The Symbiosis of Stupid between Donald Trump, American president, and the Fox News Channel has come to define our era in a way that rivals The Death of Shame. Now that pretty much every organization the president has ever run is under investigation—from the already shuttered Trump Foundation and Trump University, to the Trump campaign, the Trump inaugural committee, the Trump transition, and the Trump Organization—he has begun to sink deeper and deeper into the infotainment vortex. He has correctly identified that maintaining his grip on political power may be the best way to keep himself out of the slammer, as a sitting president cannot, according to current Justice Department doctrine, be indicted.
He has also correctly ascertained that part of his strategy for maintaining that power must be to maximize the diameter of The Bubble. The president must rope as many people as possible into the void of Fox News and talk radio, where he is one of the great presidents ever—many people are saying the best, except maybe Abraham Lincoln—and all opposition to him is based in petty grievances from Liberal Snowflakes in The Fake News Media. He has, for years now, tuned into cable news for between four and eight hours a day. It is his primary source for information. More recently, he has taken to echo-tweeting whatever they say on Fox & Friends or Hannity, spreading The Gospel According to Meatheads to his nearly 60 million followers on the Tweet Machine.
But over the last week, he has gone to another level in his efforts to draw unsuspecting travelers closer to The Bubble's event horizon. The President of the United States has begun directly tweeting video clips from his favorite TV channel—11 clips in four days, to be exact. And it all kicked off on Saturday, as it always had to, with a segment from the Fox Business program hosted by Lou Dobbs, the fascist Benjamin Button.
Remember when these folks cast themselves as Constitutional Conservatives while lodging occasionally-justified complaints about Barack Obama's expansion of executive power? Now the question of whether Trump's move to declare a phony national emergency to seize funds not appropriated by Congress to build his Big, Beautiful Wall is constitutional is entirely moot. (Hint: circumventing the "power of the purse" assigned to the Legislative Branch in the Constitution is, just as it appears, an assault on the Constitution.) But it should be no surprise.
Dobbs has staked out a position as perhaps Trump's number-one cable-news authoritarian apparatchik, at one point urging him to "sweep aside the recalcitrant left" and seize the power. That is, do whatever you want, my King. No wonder his discussion with the former head of ICE begins and ends with Trump wanted to do this, and Trump is great, so this is great. By the way, when they talk about the president fighting his own party, they mean he vetoed a resolution that a dozen Republican senators backed that rejected his false national emergency declaration as an unconstitutional power-grab.
It was actually back-to-back Dobbs Time on the Presidential Feed:
Wow. Good to know.
(A fascinating part of The Dobbs Experience is that he doesn't actually ask these guests questions. He embarks on a pro-Trump monologue and then says, "Your thoughts?" Translation: your turn to praise.)
After a brief interlude where the president tweeted that He's Not Mad, He's Actually Laughing at the fact House Republicans unanimously voted for a resolution calling for the release of the Mueller Report—contradicting previous presidential messages–it was back to serving as a local Fox affiliate:
Yes, they are yelling about Hillary Clinton's demonic email server in the Year of Our Lord 2019. And the president is tweeting the clip.
Later that day, it was time for clip number four: another We're Just Asking Questions session about Hillary Clinton's emails.
Notice they are just saying words like "server" and "Peter Strzok" and "the Clinton Foundation" in excited tones. That's really all that's required. Again, the President of the United States megaphones it to the world.
After that, it was almost a whole day before he once again distributed Fox's programming for them:
Here's an Immigration Expert who knows all about how immigration is "destroying our communities," like his. Thomas M. Hodgson, the chyron helpfully tells us, is sheriff of Bristol County, Massachusetts.
The president took a break from distribution on Sunday to go absolutely intergalactic, firing off 28 tweets of varying comprehensibility. (Not to worry: the official Twitter account of the White House also shares clips from Fox News now.) But he was back Monday with a clip from Maria Bartiromo, a once relatively normal Fox Business anchor who has attended The Lou Dobbs School of Authoritarian Toadyism over the last few years.
