In the hours after Donald Trump announced that he had been indicted on a charge of hoarding classified documents, conservative media outlets and personalities jumped to the usual barricades, according to The Washington Post.
“A dark day in America,” Fox News host Sean Hannity said on his program Thursday night. The sometime Trump adviser continued: “Our system of justice has now been weaponized beyond belief, and this country is in serious trouble.”
“Well, they did it, and how dare they — they indicted him again,” fulminated Greg Kelly, a prime time host on Newsmax, a smaller cable channel that has attempted to outflank Fox on the right. He added: “This will not derail Donald Trump, no way.”
By then, the framing of the indictment was largely set — initially by Trump, who broke his own news Thursday evening on his Truth Social platform. He called the at-the-time unreleased indictment the work of “the corrupt Biden administration,” though it was the work of a grand jury, acting on evidence presented by a special counsel appointed by attorney general Merrick Garland to limit perceptions of political influence.
The Daily Wire, a news and commentary site co-founded by conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, played the news relatively straight, citing mainstream media reports about the indictment.
The Trump talking points — the prosecution is unfair, Democrats are guilty of similar crimes, the indictment amounts to 2024 “election interference” — quickly echoed across Trump-partisan media. It was a replay of the reaction to Trump’s first indictment, in March, by prosecutors in New York City in connection to alleged hush-money payoffs to an adult-film star.
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