Let’s go back in time to earlier this year, when the Media Research Center tried to manufacture a conspiracy theory about how astronauts stuck at the International Space Station were being referred to. Take it away, Alex Christy:
One of the media’s worst habits is its urge to contradict everything President Donald Trump says simply because he says them. NPR had a rather comical example of this phenomena on Wednesday as it ran a headline saying Trump was wrong to say two astronauts on the International Space Station are stranded despite three previous NPR articles saying they were stranded.
Under the headline “Trump asks SpaceX to ‘go get’ two stranded ISS astronauts. They’re not stranded,” Brendan Byrne cites a Trump social media post, “I have just asked Elon Musk and SpaceX to ‘go get’ the 2 brave astronauts who have been virtually abandoned in space by the Biden Administration,’ Trump wrote on Truth Social. ‘Good luck Elon!!!’”
A displeased Byrne continued, “The astronauts Musk and Trump are presumably referencing are NASA’s Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams. NASA has long said the crew isn’t ‘stranded’ and a plan to return them safely to Earth has been in place for months. In fact, NASA astronauts always train for lengthy missions and medical experts have kept a watchful eye on the health of the two during their extended stay.”
Byrne would also add, “The astronauts arrived at the International Space Station on Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft after launching from Florida’s Cape Canaveral in June 2024. The test flight was supposed to last only eight days. But engineers at NASA and Boeing uncovered issues with the spacecraft’s propulsion system, and decided to return the vehicle back to Earth without a crew. The two have remained at the station ever since.”
An eight-day mission has been transformed into a seven-month one, but Byrne doesn’t like the word “stranded.” That is odd considering, in this very article, NPR advertises a related article from August 24 headlined “NASA will bring stranded astronauts back on SpaceX—not Boeing’s starliner.”
Note that Christy is still sticking with his conspiracy theory despite admitting that NASA itself says the astronauts aren’t “stranded,” and he later conceded that Trump has a “has a uniquely difficult relationship with the truth.” Christy also avoided discussing the actual issue at hand: Trump specifically blaming the Biden administration for the situation, for which neither he nor Christy offered evidence to support.
Christy pushed his conspiracy again a week later, complaining that one of the stuck astronauts wouldn’t play along:
Recently, NPR shamed President Donald Trump for pledging to rescue two stranded astronauts on the International Space Station because, according to them and despite months of their own reporting to the contrary, they are not stranded. On Friday CBS Evening News host John Dickerson became the latest media personality to do the same thing.
During an interview with Sunita Williams, one of the astronauts in question, Dickerson asked, “Last week, President Trump said you and Butch Wilmore, who’s your Starliner crewmate, had been virtually abandoned. Do you feel abandoned up there, commander?”
Trump was clearly talking about abandonment in the physical sense, but Williams, not wanting to throw her NASA colleagues under the bus on national TV or ignore other astronauts currently on the International Space Station, used the word in the more emotional or communicative sense, “No, I don’t think those words are quite accurate. You know, we’re part of something bigger than ourselves. We are part of the International Space Station. So no, we don’t feel abandoned. We feel like we are part of the team, and that is a huge honor.”
Christy didn’t explain how he could read Trump’s mind on his word usage, and he didn’t mention the fact that the astronauts have been quite vocal about not feeling “abandoned.” Instead, he whined: “While Williams can be commended for her ability to adapt in the face of adversity and put a happy face on the situation, there is no reason why Dickerson and CBS need to change their tune on how they described her and Wilmore just because Trump commented on it.”
In a related complaint, Christian Toto groused in his April 5 column that Elon Musk didn’t get the credit Toto thought he deserved for using a SpaceX mission to bring the astronauts home:
Part of the “Joe Rogan Experience” chat focused on SpaceX’s mission to bring astronauts Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Suni Williams back to earth. They were on board a space station for more than nine months before the successful rescue operation.
It should have been a massive news story. It could even inspire a movie or TV miniseres some day. Heck, dolphins greeted the rescued astronauts’ capsule in a moment tailor-made for the big screen.
Instead, legacy media outlets covered it briefly and moved on. Nothing remarkable to see here. Move along.
And Rogan knows why.
“They’re trying to s*** on everything [Musk] does. Hide all the good stuff. We didn’t hear a peep about Elon rescuing those people,” Rogan said. “We should have had a live stream of it. It should have been a huge national event. ‘We’re finally gonna rescue the astronauts who were trapped on a space station for eight f***ing months. This supergenius, this Elon Musk character, is the guy who figured out how to go get them.’
Toto didn’t question why Musk, if he was capable of doing so, apparently did not offer to rescue those astronauts while Joe Biden was still president.