Trump Is The Creature From Fox News, That’s Why He’s Weird

Something About A Cow...

On Friday, Donald Trump went to his safest of spaces, the middle of the curvy couch on the set of Fox News’ “Fox & Friends.” It was an appropriate place for Trump to hide out for a bit after a weak of negative headlines and punchy attacks from Vice President Kamala Harris calling him out for being unfit and exhausted.

The “Fox & Friends” hosts looked on adoringly like cult members watching as their beloved leader rambled on incessantly about one thing or the other, granting an audience to the show that turned Trump into a cable news pundit spouting the racist birther conspiracy theory about Obama. It was, as usual, a mess. But I thought one bit of Trump’s verbal diarrhea encapsulated just how much Trump’s mushy brain has been shaped by years and years watching Fox News, mouth agape and drooling.

A little kid sent in a video message to the network and asked Trump what his favorite animal is. This is the kind of cutey-pie innocuous question that comes before every presidential candidate. And it’s the sort of query a candidate can laugh off or even – if they have any real political skill – turn into moment that humanizes them to voters.

Here’s what Trump said: “I tell you what I love. I love cows. But if we go with Kamala you won’t have any cows anymore.”

If you are a normal person watching this, you have absolutely no idea what this septuagenarian apparently in a sundown spiral is saying. But I’m not like you, and I spent nearly a decade and a half reporting on conservative media – particularly Fox News – so I unfortunately speak Trump, because I speak Fox.

When Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey proposed the Green New Deal back in 2019, there was a fleeting mention of cow emissions of methane in a supplementary document posted on a website. The right-wing media, and especially Fox News, latched on to this as part of their crusade against Ocasio-Cortez as evidence that she wanted to ban cows. Fox repeated this ad infinitum, and their viewers came to believe it was clear evidence of a sinister Democratic Party plot led by a brown-skinned woman to ban cows.

Because Harris backed the Green New Deal while she was in the Senate, the misfiring synapses of the world’s most prominent Fox News viewer pukes out the notion that Harris wants to ban cows while responding to a child.

No, you’re not hallucinating. It is really that stupid.

 Republicans have been using Fox News and its audience as a way to further the party and the conservative movement since the network’s launch in 1996. Fox, after all, was the brainchild of Nixon aide (and serial sexual assaulter) Roger Ailes who came up with the notion for the network in a memo outlining how to put the party on television and circumvent the mainstream media’s fact checking filter.

But the difference between how previous GOP leaders like Mitt Romney, George W. Bush, and John McCain used Fox and how Trump operates with the network, is that those men for all their flaws and evil, were never dumb enough to actually believe the bullshit on Fox News (not even Bush). Trump, on the other hand, watches Fox News incessantly. He watches Fox News at the level of a Media Matters for America researcher, only he isn’t paid to do so. Trump is familiar with all of the network’s anchors and hosts, even the second-tier ones who appear during the daytime and on the weekends.

You can see this from his social media posts, which angrily comment when the network isn’t friendly enough to him. It looks like everyone’s grandpa in the basement muttering about Fox, but this is a guy who once had access to the nuclear launch codes and wants that access back.

Trump became the Republican nominee in 2016 largely because Fox featured him so heavily and the network’s audience is comprised almost entirely of conservative diehards of the sort that vote in primaries. Fox feeds Trump nonsense, Trump regurgitates the nonsense, and the red hat wearing MAGA faithful lap it all up until their bellies are bulging with fetid disinformation, misinformation, bigotry, and nonsense.

This of course, is a big reason why I still think it’s a mistake for Democrats to go on Fox, even when they get the best of Fox like Sec. Pete Buttigieg has and Harris did this past week. But that is beside the point.

Trump is a naturally weird guy and has been for decades. He’s the kind of guy who is happy to have the tawdry details of his sex life and marital infidelity play out across the front pages of tabloid newspapers. That would have been fine if he remained confined to the realm of dumb celebrity. But the Fox News fuel on this fire has made him a tragically important figure in American history.

The man is a weirdo with a brain filled with dangerous, false nonsense – and it can be traced directly to the fascistic propaganda weapon that Rupert Murdoch has inflicted on America and the world: Fox News.

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— Oliver

Follow me, Oliver Willis, on Threads @owillis1977

Exclusive Kal-El Photo

Sometimes I have to watch Fox for work, and I like to think Kal knows this and that is why he stands between me and the monitor like this.