 8:00 AM

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This past month, saw the likes of MS NOW’s Joe Scarborough trash the “unrelenting bigotry” in Donald Trump’s State of the Union address, while CBS’s Ed O’Keefe inexplicably questioned when anybody has called the President “racist?”

Media elitists like MS NOW’s Chris Hayes compared bombing Iran to 9/11 while the Washington Post eulogized Ayatollah Khamenei as a man with an “easy smile” and love of “poetry.”

The Hollywood left got in their shots, too. ABC late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel griped that Trump’s “angry” State of the Union speech sounded like a “Christmas message from the Grinch.” Kimmel also claimed Republicans were protecting pedophiles and rapists while attacking illegal aliens who are “raising your children.”

The following are just a few of the most obnoxious outbursts from leftist journalists and celebrities over the last month: 

 

Joe Scarborough Trashes Trump’s “Unrelenting Bigotry”

 

 

“There are a couple things that I thought were extraordinary that you wouldn’t see in other State of the Unions, unless they were Donald Trump’s. The first, of course, was just the unrelenting bigotry, the lies, the attacking of one group specifically, the Somalis, Somali-Americans. That’s the sort of thing that, oh, you know, I’m not going to talk about fascism or Nazism. You just read history and see what type of regimes will pick one or two groups and blame all of America’s ills on those groups.”
— Host Joe Scarborough on MS NOW’s Morning Joe, February 25.

 

Clueless Ed O’Keefe: When Has Anybody Called Trump Racist?

 

 

CBS senior White House correspondent Ed O’Keefe: “Today in his statement about Jesse Jackson, the President said, ‘Despite the fact that I’m falsely and consistently called a racist by the scoundrels and lunatics on the radical left, Democrats all, it was always my pleasure to help Jesse along the way.’ Where or when does the President believe he’s been falsely called racist?”
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt: “You’re kidding, right?”
O’Keefe: “No.” 
— White House Press Briefing, February 18.   

 

Jonathan Capehart Compares Minnesota Protestors to the Underground Railroad

 

 

“In Northfield, Minnesota, they were dealing with ICE. And they were dealing with ICE in a very quiet way, not the whistles and the horns, but text chains, people who were observing, taking license plates, letting people know. I went to do something on Friday and the person who picked me up said—apologized for the vehicle and then said to me, I was—quote—‘underground railroading food all night.’”
— MS NOW host and PBS contributor Jonathan Capehart on PBS’s News Hour, February 13. 

 

On PBS: Trump Administration to Employ “Jim Crow” Strategy 

 

 

Host Geoff Bennett: “This is a multifront strategy, legal pressure, DOJ demands, raids at the Fulton County election office. How do you see it?”
Boston Globe columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr: “That’s exactly right. And we can use another historic analogy, which is during Jim Crow, the fact that police were often sent around polling stations in order to discourage people of color from casting votes, even though the Constitution was amended to specifically protect that right. The law won’t protect you if you don’t have government that is backing it up and actually flouting it. So all of this is from playbooks from the darkest times in our history.”
— PBS’s News Hour, February 6. 

 

Chris Hayes Compares Trump Bombing Iran to 9/11 

 

 

“Gets far too easy to wave away the loss of human life. It’s priced in. It’s the cost of doing business. Remember, there was one instance in my lifetime when we in America experienced death from above. September 11th, 2001….For us, that kind of violence is an anomaly. It is a once-in-a-lifetime tragedy. For other people, in other countries, the terror is commonplace because, in part, of the kinds of war of aggression that Donald Trump just started.”
— Host Chris Hayes on MS NOW’s All In With Chris Hayes, March 2. 

 

PBS’s Reza Sayah: “A Bleak, Grim and Scary Day” for “People of Iran”

“Yes, this was a bleak, grim, and scary day for the people of Iran, a population that has seen a lot of adversity over these past five decades, and this time the adversity they're facing was an attack by the world’s leading superpower, the United States of America and the regional power Israel, both of them nuclear powers, mind you.”
— Correspondent Reza Sayah on PBS’s News Hour, March 2. 

