President Donald Trump called for the CBS News program 60 Minutes to be “immediately terminated” and its network shut down Thursday, as he escalated campaign threats to punish media outlets that don’t offer coverage to his liking. He also tried to shoehorn the network into an online rightwing conspiracy theory that falsely claimed media outlets took millions in government kickbacks.
In a post on Truth Social, Trump reiterated his claim that 60 Minutes committed “election interference” last year by advantageously editing an interview with his then-Democratic opponent, former Vice President Kamala Harris.
“CBS and 60 Minutes defrauded the public by doing something which has never, to this extent, been seen before,” Trump fumed Thursday. “They 100% removed Kamala’s horrible election changing answers to questions, and replaced them with completely different, and far better, answers, taken from another part of the interview.”
Transcripts released by CBS Wednesday discredited his claim, showing the network’s flagship newsmagazine made routine edits to the Harris interview for time and clarity.
The controversy arose after CBS aired different parts of Harris’s answer to a question about Gaza on separate broadcasts in October, leading to conservative conspiracies that the network was editing coverage to help Democrats.
Trump said “CBS should lose its license,” adding he considered 60 Minutes “cheaters” and “disreputable ‘NEWS.’”
The president then tried to rope the network into a right-wing conspiracy theory baselessly alleging that news outlets Politico and the Associated Press earned millions of dollars from the United States Agency for International Development.
“Was CBS paid for committing this FRAUD???” asked Trump.
In an all-caps follow-up post, he falsely alleged USAID funds went to “the fake news media as a ‘payoff’ for creating good stories about the Democrats. The left-wing ‘rag’, known as ‘Politico’, seems to have received $8,000,000. Did the New York Times receive money???? Who else did???”
The conspiracy theory began circulating on social media earlier this week after conservative commentator Kyle Becker falsely claimed on X that “Politico received USAID funds.”
He tried supporting the claim by posting an image that showed the outlet had received $8.2 million in payments from across the entire federal government, not from USAID.
Other conservative commentators, including Benny Johnson and Charlie Kirk, as well as DOGE leader Elon Musk and White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, helped circulate the false claim.
In fact, the money Politico earned was from government departments and agencies that bought subscriptions to its publications, which include the subscription-only Politico Pro that focuses on in-depth coverage of Washington.
“Politico has never been a beneficiary of government programs or subsidies—not one cent, ever, in 18 years,” the outlet said, in a Wednesday memo.
Leavitt suggested Wednesday that the Trump administration is working to cancel the subscriptions to Politico across government, saying Musk’s DOGE team “is working on canceling those payments now.”
Trump, in his all-caps bluster, clung to the conspiracy theory, stating it could be “the biggest scandal of them all, perhaps the biggest in history!”
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