Donald Trump has been watching Fox News again.
On Saturday morning, the president took to Twitter to seemingly regurgitate a segment he saw on the network almost verbatim. The result was a racially-charged screed almost as offensive as his infamous attacks on Ilhan Omar.
“Rep. Elijah Cummings has been a brutal bully, shouting and screaming at the great men & women of Border Patrol about conditions at the Southern Border, when actually his Baltimore district is FAR WORSE and more dangerous”, Trump screeched. “His district is a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess”, the president continued, adding that Cummings should “spend more time in Baltimore” so he can “help clean up this very dangerous & filthy place”.
(Fox)
Like Trump’s July 14 attacks on Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley, the president’s Saturday remarks were a carbon copy of Fox’s coverage. The tiled visual above is from a segment that aired less than an hour before Trump’s tweets.
“I really cannot stress enough how virtually every seemingly random Trump tweet is really just him responding to what he just saw on Fox, particularly the unhinged ones in which he lashes out at perceived enemies”, MMFA reporter Matthew Gertz remarked.
You’ll note that this is very similar to Trump’s attacks on John Lewis from 2017:
Congressman John Lewis should finally focus on the burning and crime infested inner-cities of the U.S. I can use all the help I can get!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 15, 2017
As FiveThiryEight’s Nate Silver was quick to point out, “Cummings’ district has above-average college education rates and home prices, along with a pretty good mix of urban and suburban areas (even some rural), and well-off, working-class and middle-class areas”.
Of course, facts don’t matter to Trump and they arguably matter even less to Fox. What you’re seeing is the pernicious reality distortion loop between the network and the White House continue to spin, to the detriment of public discourse.
Cummings responded gracefully.
“Mr. President, I go home to my district daily. Each morning, I wake up, and I go and fight for my neighbors”, he tweeted. “It is my constitutional duty to conduct oversight of the Executive Branch. But, it is my moral duty to fight for my constituents”.
Cummings’s House Oversight Committee has been the bane of Trump’s existence for months. In April, Trump sued Cummings in a bid to block the committee from obtaining financial records from Mazars USA.
Read more: Trump V. Cummings: Naturally, US President Sues Black Man For Asking About His Finances
After recapping the Fox segment for his 63 million followers, Trump proceeded to suggest that Cummings and/or unnamed others might be stealing money from the government and should be investigated.
“Where is all this money going? How much is stolen?”, Trump wondered. “Investigate this corrupt mess immediately!”
He also said Cummings’s district is “the worst run and most dangerous anywhere in the United States [and] no human being would want to live there”.
Does that ring a bell? It should. In a November 2018 interview with Vanity Fair, Michael Cohen described an incident that he said happened sometime in the “late 2000s”, when the two men were driving through a rough neighborhood in Chicago on the way to a hotel from the airport.
According to Cohen, Trump looked at their surroundings and remarked that “only the blacks could live like this”.
So great to have a racist demagogue as president.
Such an asshole.
Cohen=fake news, bet yur butt.
Who be asshole?
Someone of reason may consider these deplorable conditions (and they are everywhere) an indictment of our economic system rather than Mr. Cummings. Of course, I did use the word “reason” so there goes that argument.
of course, the real question is: where exactly did Fox go to get this footage? i mean, obviously Baltimore is no paradise on earth, but there is barely an area code in this country that you can’t drive 20 miles in one direction or another and get similar footage.
the thing that I think is still very hard for a lot of people to come to terms with is that Fox News is literally lying to people. it’s not spin, it’s not bias, it’s not [fill in the blank] — sure, the footage may be “real”, but the stories are not. it’s all manufactured. they’ve been doing this since inception. it is literally what Ailes set out to do. the whole network is built on it. one of the largest news organizations in our country is allowed by the FCC to perpetuate lies and spread misinformation designed to incite a certain gullible section of the electorate. it is indoctrination, plain and simple. there’s a sense in which it is conceptually similar to radicalization. Trump and Fox are radicalizing people.
I say “very hard for a lot of people to come to terms with” because I don’t think it occurs to most of Fox’s viewership that it isn’t just racist/bigoted/skewed/silly/etc. etc… in many cases it is actual lies. sure, a certain percentage of Fox’s viewership is probably fine with that, but I bet 75% of their viewers would be at least a little bit unnerved if they got a look behind the scenes there. i am absolutely positive that most Fox viewers do not see themselves as stooges that are being played, but that’s exactly how Fox sees its viewers. i went to their Manhattan studio for a taping once (i was there with someone who was doing a segment on Fox Business) and even the prep for a non-political segment was wholly bizarre. it’s not real. it’s literal “fake news”.
Fox viewers are fox viewers, and trump fans are trump fans because it feels good to them; so they do it.
They are addicts, they get high on the oppression and enjoy the suffering those who oppose their dragon.
Something has happened to me – any time I see him or read anything he says I have a flashback to my youth: M-I-C-K-E-Y, M-O-U-S-E! Don, the Mouseketeer, big ears and all, grinning that stupid fake tangerine grin that has never been, nor ever will be an actual human smile.
“Mickey Mouse! (Donald Duck!)
Mickey Mouse! (Donald Duck!)
Forever let us hold our (his) banners high
High, high, high!”
Sieg Heil!
Yep. And we here at Heisenberg have our own “Anonymous(e)”
Thank goodness Trump has never seen Season 4 of The Wire.
In all seriousness, though, the central question people cannot agree on is what the proper function of “news” actually is. Is it supposed to be a dispassionate purveyor of information, striving for objectivity? Is it supposed to be biased based on the perspectives of its intended market? Is it supposed to always be adversarial in order to hold power to account? Is it supposed to be as entertaining as possible in order to commoditize itself to generate the greatest possible profit? Understanding this as a culture will help us determine if news is a public good or not, and how or if it should be regulated.
In a free market “news” is supposed to be what the consumer wants to consume. I was as big of a conservative republican you could find until Rush Limbaugh and Fox started cheer leading for invading Iraq. I stopped consuming. I eventually questioned my entire political thought spectrum and came out of the worm hole as an independent. Learning the macro, learning what drives equity, following the money found me doing my own research. I became isolated and out of touch with the “news”, even local.
Has the left news figured out yet that Hillary did not lose because they did not understand how poor uneducated white people felt. The last time i checked in with CNN they were still reacting to that self inflicted mythology. Their penance for not delivering?
Regulate? Stay away from my Heisenberg News Feed!
“In a free market “news” is supposed to be what the consumer wants to consume.”
huh? that’s like saying “in a free market, peanut butter is supposed to be what people want to consume”. No. Peanut butter is supposed to be peanut butter. That’s why it’s illegal to market something as “peanut butter” that isn’t really peanut butter. You put out your brand of peanut butter and if people like it better than somebody else’s brand, then they consume yours. but yours is still peanut butter.
you seem to be falling into the same trap that I was talking about here. Fox and Rush Limbaugh aren’t “news”. forget war with Iraq. what about Tucker Carlson telling you panda bears are, quote, “vicious and sex crazed with a taste for human flesh”? the point is: Fox isn’t news. it’s propaganda at best, and it shouldn’t be allowed on television if the sole purpose is to incite people to violence and hatred. this is so blatantly obvious to anyone with any semblance of intelligence that it’s mind boggling to try to explain it to people. Fox is no different from Alex Jones. and just like Alex Jones, they should be banned from social media and television and Youtube because they are dangerous. point, blank, period.