Fox News Isolated Maria Bartiromo for Weeks Before Firing Her

New details from Maria Bartiromo’s sudden firing from Fox News reveal internal upheaval that resulted in her being completely isolated at work, as her own staff was banned from speaking to her and her primary producer was fired alongside her. 

Puck News’s Dylan Byers reported that executive producer Patrick Ignozzi was fired from Bartiromo’s show on Thursday, following her out the door after she was sent packing for “betraying” Fox News by offering the Trump administration information on how the network was covering the president. 

On top of that, Fox News kept the Mornings with Maria host isolated from her colleagues for weeks, a move stemming from issues over the $787.5 million settlement Fox News was ordered to pay to Dominion Voting Systems in 2023 due to their false claims of election fraud in 2020.  

“In order to talk to her, you had to go to management,” an anonymous source told Mediate. “[That’s how we] knew something was up.… Even her own staff had to go through management.… People were freaking out.” The source also noted that Bartiromo wasn’t even reachable over the phone, being completely iced out from the Fox News work environment. 

It’s unclear where Bartiromo will find herself next. 

Donald Trump’s administration has made a game of the president’s deadly crackdown on immigrants.

The White House launched a new arcade website Thursday that hosts a series of retro-style video games touting the administration’s policy priorities—including one where players can detain undocumented immigrants crossing the border.

In “Rio Run,” players are directed to “pick up every crosser in the lot.” An avatar of a balding white man dressed in a suit and tie collects stationary bodies, and adds them to a growing line of orange-jumpsuited figures floating behind him. The snake-style game evokes the horrific images of chained immigrants boarding planes to foreign countries.

If you thought that was callous and dehumanizing, just wait: In a Tetris-style game called “Build the Wall,” players are directed to stack bricks in order to stave off a “border zombie siege.” It has never felt more clear that the Trump administration is made-up entirely of terminally online right-wing trolls desperate to appease deportation fanboys.

Other White House arcade games invite users to “sort the school lunch to Make America Healthy Again,” or use a net to catch cash and gold to “fill your kids’ Trump accounts.”

A White House official told CNN the arcade was “an effort to further contrast between a culture of fun and winning and the dark socialist vision Democrats have for America.”

It’s hard to get much darker than turning a mass detention policy into some kind of game—a legal front on which the Trump administration is definitely not winning. A total of eight federal appeals courts have ruled that the policy is unlawful.

Embattled Democratic Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman blew off meetings with disabled veterans, the families of slain police officers, children’s hospital officials, and countless constituents in his past two years in Congress—once again displaying his indifference and apathy to any cause that isn’t shamelessly lobbying for Israel.

New reporting from The Wall Street Journal showed that Fetterman couldn’t care less about the bare minimum presence and effort his Senate job requires, or the Pennsylvanians he’s supposed to be fighting for.

Text messages obtained by the Journal show Fetterman asking an aide why he had to meet with the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) of all places in September.

“Why do I have to keep having to meet with chop,” he asked.

“Because they are worried about vaccines and Medicaid cuts,” the aide said. President Donald Trump’s cuts to Medicaid have negatively impacted children’s hospitals across the country.

“Well I’m not,” Fetterman responded. “I’m convinced they just want free trips to DC.”

Another exchange shows Fetterman calling a funeral for three slain police officers that same month a “nonstarter” because it was three hours long—a sensible length of time given it was three officers at once. And even if it wasn’t, any U.S. senator should be able to spend a few hours at a cop’s funeral.

The report also notes that Fetterman canceled a scheduled meeting with three paralyzed military veterans in June, telling them he had eaten something that upset his stomach. He arrived at his office an hour later, perfectly healthy, and got on Fox News to talk about how great Trump’s war on Iran was going.

And aside from these more recent developments, he is still skipping votes, still ghosting constituents, still sitting out of committee meetings, and still choosing to side with Republicans and the larger conservative landscape—all things that have become common for him, particularly after his 2023 stay in Walter Reed for clinical depression.

Fetterman has free health care, good pay and pension, and a job that is really not that hard in the grand scheme of things. And yet he can’t be bothered to cast votes, attend funerals, or look paralyzed veterans in the eyes.

President Donald Trump admitted that he’s just building monuments to himself.

In a sprawling dispatch Friday, New York Magazine’s Ben Terris asked Trump what he made of a viral barb from Jon Ossoff, a Democratic senator from Georgia who suggested in June that the president had become obsessed with building monuments to himself because “no one will honor him when he’s gone.”

“That’s true,” Trump said. “Nobody will do it once I’m gone. When I leave here, nobody will.”

Monuments are typically something that great leaders earn by being, well, great. Trump’s comment suggests that the president is well-aware that he’s going to walk away from his two terms with few great deeds worth remembering. It also indicates that Trump has no idea there are things you have to earn, not just buy.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum announced Thursday that construction would begin on a “Great Triumphal Arch” in a traffic roundabout between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington Cemetery. Trump has been raving about the project, nicknamed online as the “Arc de Trump,” for almost a year. Earlier this week, the Supreme Court’s conservative-majority ensured it was virtually impossible to challenge the illegal construction of a $600 million White House ballroom.

Trump has skipped work to oversee at least a dozen renovation projects around Washington, D.C.

The president gilded the Oval Office in the gaudy golden style of Mar-a-Lago, demolished the East Wing, paved over the Rose Garden, renovated columns and porticos, repaved the driveway with white granite, directed statues to receive a gold leaf makeover, built and rebuilt a helipad, re-lined the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, and then had to scrape that off to re-line it again. And who can forget that he launched a months-long legal campaign to tack his name onto another man’s memorial.

Previously, a prominent clinical psychologist signaled that the president’s tireless obsession with renovations could be a warning sign of cognitive decline.

Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo was fired for leaking information about her employer to the White House, Status reported Thursday.

Bartiromo’s sudden termination stemmed from President Donald Trump’s incendiary prime-time speech in July baselessly accusing foreign agents of tampering with our last three elections. Fox News reportedly issued guidance to senior staff to avoid validating Trump’s wildly inaccurate claims on-air, resulting in a noticeable lack of coverage of the speech.

It’s not clear whether someone at the White House asked Bartiromo directly about the coverage, or if she offered the information freely. But Bartiromo told the White House all about Fox News’s guidance, disclosing confidential company information and violating the terms of her employment in the process.

Bartiromo’s departure was announced in an unusually short statement from Fox News Thursday. The next day, she wasn’t even mentioned on Mornings with Fox News, previously Mornings with Maria.

This incident indicates a stunning level of cooperation between the Trump administration and the sycophants working at Fox News. There was early speculation that Bartiromo left her position at Fox News for a role in the Trump administration, which prompts the question: Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?