The Fox White House
Watch Fox News write Trump’s lines for him. Watch Trump dutifully deliver them.
Trump’s tendency to echo the network’s shows was documented on Sunday’s “Reliable Sources” on CNN.
Remarks Trump made last week — railing against the Russia investigations and attacking his enemies — were juxtaposed with previous clips of Fox personalities saying almost exactly the same things.
The same things paraphrased. He uses his own 30 or 40 words, but the content is identical.
Mind you, it must flow both ways. Fox knows what Trump thinks, and what makes him happy or livid, and it feeds him his lines accordingly. No collusion! Democrats mad! Sore losers! Hillary!!
“Typically talking points in the past have gone from politicians to partisan media,” said John Avlon, editor-in-chief of The Daily Beast. “It is an extraordinary two-way relationship, the likes of which we’ve never seen.”
Trump has hired numerous people who have appeared on the network — as contributors, commentators or guests — to work in the administration.
And Sean Hannity, who hosts the prime-time show “Hannity” on Fox News, has a close relationship with Trump. The pair talk on the phone “several times a week,” The Washington Post recently reported.
We live in Fox World.
Funny how Trump, the self made…something, can’t see that he’s being fed this stuff, that he’s parroting other people, being led and not leading. It would be hilarious if it wasn’t so bloody frightening.
YNnB – I have several people in my family who are doing similar (though without the power that makes this so scary). They are following where hateful people lead, and do not see that they are being fed anything. They insist everything they think, say, and do is totally from their own experience – even when those of us who have known them their entire lives know better!
I have one nephew who incorporates stories from MRA and Neo-Nazi sites into his own personal narrative (we all know him too well to believe any of it – seriously, an honorable discharge when he deserted during boot camp? We know his history!). He then seems to believe that these things are true. He makes up other stories based on the awful things said on MRA sites, and adopts them as his own. He has been led to a marginally obnoxious young man into a dangerously delusional man, and doesn’t even see the leash.
My dad used to be a fairly normal conservative, but he slipped into the Fox News World, too. Conspiracy theories – birtherism – convinced that everyone is trying to take his guns away – convinced that everyone wants to force him into atheism – all of it. A sane, solid man has turned into a foaming at the mouth Fox news consumer. Again, he doesn’t see the leash.
How? Why? I guess any form of hate can be stoked until it grows beyond itself, transcends even what it hates to create whole new categories of hatred and fear. So a mild distaste for African Americans can become a rage. A mild sense of superiority and entitlement over women gets stroked until it becomes raging misogyny. A sense of entitlement that is unconscious and maybe not that well developed evolves into a sense of total superiority and right to rule that is bigger than the universe itself.
I see it on the left, too, in the nonsense of the people who insist they are “woke” and the rest of us are “TERFs” or worse. Living in an echo chamber becomes deafening after a while, until you can’t hear anything but the voices in the echo chamber.