For years I’ve been asking myself why FoxNews is so enamored with Trump. It seemed to me they could have championed a “normal” conservative who would have given them acceptable Supreme Court Justices, reduced government spending (or greatly inflated it so that the successor administrations would have to slash services and entitlements), provided them with their grotesque tax cuts, and generally indulged in “pro-business” policies regarding trade, environmental regulation, immigration, and so on.
But they chose to blindly support an unhinged sociopath right out of the gate instead. It seemed to me that FoxNews had put itself in the position of being Trump’s “useful idiot”, i.e. a megaphone propagandizing for a cause without fully comprehending the cause’s goals.
And the cause was simply to fight with “elites” about anything and everything. Who are the “elites”? Academia, the media, science, and government. The spectacle of Trump fighting with virtually every element of government has been baffling over the last few years. Isn’t the President the leader of government? But when you realize that he doesn’t actually care about leading the country or making things better for its citizens or “governing”, you’re on your way to understanding.
As many have pointed out, Trump cares about only one thing: Trump. And the measure of how well he’s taking care of that thing is TV ratings. In his reptilian brain, he has long understood that TV ratings are far, far more important than political polls, or the GNP, or the Dow Jones, or any other measure of success.
And Donald trump is a ratings machine, as he never tires of pointing out. People just love to hear what this clown is going to say next. Love him or hate him, it’s hard to take your eyes off him. Tuning in to a CoronaVirus briefing to get the latest? Here ya go: Trump is number one of Facebook! Very nice.
This is a big step towards understanding the Trump-FoxNews connection. Fox is in the business of selling “information” to a particular demographic. Without going into too much detail, let’s just say that demographic resents the elites, so Fox knows what it needs to sell. The more people watch, the better their business model succeeds, and Trump draws the eyeballs to Fox. As President, how can he not? It’s a great relationship for both parties. Whatever Trump wants to put out there, Fox will repeat and amplify and beat to death.
But recently, it finally dawned on me that FoxNews is not Trump’s useful idiot. I had it backwards. It is Trump who is the useful idiot of FoxNews. As he’ll readily attest, he has a lot of great instincts and, as a very stable genius, is always right. But there’s a lot he doesn’t care about and never gave a second thought to. How can he know what to say about these things? The catch-all strategy has always been to take a strong position on all sides of an issue or just claim you’ve been saying something all along when it becomes clear what will benefit you most.
But there’s a much better way. All he has to do is stay glued to FoxNews all day. He’ll find out what he should say when they say it. The number of times he sees something on Fox and then just minutes later adopts it as a talking point to be repeated endlessly should be zero. But he does it all the time. Just a couple of examples:
Even though Trump has access to the best experts in the world on science, medicine, and virtually everything else, he still gets all his ideas from watching TV. Because TV ratings are the measure of his success and greatness.
And the worst of it is, no one at Foxnews actually believes the nonsense they spew out every day. Internally, they have issued the same guidance as any sane organization would: work at home, reduce face-to-face interviews, maintain social distance, wear masks, and so on. Just like normally-informed, half-way intelligent people.
As John Oliver points out in this brilliant takedown, “They only pretend to believe these things on television for money.” It would be one thing if they believed it themselves and sold it to the rest of us, but to spread dangerous, possibly life-threatening disinformation for money? There oughta be a law.
But at least we have the answer to the riddle of a major “News” organization backing a crazy person. Why back a normal guy who will attempt to lead our country the best he can and give you, say, 75-80% of what you’d like, when you can have a guy who will simply obey your directives 100% of the time?
They’re not following him off a cliff. They’re leading him. For money.
Get Off My Lawn 