Only on Fox News would a supposedly objective anchor help a White House spokesman spin Donald Trump’s support for two losing candidates in Alabama’s senate race, culminating in a stunning upset for Democrat Doug Jones, as proof of Trump’s political mojo.
Fox News anchor Harris Faulkner, whose Outnumbered Overtime show is billed as an “hour of news,” interviewed deputy White House press secretary Hogan Gidley today. She swallowed every bit of Gidley’s untruthful and/or misleading spin and even added some of her own.
Let's take a look at the BS.
Gidley pretended Trump didn’t really support losing candidate Roy Moore much
GIDLEY: The president obviously didn’t support Roy Moore at the beginning. He supported someone like Luther Strange. He made that very clear and made Luther Strange a very popular candidate in the state of Alabama. But at the end of the day, it was a binary choice between two people. It wasn’t the president’s first pick. He made it clear, though, what he would like to have in the Senate are people who support his agenda. He was very clear that with the binary choice presented to him, there was only one person out there who would have furthered the agenda of securing the border and lowering taxes and that was Roy Moore.
FACT CHECK: Whatever Trump’s feelings about Moore, he went to Pensacola, Florida (an Alabama media market) and urged people to vote for him.
Secondly, a study showed that Trump’s endorsement did absolutely nothing to help his first (losing) choice for the Alabama senate seat, Luther Strange.
Faulkner didn’t challenge a word.
Gidley distorted public support for Trump and his agenda in order to pressure Jones to support them
GIDLEY: We all know the people of Alabama overwhelmingly supported this president so the question remains, when [Jones] gets here, will he ... actually do what the people of Alabama voted for, which was Donald Trump’s agenda.
[…]
Look, the American people voted overwhelmingly to support Donald Trump’s agenda, he’s here in the White House now, they want to see this implemented. You see the popularity of the tax cuts that we could potentially get next week. People want tax cuts for Christmas, they want to be able to keep more of their own money. That’s the agenda the people of Alabama, for example, voted for.
FACT CHECK: Alabamians supported Trump “overwhelmingly” in the presidential race but among Tuesday’s voters, his approval and disapproval were tied at 48%.
The tax cuts are even less popular than Trump. Late last month, an average of five surveys found only a third of voters like the plan.
And Americans never “voted overwhelmingly” to support Trump’s agenda. He lost the popular vote by nearly three million votes, the biggest popular vote loss of an electoral-college winner in history
Yet Faulkner murmured her agreement.
Faulkner baselessly suggested Trump “tightened the gap” between Jones and Moore
Instead of coming right out and saying that Trump helped Moore, she slyly suggested that was the case by asking if that’s how Trump sees it.
FAULKNER: Does the president look at the situation as he actually tightened the gap between Doug Jones and Roy Moore? I mean, when you dig into some of the exit polling now, Roy Moore was in trouble with women and we knew that actually going into yesterday and as people were coming out, we learned more, that the deficit for him was with women.
GIDLEY: Right. Well, look, I think Donald Trump did a lot better amongst women than someone like Mitt Romney did, for example. … The president was able to narrow that gap. I mean, he was able to narrow the gap, as we just talked about, for someone like Luther Strange who was virtually unheard of. He gave that person credibility. He gave that person a rise in the polls. That’s the power of what this president is able to do.
FACT CHECK: According to exit polling, Donald Trump was not a factor in 56% of yesterday’s voters in Alabama. Only 27% of the voters said support for Trump was one reason for their vote.
Also, Trump did not do “a lot better” with women than Romney. Pew Research found that Trump got a slightly smaller percentage of the woman’s vote than Romney did.
Faulkner not only gave Gidley a pass on all his bullcrap, she concluded the interview by saying, “I hope you’ll come back to us” and “it was good to talk to you.”
Watch Operation Make Trump Look Great Again below, from the December 13, 2017 Outnumbered Overtime.