 

Washington Post Touts Khamenei as Man With an “Easy Smile” and Love of “Poetry”

“With his bushy white beard and easy smile, Ayatollah Khamenei cut a more avuncular figure in public than his perpetually scowling but much more revered mentor, and he was known to be fond of Persian poetry and classic Western novels, especially Victor Hugo’s ‘Les Misérables.’...Some Iranians who knew Ayatollah Khamenei before he became supreme leader described him as a ‘closet moderate.’..After Trump lost the 2020 election, Ayatollah Khamenei said its chaotic aftermath, marked by Trump’s baseless fraud claims, illustrated ‘the ugly face of liberal democracy’ in the United States and made clear the country’s ‘definite political, civil [and] moral decline.’
— Washington Post obituary for Ayatollah Khamenei, February 28. 

 

Trump Has “Strongman Dictatorial Impulses,” Shows No Interest in “Promoting Democracy” 

“We are talking about a President who is presenting himself as a liberator of, you know, the Iranian people, who himself is an authoritarian, who himself has these strongman dictatorial impulses, who has shown no interest in, you know, promoting democracy or freedom, who rightly lambastes Iran for slaughtering innocent protesters on the streets of Tehran and calling them terrorists who deserve to, you know, be killed for their actions; but then who uses the exact same rhetoric when it comes to his own people in places like Minnesota.”
— Former CNN contributor Reza Aslan on MS NOW’s Iran live coverage, March 1.

 

Jen Psaki Dismisses SOTU Honorees as “Circus Entertainer Part”

 

 

“Trump decided to double down on things that are hugely unpopular. I mean, to your point, it was like a three-part speech. There was the gross, violent pornography part of it. There was the circus entertainer part, where he was bringing out unrelated people and vignettes. And then there was a part that was policy-ish.”
— Host Jen Psaki on MS NOW’s coverage of the State of the Union address, February 24.

 

Morning Joe Attacks ICE

Co-host Joe Scarborough: “America - this is no place, as the judge said, federal judge said, for the secret police. This is no place for masked men in unmarked cars without license plates grabbing people off the streets. That seems to me to invite illegal and unlawful behavior from those who may not be members of the secret police for the federal government. But the fact that we have a secret police in the United States of America, I’m sorry, I’ve been around long enough to be able to say this freely, I agree with most Americans. That is un-American, isn’t it?...Terrorize communities, create distrust, and actually gun down Americans in the street. And gut funding for Medicaid, gut funding for our grandparents, gut funding for children, gut funding-”
Co-host Mika Brzezinski: “And they’re building the internment camps.”
— MS NOW’s Morning Joe, February 23.

 

David Brooks: Donald Trump is “Forcing Dehumanization”

 

 

“We travel around the country. We meet people trying to heal America, trying to build conversations. And it’s just frustrating that all these people are doing this work around the country at the same time, day by day, there’s a shredding from the top. And so there’s these forces of humanization that are trying to have a decent country, and then the shredding from the top is just a constant battle of forcing dehumanization.”
— New York Times columnist/PBS contributor David Brooks on PBS’s News Hour, February 20.

 

Kathleen Parker: Trump Has “Taken a Page” from Hitler’s Mein Kampf

“He’s [Donald Trump] still clinging again to the 2020 — we know it was a fully regular election he lost. And he can’t let it go because I think he’s taken a page from Mein Kampf, frankly, you know, the saying that if you say — tell a big lie often enough and repeat it, then people will believe it.”
— Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker on PBS’s News Hour, February 6. 

