Over the weekend, 71 million people—anyone who has ever created an account on the Social Security Administration’s website—got an unhinged partisan email lying about how President Donald Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill “eliminates federal income taxes on Social Security benefits for most beneficiaries.” It also floridly praised Trump for reaffirming his “promise to protect Social Security” and says that the newly signed law “helps ensure that seniors can better enjoy the retirement they’ve earned.”
We know that’s a lie. We also know the media knows it’s a lie. But they seem, as always, not ready to meet the moment. Rather than reporting on how there has never been such a nakedly partisan email from the SSA, and how turning agency communications into partisan boasts filled with lies undermines democracy, they’re desperately trying to explain it away.
Axios said it was “unusual for the agency to blast an overtly political message to its massive email list, which includes retirees and those who’ve signed up at their website.”
“Unusual” implies that there is a usual course of action this slightly diverges from, but that it’s also not wholly outside of the bounds of appropriate government communication. In reality, it’s unheard of. It’s tiresome to do the “Imagine if President Joe Biden did this” thing, but honestly, imagine it. The media would lose their minds. It would be “But her emails” combined with “Joe Biden is senile” times 1,000.
It’s not that past presidents haven’t had agencies blast out press releases touting their achievements. Here’s one that Axios dug up from 2010, in its attempts to characterize the Trumpy announcement as similar to past presidential communications. In the old press release, the then-head of Social Security praised President Barack Obama’s “commitment to creating an unprecedented level of openness in government.”
That example doesn’t really help Axios, though. First, the Obama-era announcement was a press release, not something sent to 71 million people’s email inboxes indiscriminately. Second, the 2010 statement was not about the passage of a partisan tax law, but rather, it was about how SSA now had new datasets available for researchers. And finally, of course, that 2010 announcement was not based on a lie.
Quite simply, the Big Beautiful Bill has no language in it whatsoever about eliminating federal income taxes on Social Security. In reality, the bill does give seniors an extra tax deduction—but only for four years, because the benefits should never last longer than Trump, only the tax cuts. But that deduction phases out based on income, and doesn’t apply to any Social Security recipients under 65, even though people are eligible to begin drawing Social Security at 62.
Axios isn’t the only outlet that should come in for blame here. The New York Times said that the Social Security Administration had “circulated an imprecise email,” as if it were internal communications about a potluck and it accidentally said Peggy was bringing chips, but it’s actually Timmy. CNN characterized it as “stray[ing] from the agency’s typically apolitical nature.”
Trump is now circulating his supposed evidence for how it gives everyone the tax break his email promised. That evidence is a scant little piece from Trump’s own Council of Economic Advisers. It’s dated as “June 2025” and comes in at 4 pages, including the title page. Rigorous analysis, this is not. But of course, it’s already getting reported as accurate.
When it comes to Trump, the mainstream media is constantly engaged in this sort of sanewashing, trying to paint Trump as just a bit off-kilter, a little more inclined toward some unusual styles of communication.
They know as well as you do that the actions of the administration and the president are so out of pocket, so repulsive, so partisan that it should be on the front page of every paper in America. But since this is Donald Trump, not Hillary Clinton or Kamala Harris or Joe Biden, the media is going to keep giving him cover.