This morning, Fox & Friends came up with another defend-Trump-on-Russia-by-attacking-Obama talking point. Lo and behold, Donald Trump tweeted the same talking point minutes later.
On this morning’s Trump's & Friends, the Curvy Couch Cheerleaders asked, “How worried should we be” about a Russian spy ship spotted off the coast of Delaware? The answer, apparently, was that nobody should worry with our new "sheriff" on the case.
Guest Kirk Lippold perhaps didn’t sound quite Trump friendly enough when he suggested that there should be “no daylight” between NATO and the United States (Trump has been hostile toward NATO).
So cohost and sycophant Steve Doocy stepped in. “During the last administration, we didn’t really stand up to Russia so much, did we?” he "asked."
Cohost Brian Kilmeade claimed that the Russian ambassador was “relatively stunned” when Trump’s U.N. ambassador, Nikki Haley, condemned the country’s aggression in the Ukraine. “Are they beginning to understand on some level or are they going to be forced to understand that there’s a new sheriff in town?” Kilmeade "asked."
Cohost Ainsley Earhardt made it three for three on the Trump/Russia PR front. “You talk about consistency,” she said. She insisted that Trump’s (future, hypothetical) tough stand on Russia would be “totally different than what President Obama did and how he reacted.”
Sure it would be. Because not even Fox News has been able to come up with any ties between the Obama administration and Russia. And while the Curvy Couch Cheerleaders had a collective case of amnesia about all the extremely bromancey things Trump has said and done with regard to Russian president Vladimir Putin and the fact that both Republicans and Democrats are calling for investigations into the ties between Trump and Putin, there’s one person who thinks this was a fine example of journalism: Trump.
Mediaite caught Trump tweeting his approval this morning, albeit before this particular discussion:
The fake news media is going crazy with their conspiracy theories and blind hatred. @MSNBC & @CNN are unwatchable. @foxandfriends is great!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 15, 2017
Obviously, Trump thought this bit of propaganda was another bit of greatness. Mediaite caught this from the Twitterer in Chief, about 10 minutes after it aired:
Crimea was TAKEN by Russia during the Obama Administration. Was Obama too soft on Russia?
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 15, 2017
Watch Trump’s inspiration below, from the February 15, 2017 Fox & Friends.
This particular clip just reinforces that Trump is regularly watching Fox News at all hours – likely because it’s the only media outlet consistently giving him high fives. The scary part here is something akin to the movie Broadcast News, where the anchor blindly repeats what he’s told over his headset. In this case, Trump regularly parrots whatever propaganda line is spewed from the Fox News’ broadcasts, and does so within minutes of the line being aired.
We actually did hear the Watergate line last night from Bill O’Reilly, while Bob Woodward was trying to school him on the real problems being exposed by the Flynn debacle. Woodward was concerned that the firing of Flynn was setting off warning bells for journalists who didn’t see why his dissembling was so serious – meaning that there must be something more to this story than what we’ve been told. They clearly think there is a greater malfeasance. (And Fox News wants to twist the story so it’s about the act of leaking rather than about the information that came out – which is stunning in its hypocrisy for an outfit that openly rooted for leaks into the Clinton campaign and the Obama White House…) I would argue that the real reason Flynn was fired was because he messed with Mike Pence, the acting President and this was a message to the entire cabinet and the Executive Branch – don’t make the same mistake Flynn did. I’m sure the rest of the White House will be a LOT more careful in how they deal with Pence going forward. Or they’ll be fired too. We can always hope that journalists will start picking up on this and showing how Pence is controlling a lot more than anyone thought. His influence today is apparently much greater than even Dick Cheney’s was a decade ago – and that’s saying something.