The casual, shameless willingness to simply replace reality with something more convenient remains the hardest thing to get used to about the Trump era. It’s not merely that the president behaves with callous disregard for basic norms, but that an entire media apparatus ensures his supporters rarely have to see it.
The latest example came Saturday at one of the most solemn moments a commander-in-chief can face: a dignified transfer at Dover Air Force Base. Six American service members killed in the war with Iran were returning home in flag-draped coffins. And Donald Trump stood there wearing a $55 white baseball cap with gold USA and 45-47 embroidery, a piece of his own merchandise, to honor them. Unbelievably, no one standing alongside the president — not his wife Melania, not his vice president JD Vance, not his chief of staff Susie Wiles, who should have been especially attuned to the optics — intervened.
No American president has ever worn a baseball cap at a dignified transfer, and none would have even considered doing so. Instead of being concerned with product placement, they had an innate understanding of what their office symbolizes and demands.
No American president has ever worn a baseball cap at a dignified transfer, and none would have even considered doing so. Instead of being concerned with product placement, they had an innate understanding of what their office symbolizes and demands. At military funerals, the Veterans of Foreign Wars advises it is appropriate to remove one’s hat and place it over the heart. In American civic culture, removing one’s hat is a visible sign of respect, particularly during ceremonies honoring the dead.
Fox News producers understood what Trump did not. It’s a bad look.
When Fox News covered the ceremony, viewers did not see Trump in the hat. Instead, the network aired footage from an entirely different dignified transfer — one that took place on Dec. 17 — showing Trump bareheaded. First flagged on X by an account titled “BadFoxGraphics,” the clip quickly went viral on social media over the weekend.
“President Trump, First Lady Melania Trump, Vice President JD Vance and [Second] Lady Usha Vance attending a dignified transfer to honor the final homecoming of the six US service members killed in Kuwait,” host Griff Jenkins said, narrating the clip. “The solemn ritual returns the remains of troops killed in action. It is considered one of the most somber duties of a commander-in-chief.”
With the substitution exposed, Fox claimed the error was inadvertent. A staffer had mistakenly pulled archival video during the sourcing process, the network said. “We want to acknowledge a mistake made earlier on our program,” Jenkins said on Sunday. “During our coverage of yesterday’s dignified transfer, we inadvertently aired video from an older dignified transfer instead of the ceremony that took place yesterday. We deeply regret the air and extend our respect and condolences to the service members’ families. We honor the sacrifice of those six American heroes.”
He then read the names of the service members. They did not, however, show the footage showing Trump sporting his merch. In the shared clip, Fox News cut away from footage showing the solemn event before Trump could be seen saluting with the hat on. As Acyn Torabi, an editor at MediasTouch, observed, “Fox’s dignified transfer footage now just completely excludes Trump.”
The substitution was not a one-time fluke. The same wrong footage aired on Saturday night’s “Big Weekend Show” and again the next morning on “Fox News Sunday.”
If this were an isolated slip, perhaps viewers could chalk it up to newsroom chaos. But Fox News forfeited the benefit of the doubt years ago — most infamously when it agreed to pay $787 million to settle a defamation lawsuit over knowingly raising false claims about the 2020 election. The case revealed internal messages showing hosts and executives privately acknowledging that conspiracy theories they broadcast were nonsense.
Bill Carter, a former longtime chief television correspondent for the New York Times, put it plainly: “This was clearly a deliberate choice to try to protect Trump from criticism they knew would rain down on him.” The correct footage was available. The network had it. At other times — including on Lara Trump’s program — they used it. The selective invisibility of Trump’s hat was not an accident of the archive. It was editorial judgment exercised in real time, in service of a man who stacked his Cabinet with Fox News personalities.
To his credit, Fox News veteran Johnny “Joey” Jones said he was “embarrassed and ashamed.” But he was one of the network personalities who spent years telling the Fox News audience that Democratic presidents don’t exhibit proper respect for fallen heroes. In August 2021, when Joe Biden attended the dignified transfer of 13 service members killed at Abbey Gate in Kabul, Fox News manufactured a scandal out of it. After other right-wing media figures seized on video of Biden’s hand movements, Fox played the footage back in slow motion, at roughly half-speed, doubling the apparent duration of the moment, to amplify claims that he had glanced at his watch during the ceremony. The network covered the story for days as a matter of grave moral consequence. Sean Hannity declared it “unforgivable.” The moment was later featured prominently at the 2024 Republican National Convention, where Gold Star families appeared on stage to condemn Biden’s behavior. Trump made Biden’s watch-check a campaign centerpiece.
