Fox News Turns Full Propaganda With Trump Monument Proposal

Fox News is trying to make adding Donald Trump to Mount Rushmore happen.

Following a MAGA push over the weekend to change the national monument, the hosts of Fox News’s Outnumbered praised the idea on Monday morning, with Harris Faulkner claiming “a growing number of conservatives are pushing to add Trump to the legendary monument.”

Contributor Jason Chaffetz, a former member of Congress, expressed his support for Trump being added to the South Dakota landmark.

“Hey, if there’s room up there I think it’d be great,” Chaffetz said. “I think what Donald Trump has done—and is in the process of doing—is transforming the United States of America and putting America first. And I think America loves it, and I think there’s a great case for it.”

Trump reportedly floated the idea of having his face added to the mountain during his first term in 2020, even asking South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem (now his DHS secretary) about the possibility. Nothing came of it except for Noem gifting Trump an $1,100 bust of the monument with his face on it that same year.

This time around, the idea has gotten some attention on the right thanks to Trump’s former aide, conservative pundit Corey Lewandowski, who raised the idea on fellow right-wing pundit Benny Johnson’s show on Friday, suggesting a MAGA legislator could get the ball rolling. Representative Anna Paulina Luna then chimed in on X to say that she planned to introduce legislation to get Trump’s mug on the monument.

Leaving aside the absurdity of the idea, it’s not feasible—the National Park Service said in 2020 that there is no secure space on the mountain. Not to mention that any attempt would be quite an expense for the American taxpayer for an administration pledging to increase “government efficiency.”

Realizing this, other Fox personalities on Outnumbered floated changing the name of Dulles International Airport to Trump International Airport instead, likening it to Ronald Reagan National Airport in the D.C. metro area. That idea was floated last year by Republicans in Congress, only to be met with a tongue-in-cheek response from House Democrats to instead name a federal prison after the convicted felon president.

Now that Republicans have control of both houses of Congress with Trump in office, though, Trump will likely have his name or face on something before he leaves office. Hopefully, it’s something akin to the poor excuse for a state park that bears his name.

A Trump-aligned effort to make the Senate vote to confirm Tulsi Gabbard public could be what pushes the controversial nominee over the finish line.

Gabbard is the forty-seventh president’s pick for director of national intelligence, but in order to actually get the job, she’ll need the support of every single Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee—and it appears that she currently does not have the votes.

“I think it remains to be seen,” Republican Senator John Cornyn, an Intelligence Committee member, told The Hill of Gabbard’s odds. “I think the jury’s still out.”

The committee has a 9-8 split, with Republicans holding the majority. That means that just one Republican voting against Gabbard could compromise her nomination, should Democrats uniformly vote against her.

But a MAGA coalition in the Senate is trying to turn the traditionally closed vote into a public one in order to pressure Republicans on the committee from voting against Trump’s nominee, Politico reported Monday.

Doing so would break Intelligence Committee procedure: “While panel rules allow for the release of a vote tally, they do not allow for a public roll call of how each member voted. Members are free to disclose their votes if they wish,” an unidentified source familiar with the committee told Politico.

According to the outlet, Gabbard’s allies hope that forcing a public vote could scare any reticent Republicans into line. When a few Republican senators expressed concerns about Pete Hegseth, who was sworn in over the weekend as secretary of defense, MAGA fans and Elon Musk threatened to primary them in the 2026 midterms.

Gabbard is scheduled to participate in open and closed hearings before the committee on Thursday.

So far, Maine Senator Susan Collins has expressed frustration with Gabbard’s criticism of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allows intelligence officials to conduct surveillance operations on foreign targets and Americans without a warrant.

“There are several questions I want to follow up on in the hearing,” Collins told The Hill, noting that she wants to hear Gabbard’s “unpracticed responses.”

Gabbard, a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate turned MAGA acolyte, has also gotten heat from GOP lawmakers for her relationship with fallen Syrian dictator Bashar Al Assad, as well as her apparent affiliation with Russian media, her propensity for amplifying Russian propaganda, and spreading conspiracy theories.

In December, the editor in chief of the Russian state-controlled broadcaster RT said that Gabbard was one of the friendly faces in Trump’s proposed Cabinet that brought the Kremlin “lots of joy.”

If confirmed, Gabbard would be the first director of national intelligence to have never held any senior government roles. For reference on her relative lack of experience: Gabbard would replace Avril Haines, the first woman to serve in the role. Haines held top national security and intelligence positions before being appointed by President Joe Biden to the role, including serving as deputy national security adviser and deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency during the Obama administration.

Senate Republicans are wary of Tulsi Gabbard, putting her confirmation as director of national intelligence in jeopardy.

The former Hawaii congresswoman’s confirmation hearings are scheduled for this week, along with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s for secretary of health and human services, but Gabbard seems to be facing more opposition from the GOP, The Hill reports.

“I think it remains to be seen,” said Senator John Cornyn, a Republican member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, regarding whether the committee will back Gabbard. “I think the jury’s still out.”

Another Republican senator told The Hill that Gabbard “has a path [that] continues to narrow.”

The committee is split 9–8 between Republicans and Democrats, meaning that Gabbard can’t lose a single GOP vote. Republican Senator Susan Collins is a member of the committee, and she was one of the three Republicans who voted against Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense, necessitating a tiebreaker vote from Vice President JD Vance.

Collins said she was concerned about Gabbard’s stance on Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allows foreign targets to be surveilled without a warrant. As a member of the House in 2020, Gabbard proposed repealing the program, and has voted against reauthorizing it.

