Why does Trump call MSNOW, MSNDC?

Here is a rundown of the main ones and the logic behind each.

The outlet-level labels

The New York Times gets called the "failing New York Times" almost every time Donald Trump mentions it. The Times is always the "failing" New York Times in his usage, and the word does specific work: it implies the paper is losing readers, losing credibility, and losing the argument, so whatever it prints can be dismissed as the output of a dying institution. He has called the Times, among other slurs, "fake," "phony," "nasty," "disgraced," "dumb," "clueless," "stupid," "sad," and "dying." He is currently pressing a $15 billion lawsuit against the paper, and a federal judge struck his original complaint as "decidedly improper and impermissible," ordering it cut from 85 pages to 40.

CNN has carried two different labels over time. CNN used to be the "Clinton News Network," but Trump later preferred "FNN," meaning Fake News Network. The first version tied the channel directly to a political opponent; the second broadened the attack into a general credibility question.

The Washington Post became the "Amazon Washington Post," a label Trump attached to the paper in a tweet about internet taxes. The target there is Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, who also owns the Post. Calling it "Amazon" implies the paper is a corporate vanity project run by a tech billionaire rather than an independent news organization. He has also characterized the Post as "fake," "crazy," "dishonest," "phony," and "disgraced."

The blanket names for the whole press

Beyond individual outlets, Trump applies umbrella labels to the press as a whole. His most frequently used phrases to describe the news media and journalists were "fake news," "enemy of the people," "dishonest," and "corrupt."

"Fake news" is the engine that runs all the others. Once you accept the frame that a story is fake, you have a reason to ignore both the story and the outlet that published it. About a month into his first presidency, Trump called the news media "the enemy of the American people" in a tweet that named the Times, NBC, ABC, CBS and CNN specifically. He also called the press the "opposition party," a label he applied five days after the Annapolis shooting in 2018.

Why the same logic runs through all of them

Every nickname does one of three things. It claims the outlet is dishonest ("fake," "lying"). It claims the outlet is failing commercially and therefore irrelevant ("failing," "dying"). Or it claims the outlet is secretly working for a political opponent ("Clinton News Network," "Amazon Washington Post," "MSDNC"). Sometimes it does all three at once.

The strategic effect is the same in every case: any story from that outlet arrives pre-discredited. The reader who has absorbed the nickname doesn't have to evaluate the reporting. The label already did that for them.

That is a genuinely powerful communication technique, whatever you think of the politics behind it. Name something before your opponent gets to name it and you control the frame. It is worth understanding how it works, because you will see the same move used in business, in sports and in marketing, any time someone wants to lower the credibility of a source before the source gets to speak.

The two men spent Trump's first term at war. Trump tore into Jeff Bezos throughout that first presidency, and was deeply angered by the Washington Post's critical coverage, deriding the paper as the "Amazon Washington Post." He even called Bezos "Jeff Bozo" and, in 2019, Amazon sued the Pentagon, alleging Trump had blocked the company from securing a $10 billion cloud-computing contract because of his animus toward the Post and its owner.

The détente came quietly, well before the 2024 election. Bezos privately urged Trump to pick Doug Burgum as his vice president, calling Burgum an "excellent" choice, in a phone call that showed Bezos was engaging with Trump on political issues months earlier than publicly known. Then, he stopped his newspaper's editorial board from endorsing Kamala Harris for president. Bezos quickly congratulated Trump for his election victory, and Amazon donated $1 million to Trump's inauguration fund. Bezos and his fiancée, Lauren Sánchez, attended the inauguration.

What Bezos got, and what it cost him

The Wall Street Journal described the shift plainly: Bezos "has gone from an avowed enemy of the president to an energetic ally." Trump hosted Bezos for a private dinner in the Rose Garden, frequently asks whether he will be attending other events, and talks and texts with him regularly.

The business benefits have been concrete. The Wall Street Journal reported that Bezos's Blue Origin space company's federal contracts accelerated in Trump's second term, with Blue Origin awarded over $1.1 billion in contracts from NASA and the Department of Defense. Bezos also benefited greatly from Trump's 2025 tax legislation, which gave large tax cuts to the wealthy and corporations.

At the Washington Post, Bezos moved the opinion pages sharply. He shook up the paper's opinion section, announcing it would focus on "personal liberties and free markets," a move that followed his decision to end the newspaper's tradition of endorsing presidential candidates. Both moves cost the Post subscribers, staff resignations, and a wave of backlash.

Trump, for his part, noticed and approved. "I've gotten to know him, and I think he's trying to do a real job," Trump said. "Jeff Bezos is trying to do a real job with The Washington Post, and that wasn't happening before."

The alliance is real, but it has cracks. Observers describe the relationship as one of convenience. The FTC and 22 states sued Amazon, alleging the company engaged in deceptive and unfair practices in its online search advertising auctions. Bezos may have calculated that proximity to power was safer than opposition to it, but the protection has not been total.