Among President Donald Trump’s Cabinet appointees, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has enjoyed one of the strongest starts.
Thus, in its ongoing effort to destroy both Gabbard and the president, the establishment media has resorted to brazen lies. That, of course, represents nothing new.
Nonetheless, in a sign of how much times have changed since Trump’s first administration, the Trump-hating Associated Press had to print an embarrassing correction after first publishing a lie about Gabbard and Trump so obvious that any number of writers or editors could have caught it long before publication had they really wished to do so.
The correction, printed at the bottom of the updated story, read as follows:
“Eds: This story was updated on Mar. 17, 2025, to delete erroneous reporting that U.S. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin ‘are very good friends.’ Gabbard was talking about Trump and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.”
In other words, the AP ran with a false story about Trump describing Putin as a very good friend.
Of course they did. After all, the establishment media as a whole has spent nearly nine years priming its Trump-hating readers and viewers to receive with credulity the establishment-manufactured accusation that Trump amounts to a Russian asset.
Meanwhile, both the establishment and its media minions — enemies of truth all — have taken the same approach with Gabbard.
Alexa Henning, Gabbard’s deputy chief of staff, captured a screen shot of the AP’s original headline.
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“Gabbard says Trump and Putin are ‘very good friends’ focused on strengthening ties,” the original headline read.
“This is why no one trusts the maliciously incompetent and purposefully bias media. If this isn’t a clear example of pushing a solely political narrative, then nothing is,” Henning wrote early Tuesday on the social media platform X.
The @AP is total trash. DNI @TulsiGabbard was referring to PM Modi & President Trump and this is the headline they publish.
This is why no one trusts the maliciously incompetent and purposefully bias media. If this isn’t a clear example of pushing a solely political narrative,… pic.twitter.com/1chFZQqTEd
— Alexa Henning (@alexahenning) March 18, 2025
Republican Sen. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma agreed.
“Media has attacked my friend, @TulsiGabbard since day 1. They failed. Tulsi is Senate-confirmed and hard at work. I guarantee this will only make her stronger and more mission-focused,” Mullin wrote on X.
🚨 READ THIS: @AP ran an insane fake story about @DNIGabbard— they were forced to retract it.
Media has attacked my friend, @TulsiGabbard since day 1. They failed. Tulsi is Senate-confirmed and hard at work. I guarantee this will only make her stronger and more mission-focused. https://t.co/inpckia1zf pic.twitter.com/OfDuOegT75
— Markwayne Mullin (@SenMullin) March 18, 2025
Since taking over as DNI last month, Gabbard has hit the ground running in impressive fashion. For instance, she immediately dismissed more than 100 intelligence officials caught using government chatrooms to discuss their transgender sex fantasies while plotting against the new Trump administration.
Moreover, Gabbard personifies Trump’s intense aversion to regime-change wars across the world. Thus, establishment warmongers panicked over her ascent to DNI.
Another element of this story involves the AP’s undisguised hostility toward the president and his administration.
Above all, however, the AP’s embarrassing correction showed that the establishment media can no longer lie with impunity.
Imagine, for instance, if the outlet had run with its “very good friends” story eight years ago.
In fact, no one needs to imagine anything. The entire establishment media ran with the “very fine people” hoax despite clear video evidence that Trump excluded neo-Nazis and white supremacists from that “very fine people” category when he described protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, during the summer of 2017.
Tellingly, it took the leftist “fact-checking” (read: propaganda) outfit Snopes seven years to admit the truth about what Trump said.
In 2017, of course, the establishment held a virtual monopoly over the dissemination of information and opinion. By the COVID madness of 2020, it had used that monopoly to build a censorship-driven reign of terror.
Under Elon Musk’s ownership, however, X has emerged as the one platform in the world where social media users may instantly expose the establishment media’s relentless lies.
That, more than anything, constitutes the real story of the AP’s embarrassing correction.
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