Gabbard claims to have changed her position recently, telling Punchbowl News that Section 702 is “crucial” and “must be safeguarded to protect our nation while ensuring the civil liberties of Americans.” But Collins isn’t Gabbard’s only GOP skeptic on the committee. Senator Todd Young has been described as being a “problem” for Gabbard by two GOP aides, according to The Hill.

“Those members are going to have a really hard time getting to ‘yes,’” said one of the aides. An aide also said that Senator Mitch McConnell, who was a “no” vote on Hegseth, is telling other Republicans that he is “adamantly” opposed to Gabbard’s appointment.

Even if Gabbard sways enough skeptics on the Intelligence Committee, she could face broader GOP opposition in the full Senate over her policy views, as well as her sympathies toward Russia and ousted Syrian President Bashar Al Assad. The question is whether that is enough to sink her nomination.

Forget about the price of eggs—Trump still wants to build the United States its own “iron dome.”

The president is set to sign an executive order that would begin the production of a “next generation” missile defense shield that would envelop the entire country.

“The order calls for an ‘Iron Dome’ for an America, borrowing the name of the short-range Israeli missile defense system that for years has been used to intercept launches from Gaza. The U.S. provided billions of dollars in funding to Iron Dome, and the US Army has its own system,” White House reporter Alayna Treene wrote on X.

The Israeli Iron Dome was a collaboration between Israel’s Rafael Advanced Defense Systems and U.S. weapons manufacturer Raytheon that came online in 2011. It is not a literal iron dome but a system of “interceptor missiles” that can shoot down enemy missiles before they reach their targets

Even still, it’s hard to imagine a system that could do the same for the entirety of the continental U.S., as Trump has suggested multiple times before today.

“We will build a great iron dome over our country, a dome like has never seen before, a state-of-the-art missile defense shield that will be entirely built in America,” Trump said at a Wisconsin campaign rally last summer. “We are going to build the greatest dome of them all. You see what happened in Israel, they shot 3000 missiles and they knocked down almost all of them … we are entitled to that also, you know and it was our idea, by the way.”

The iron dome was also the eighth point of the first part of his campaign platform, as the president promised to “BUILD A GREAT IRON DOME MISSILE DEFENSE SHIELD OVER OUR ENTIRE COUNTRY—ALL MADE IN AMERICA.”

National security analyst Joseph Cirincione has been highly skeptical since the beginning of Trump’s iron dome fantasy.

“[The] Iron Dome is designed to intercept short-range rockets, not intercontinental ballistic missiles. Each Iron Dome system can defend an area of roughly 150 square miles,” Cirincione wrote for the Defense One website last summer. “We would need to deploy more than 24,700 Iron Dome batteries to defend the 3.7 million square miles of the continental United States. At $100 million per battery, that would be approximately $2,470,000,000,000.”

Not only would this iron dome be a waste of time and effort, it would also cost three times more than America’s entire military budget for 2025.

Defending America’s police force is apparently no longer a priority for Republican leadership.

Five years after the party took a hard pro-police stance in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, Vice President JD Vance believes it’s okay to support individuals who beat and kill cops, so long as they do so in support of Donald Trump.

While listening to a list of January 6 offenders who had harmed police officers while invading the U.S. Capitol, Vance said he continued to “stand by” the decision to grant the violent attackers full, complete, and unconditional pardons.

“If you stand with law enforcement, how can you call these people unjustly imprisoned?” asked CBS’s Margaret Brennan on Sunday.

“Margaret, you’re separating—there’s an important issue here,” Vance said. “There’s what the people actually did on January the 6th, and we’re not saying everybody did everything perfectly, and then what did Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice do in unjustly prosecuting well over 1,000 Americans in a way that was politically motivated?”

“Is violence like that against a police officer ever justified?” pressed Brennan.

“Violence against a police officer is not justified but that does not mean that you should have Merrick Garland’s weaponized Department of Justice expose you to incredibly unfair process, to denial of constitutional rights, and frankly, to a double standard that was not applied to many people,” Vance responded.

“The pardon power is not just for people who are angels or people who are perfect. And of course, we love our law enforcement and want people to be peaceful, with everybody, but especially with our good cops. That’s a separate issue from what Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice did. We rectified a wrong, and I stand by it.”

Last week, the country’s most powerful police union torched Donald Trump for pardoning more than 1,500 people in connection with the January 6 riot, including individuals who attacked Capitol Police as they broke into the Capitol building.

“The [International Association of Chiefs of Police] and FOP are deeply discouraged by the recent pardons and commutations granted by both the Biden and Trump Administrations to individuals convicted of killing or assaulting law enforcement officers,” the Fraternal Order of Police said in a statement. “The IACP and FOP firmly believe that those convicted of such crimes should serve their full sentences. Crimes against law enforcement are not just attacks on individuals or public safety—they are attacks on society and undermine the rule of law. Allowing those convicted of these crimes to be released early diminishes accountability and devalues the sacrifices made by courageous law enforcement officers and their families.”

The both-sides statement was a humbling turnaround for the fraternal order, which endorsed Trump in the 2024 presidential election. Moments after the pardons were announced, the order initially reacted with “no statement” statement.

Even some of the people who raided the U.S. Capitol and received pardons do not believe they deserve the nation’s forgiveness. Former MAGA granny Pamela Hemphill, 71, rejected Trump’s offer of clemency last week after serving 60 days in jail on a misdemeanor charge for her role in the insurrection. In an interview with NPR on Thursday, Hemphill claimed that accepting the pardon “would be a slap in the face to the Capitol police officers, to the rule of law, to our whole nation.”

“You know, I broke the law that day—period, black and white. I’m not a victim. I’m a volunteer,” Hemphill said. “And I don’t want to be a part of them trying to rewrite history what really happened that day. So if I took a pardon, I’m saying, yeah, it’s OK what I did that day. No, it was not OK.”