‘He lied and lied and lied.’ Columnist and former Tribune editor Charlie Madigan on President Trump’s primetime address last night: “I knew it would be bad, but not this bad!”
■ USA Today’s Rex Huppke: “What stood out was his frenetic, angry delivery. It was like he had somewhere to be and was hacked off that he had to deal with some speech thing.”
■ Pod Save America cohost Dan Pfeiffer says the address backfired bigtime: “A tone-deaf victory lap at the absolute wrong time.”
■ CNN’s fact-check finds a series of lies—“false claims … most of which have been debunked before.”
■ Same from The New York Times (gift link).
■ What Did Donald Trump Do Today? calls it “the sound of a presidency trying to talk over its own polling, insisting that everything is perfect precisely because voters increasingly believe it is not.”
■ Maybe the most substantial thing he announced: The feds will send U.S. troops a $1,776 bonus check for Christmas.
■ Here’s a transcript of Trump’s address.
■ California Gov. Gavin Newsom paraphrased it with one word repeated 731 times.
‘Shame on the TV networks.’ Picayune Sentinel proprietor Eric Zorn says they shouldn’t have aired “a mendacious infomercial.”
■ Columnist Mary Geddry says the networks whiffed: “There was no advance transcript requirement, no conditional airing, no editorial threshold beyond ‘Well, he is the president.’”
■ Popular Information notes that the networks have declined to air primetime speeches from the last two Democratic presidents, claiming they were too political.
■ Stephen Colbert: “We talked about doing the show live tonight to cover the speech, but we decided not to, because—and just to give you a little peek behind the showbiz curtain—we would had to have watched it, and I don’t want to do that no more.”
‘Proof beyond a reasonable doubt.’ That’s what the AP says former Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith told lawmakers his team had on charges that Trump criminally conspired to overturn the 2020 election.
■ Wonkette’s Marcie Jones on four Republicans’ alliance with Democrats to force a vote on Obamacare subsidies: “In one of the greatest loosenings of House Speaker Mike Johnson’s grip since his family installed Covenant Eyes, Republicans are revolting.”
‘I’m really disturbed.’ Count at least one Republican senator among those troubled by the insulting and partisan plaques Trump’s added to the White House portraits of his predecessors.
■ Author and former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich: “If Trump was once rational, he no longer is.”
‘The FCC just admitted it’s not independent anymore.’ Minutes after chair Brendan Carr suggested that in a contentious Senate hearing about his threats to ABC before it suspended Jimmy Kimmel’s show—the commission’s website was edited to remove that word.
■ Poynter’s Tom Jones sees that as cause for rising concern about political pressure on the media.
■ Kimmel was disappointed more senators didn’t press Carr: “No one admitted to anything, nothing was done to prevent it from happening again, no one was held accountable … and your freedom of speech is only guaranteed depending on what you have to say.”
■ Contrarian Jennifer Rubin’s list of “The ‘powerful’ who cowered in 2025” leads off with CBS as the worst of news outlets.
■ Ahead of his cancellation by CBS, Stephen Colbert’s auctioning off his show’s stuff for charity …
■ … including VIP tickets to his final show in June, going as of this morning for more than $30,000.
Bissed off. As Border Patrol Greg Bovino’s minions swept through Chicago and the suburbs yesterday, he got into it with the mayor of Evanston …
■ … where at least four people were taken into custody.
■ Bovino told a Trib photographer, “We’re, for the first time, receiving some assistance from both Chicago PD and Evanston Police Department.”
■ The Onion: “Campbell’s Unveils New Line Of Self-Defense Soups.”
■ Here’s a detailed list of books, movies, cartoons, characters, sound recordings and musical and artistic compositions that will legally become sharable, performable and screenable without permission or fee.
Oscars online. For the first time since the rise of television, the Academy Awards won’t be broadcast over the airwaves in 2029—because they’re moving to YouTube.
■ M.G. Siegler at Spyglass: “I think Netflix is going to be allowed to buy Warner Bros. In fact, it feels like they might need to … to have any shot against YouTube.”
■ Penn State media entrepreneurship professor Tom Davidson: “PBS may be nearing a systemic collapse.”
‘Hitler did it, too.’ Journalism professor Jeff Jarvis didn’t have to look hard to find a historic parallel for the State Department’s return to its old typeface.
■ Trump’s deputy chief of staff is firing back after critics compared his haircut in that Vanity Fair photoshoot to Hitler’s.
■ The photographer got off a zinger in an exchange with the president’s consigliere, Stephen Miller.
Like sharing links on Facebook? The company’s testing new limits on how much you can do that …
■ … another reason Chicago Public Square’s shifted to sharing news on Bluesky.
Thanks. John Herrbach and Mike Braden made this edition better.