It would be hard to find, even on Fox News, a bigger Trump sycophant than Ainsley Earhardt. But Earhardt appears to be in serious denial about her work.

In an interview with the Fox & Friends cohost, Business Insider writer Eliza Relman did not seem terribly concerned with Earhardt’s ludicrous claim that she doesn't see herself as a Donald Trump cheerleader:

“I’m calling it like I see it. If I watch other networks it can be frustrating to see a one-sided story,” she said. “We are inflicting opinion in our newscasts like never before. That was never done and never taught in our journalism classes.”

She doesn’t admit that Fox & Friends also largely tells one side of the story, insisting that she tries to be as fair as possible.  

“I do not want to come across as being in the tank for them or kissing their tails,” Earhardt says of the Trump administration. “I mean, I want to be a journalist, I want to ask tough questions.” 

But, she adds, “fair” means different things to different people.

“We also have to think about the forgotten man and the audience that we have and what their concerns are and they’re my same concerns too,” she says. (My emphases added)

Really? Maybe Earhardt does not want to come across as being in the tank for the Trump administration but she sure quacks like being in the tank for Trump. For example, when Trump criticized CNN and MSNBC while in Poland, Earhardt scolded the reporter for asking him about a gif he tweeted showing him “wrestling” CNN. Then she lavished praise on Trump, saying that his attack on American media and corporations while abroad proved he’s “the kind of guy that you’re going to want to represent the United States of America when he does have to come up against North Korea [and Russia].”

As for acting like a journalist and asking “tough questions,” here are a few samples from her interview with Melania Trump last year, shortly after the Access Hollywood tape became public:

"What lie [about your family] made you the most upset and how would you like to set the record straight?"

“I think all women in America felt for you and for what you went through..."

"[Donald Trump] apologized immediately. …He immediately came out and he said, ‘I said it, I was wrong and I apologize.’'”

Maybe Earhardt truly wants to be a journalist and to ask tough questions but, if so, she’s either miserably stifled in her job or she has a grotesque notion of what journalism and tough questions are. Or she is in complete denial about the truth.

What's so offensive about Earhardt is not that she loves Trump but how she perverts journalism and turns it into propaganda. It’s too bad the interviewer never challenged her about that.

Watch Earhardt play lapdog to Melania Trump below, from an October 18, 2016 interview on Fox & Friends.