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Compare that to the footage Fox refused to show: Trump, in a merchandise cap, saluting while six soldiers he sent to war were returned home. As the New York Times’ Shawn McCreesh wrote, it “was similar to the one he wore that night last weekend when he launched the war from a makeshift situation room at Mar-a-Lago. Now, exactly one week later, he stared silently as some of the human consequences of that decision passed before his eyes.”
After attending the transfer of those killed in that conflict, Trump was photographed playing golf at Trump National Doral in Miami wearing the same branded hat.
The contrast between the solemnity of the coffins and the casualness of a golf outing the next day, while the lives of Americans are at stake, would be catnip for conservative media outrage under a Democratic president. But Fox News’ relationship with presidential golf depends entirely on who is holding the club. When Barack Obama took to the links in 2014 following a press statement on the murder of journalist James Foley by ISIS, the network spent days in full outrage mode. Greg Gutfeld called golf Obama’s golfing a compulsion that blinds you to “the hell unfolding around you.” Trump didn’t even bother to order flags flown at half-staff, as he did for Charlie Kirk, to honor the first confirmed U.S. deaths of his Iran war. Instead, the man who once tweeted that Obama was “always playing golf” while the country suffered was on the course before the Sunday morning shows were off the air. Fox News, which spent years branding Obama’s golf habit as evidence of moral vacancy, somehow did not find this worth extended examination.
When the public sees rising casualties while the president projects leisure, the message is unavoidable: the burden of war is not evenly distributed.
When the public sees rising casualties while the president projects leisure, the message is unavoidable: the burden of war is not evenly distributed. Even Trump’s own words convey the detachment. When asked during a phone call with Time magazine’s Eric Cortellessa on Wednesday about whether Americans should be concerned about a potential strike on the homeland, Trump said, “I guess.”
“But I think they’re worried about that all the time,” he continued. “We think about it all the time. We plan for it. But yeah, you know, we expect some things. Like I said, some people will die. When you go to war, some people will die.”
The president’s callousness about casualties and the American military is part of a pattern that stretches back decades.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump famously mocked prisoners of war, saying he preferred “people who weren’t captured” in reference to Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who spent five-and-a-half years as a POW in North Vietnam. He has reportedly referred to American war dead as “losers” and “suckers.” During the 2024 campaign, his team pushed aside staff at Arlington National Cemetery so he could film campaign footage among the graves and treat the nation’s fallen soldiers as mere props. Even on Sept. 11, 2001, while smoke still rose from the ruins of the World Trade Center, Trump called into a television station to note that his building at 40 Wall Street had now become the tallest in lower Manhattan. At the 2017 White House Easter Egg Roll, Melania Trump nudged the president to place his hand over his heart during the national anthem.
Now the same political movement that spent years condemning athletes who kneeled during the national anthem — calling it an unforgivable insult to the military — shrugs when the president can’t remove his hat while saluting America’s war dead.
There is a pattern here that goes beyond hypocrisy, though that quality is certainly present in abundance. It’s one of systemic cover.
Fox News is not simply a network that favors Republicans. It is an apparatus that has been integrated into this administration at the structural level. Cabinet members Pete Hegseth and Sean Duffy, for instance, were plucked by Trump directly from its on-air talent roster. The network operates not as a check on power but as MAGA’s communications infrastructure. The result is a feedback loop in which Fox News protects Trump, Trump rewards the network and viewers receive a carefully curated version of reality.
Millions of Fox viewers will never know about the hat. They will never see the footage that Fox chose not to show. In their version of reality, Trump behaved with perfect solemnity. The media outrage is just another liberal smear.
But what Fox News’ scramble to hide the footage revealed is that its own producers know the difference between the standard they applied to Biden and Obama, and the one they apply to Trump. Moments like this sometimes pierce the bubble. Veterans who value military tradition understand what that ceremony represents. Some who were already uneasy about Trump may find the image difficult to ignore. Others may begin to question why their trusted news sources didn’t show them the full picture.
Not everyone will change their mind. But cracks in the narrative matter.
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