"...as our viewers know very well, and our viewers have followed this for upwards of a year and a half, and they know, from the beginning, that there was no collusion."
It's nice of Bartiromo to lay out the feedback loop that the president and all his fans have been roped into over the years. She premises the entire discussion on God's Own Truth: that there was no collusion—there could be no collusion—and that this discussion would be geared towards reinforcing that fact. Bartiromo sort of gives away the game, though, when she says viewers have been following this for a while, so they know there's no collusion, but then clarifies that they always knew there was no collusion. It's almost like subsequent revelations in the investigation—the Trump Tower meeting, the Trump Tower Moscow deal, numerous presidential associates pleading guilty to lying about their contacts with Russians—are irrelevant to this viewpoint. NO COLLUSION!
Later that day, Trump shared a 7-and-a-half minute interview between talk-radio shock jock Mark Levin and former Education Secretary William Bennett. They talked about how great Trump is. Then it was time for a clip from Tucker Carlson, now known for his own charming antics on talk radio, and whom the founder of neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer said was "literally our greatest ally" who every night was putting on "basically 'Daily Stormer: The Show.'" The topic this time, however, was The Russia Hoax.
While it's amazing that Carlson granted the birther conspiracy wasn't good for the country—we can't expect him to admit it was shamelessly racist—the rest of this is a load of conspiratorial nonsense for one key reason: "The Dirty Dossier" did not launch the FBI's probe into whether Trump's associates conspired with agents of the Russian government in 2016. That kicked off when Trump campaign foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos got shitfaced in a London bar and blabbed to Australia's senior diplomat in the U.K. that Russia had dirt on Hillary Clinton in the form of stolen emails.
Fox News Primetime continued to air on the Presidential Twitter with an Anger Panel from Sean Hannity about the Deep State. The following day, Tuesday, we got another Hannity clip about The Witch Hunt. But the president's new gig as a Fox News producer could only end one way: with a clip from Jesse Watters, the Ron Burgundy of White Resentment News:
Needless to say, this is riddled with nonsense. Comedian Bill Maher did make that idiotic plea for a recession, but at some point, Watters just starts throwing out the names of media executives with the expectation that they are prima facie Trump-haters. While many in The Liberal Media are liberals, the people that control large corporations probably aren't so sure a bet. Meanwhile, contrary to Watters' wisdom, Trump's approval ratings are well below Obama's at this stage (39 to 47, according to Gallup) and he has not magically unleashed the power of the U.S. economy. The stock and job markets look quite good, though wages are still lagging, but all of this is largely a continuation of a trend from Obama's second term.
Watters, you may remember, is the enduring skidmark left by Bill O'Reilly when the latter was forced out of the network amid an avalanche of sexual misconduct allegations. Watters made his name being a professional asshole on O'Reilly's program, doing man-on-the-street interviews with unsuspecting strangers who would sometimes be stumped by his mind-numbing idiocy. This came to an ugly crescendo with a gobsmackingly racist segment taped in New York's Chinatown.
These are the worst people on television, now getting an expanded platform thanks to the President of the United States. The amount of misinformation and outright stupidity now flowing through the hellscape of the Presidential Twitter Feed is almost beyond comprehension. The president is tweeting dozens of times a day himself, often echoing whatever he sees on the teevee, but now he—or someone he employs—is just shoveling the shit directly.
All of this is putting our republic under severe strain, and not just because the president continually attacks the separation of powers or the independent judicial system or the free press. What this era has exposed is that democratic self-government requires we all adhere to some principle of truth—that it exists, and that the many things we have learned about our world through observation and the scientific method piece together to form something we can all grant, with some disagreements, constitutes reality. This theory of the world is not compatible with Jesse Watters monologues, or with a President of the United States who shares them as the Word of God.
Jack Holmes is a senior staff writer at Esquire, where he covers politics and sports. He also hosts Unapocalypse, a show about solutions to the climate crisis.