 

Don Lemon: “Our Democracy Can Be Gone In a Second” Under Trump 

“We are watching an administration right now that treats the Constitution not as a covenant but as an inconvenience. That they don’t have to abide by. ‘This is inconvenient and this is getting in our way.’ It’s authoritarianism and we need to be careful because the very little that’s left in our democracy can be gone in a second – if it’s not too late already.”
— Former CNN anchor Don Lemon’s speech at the Human Rights Campaign dinner, February 7.

 

Keith Olbermann: Trump is the “John Wayne Gacy of the Epstein Scandal”

 

 

“For Trump, this is no longer a question of malfeasance or graft or theft or impeachment. It is a question of how many dozens of crimes he is guilty of. On Epstein, on the Epstein cover-up alone. He is the Boss Tweed of the Epstein scandal. He is the Bernie Madoff of the Epstein scandal. He is the John Wayne Gacy of the Epstein scandal!”
— Former MSNBC/ESPN host Keith Olbermann on his Countdown podcast, February 26.

 

ABC’s David Muir: Trump Is Going to Destroy the Planet and Kill You

 

 

“Tonight, President Trump has repealed U.S. power to regulate climate in this country. The president officially rejecting the science. And what this now clears the way for. Critics tonight arguing this is not only dangerous for the environment but for your health.”
— Anchor David Muir on ABC’s World News Tonight, February 12.  

 

CBS Reporter Injects Climate Propaganda into the Nation’s Founding

 

 

Correspondent David Schecter: “So, it turns out, around the time Washington looked out on the icy Delaware, there were two important pictures coming into focus: One, the story of America; the other, the beginnings of climate change. And both continue to shape our world. I kind of like to think about George Washington showing back up in 2026 and saying-”
Eric Steig, glaciologist: “What have you done?”
Schecter: “This is pretty different!”
— CBS Sunday Morning, February 15.  

 

Jimmy Kimmel: Trump’s “Angry Speech” Like a “Christmas Message From the Grinch”

 

 

“It was an angry speech. The theme of tonight’s speech was all foreigners are murderers….He bragged about ending DEI. He bragged about kicking two million people off food stamps. It was like a Christmas message from the Grinch. Trump applauded the efforts of a World War II vet who liberated an internment camp, at the same time he is building new ones here in the United States.”
— Jimmy Kimmel on ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live!, February 24.

 

Republicans Are Protecting “Pedophiles” and “Rapists,” While Attacking Illegals Who Are “Raising Your Children”

 

 

Rep. Lisa McClain: “And you know what the Democrats want to do? Let’s release them into your communities. And let’s celebrate the criminals. Let’s villainize the ICE agents and celebrate the people who are raping your children.”
Host Jimmy Kimmel: “I think she meant to say raising your children? I mean, listen, could you imagine how ignorant these people are screaming about pedophiles and rapists while members of their own party seem to be doing everything they can to protect the pedophiles and the rapists in the Epstein files.”
— ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live!, February 10. 

 

Morgan Freeman: Trump Reminds Me of Nazi “Brownshirts,” He’s Leading Us “Down a Sh*thole”

 

 

“We have somebody sitting in the White House who’s leading us down a shit hole….I’m constantly reminded of Germany in 1935, what was happening there, the Brownshirts, those people that are marching through, particularly Berlin, rounding up people and putting them in box cars and sending them off. Now, this administration wants to build large detention centers and — for what?”
— Actor Morgan Freeman on MS NOW’s The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, February 26. 

 

Robert De Niro: How Can You “Love Our Country” Now? 

 

 

“Tragically, we’re now in a country of by and for a handful of dishonest, greedy, and cruel authoritarians. So - love our country? Let me ask you: Can you love a country where our neighbors are shot down in the streets by masked government thugs? Can you love a country that denies healthcare for tens of millions of our fellow citizens? Can you love a country that ends contributions to sick and starving people around the world, causing hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths, many of them innocent children?...The bottom line is that I feel betrayed by my country.”
— Actor Robert De Niro at Defiance.org’s “State of the Swamp” event, February 24.

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