CNN spent a year screaming that Trump's tariffs would destroy the economy.
They were wrong about tariffs, wrong about Pete Hegseth, wrong about eggs, wrong about everything.
And Greg Gutfeld just figured out why they keep doing it.
The Fake News Media Has Become Group Therapy for Democrats
On The Five, Greg Gutfeld said what conservatives have known for years but nobody on television had the nerve to say out loud.
"The media is now a coping industry," he told viewers. "They're designed to produce an anti-reality, so that all this great news is really bad news – to help each other in the industry cope."
The media has stopped trying to inform you.
It exists to protect its own people from a reality that keeps proving them wrong.
Gutfeld laid out the evidence: Pete Hegseth being fired any day. A female illegal alien held captive by ICE – complete hoax. Border Patrol agents whipping Haitian migrants at the border – also fabricated.
Every story built from the same template: Trump bad, disaster imminent, crisis already unfolding.
Every story wrong.
What Liberal Media Actually Told You About Trump Tariffs and Hegseth
After Liberation Day, Nicolle Wallace went on MSNBC and told her viewers Trump had "detonated a bomb in the heart of the most resilient economy on the planet."
Jen Psaki's show repeatedly covered Pete Hegseth as an accident waiting to happen – the manufactured Signal chat scandal, the staffing drama, the predictions that Trump was about to cut him loose.
CNN declared tariffs would "probably tip into recession" and cited JPMorgan analysts to back it up.
MSNBC's Ari Melber warned viewers conditions could become "far worse than 2008."
Unemployment never spiked.
The recession never arrived.
Hegseth still runs the Pentagon.
The media used egg prices that spiked under Biden to hammer Trump on affordability after he took office last year.
Egg prices dropped 48% in the twelve months after Trump took office.
"It amazes me," Gutfeld said, "with a constant misreading of reality, you might want to question the filter you're using to look at the world."
The Media Bias Filter That Keeps Breaking Every Time Trump Wins
It's not that these anchors are stupid.
It's that the filter they use to process what Trump does is broken – and nobody inside their bubble will say so.
"This filter is destroying your perceptive abilities to know what is going to happen next," Gutfeld said.
When you spend months predicting economic collapse and it doesn't come, when you declare a cabinet secretary finished and he keeps his job, when you call a hoax story real – your brain builds compensations.
You construct an alternative reality where every Trump win is secretly a loss, every good number is a lie, and the next catastrophe is always one news cycle away.
Gutfeld put a name on it: "Your worst enabling friend who keeps telling you that you don't have a drug problem and that your fly isn't really down."
That friend is destroying your ability to understand what's right in front of you.
Why Conservatives Stopped Trusting Mainstream Media Years Before CNN Did
Gutfeld made one more point the fake news media will never acknowledge — he doesn't need special insider knowledge to predict Trump.
He just watches what happens.
"This is what Trump does," Gutfeld said. "He goes for free money on the table, decisively, low risk, high reward. Get in, get out."
When Trump announced Liberation Day tariffs, CNN went wall-to-wall with recession warnings and brought in Wall Street economists to confirm the disaster was coming.
Trump paused them, renegotiated, and walked away with better deals.
Hegseth was supposed to be gone before summer. MSNBC ran that story on a loop for twelve months. He's still running the Department of War.
"I am not a military or political genius," Gutfeld said, "but I saw this."
Conservatives figured out the pattern two elections ago.
The anchors at MSNBC and CNN keep panicking because admitting that means admitting they've been wrong about everything.
Nicolle Wallace goes back on television every morning and builds a new disaster that never comes.
And the only question worth asking is how many more times she gets to be catastrophically wrong before her audience finally demands the truth.
CNN and MSNBC’s ratings have collapsed since Trump’s second term began.
"In this relationship," Gutfeld said Friday, "truth is now being replaced by therapy."
That's what they're selling.
And the moment you realize it – you can never watch them the same way again.
Sources:
- Greg Gutfeld, The Five, Fox News, April 18, 2026.
- Ian Schwartz, "Gutfeld: The Media Is A Coping Industry, Designed To Produce An Anti-Reality," RealClearPolitics, April 18, 2026.
- "Media Predicts Recession or Boom Amid Tariffs, Stock Volatility: Bias Breakdown," SAN, April 2025.
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Price Index – Eggs, January 2026.