President Donald Trump has deployed Nationwide Guard troops to Chicago and different Democrat-run cities over the objections of native leaders.
To justify his actions, Trump has falsely claimed that crime is surging and that protests are uncontrolled, lambasting Democratic leaders for purportedly ignoring the issue. This isn’t true in Chicago, and fact-checkers have famous Trump’s rhetoric runs counter to a common pattern downward in crime.
Trump, who is understood for his prolific mendacity, has typically made critical coverage choices like this based mostly not on info however on his TV-viewing habits.
Trump is hooked on TV
As an example, on Sept. 27, Trump directed Secretary of Protection Pete Hegseth to make use of assets to “to provide all necessary Troops to protect War ravaged Portland, and any of our ICE Facilities under siege from attack by Antifa, and other domestic terrorists.”
Protests exterior the Portland ICE facility on Sept. 27, after President Donald Trump’s earlier announcement that he’ll ship troops to Portland.
In contrast, Portland residents have been importing movies that present town within the throes of normalcy, with town’s eclectic mixture of residents stress-free and having fun with themselves—removed from residing in a “War ravaged” metropolis.
A discerning Fox viewer could perceive that displaying the identical footage time and again doesn’t imply new cases of an occasion are occurring, however Trump probably isn’t that form of viewer.
Fox Information habitually lies about American cities
In 2011, Fox repeatedly confirmed a single picture of a migrant climbing over a border wall as a part of the community’s campaign to say the border was broad open beneath then-President Barack Obama (a method that continued beneath former President Joe Biden).
It was round this time that Trump was offering commentary to Fox, selling racist conspiracies about Obama’s birthplace. He later grew to become fixated on the notion that migrants had been utilizing a porous border wall as their technique to enter america, and the thought of constructing an entire wall between the U.S. and Mexico grew to become central to his 2016 presidential marketing campaign.
In his first time period, the Trump-Fox suggestions loop—as Media Issues for America senior fellow Matt Gertz has termed it—got here to life. Trump watched the community religiously and constructed his presidency round its obsessions.
President Donald Trump excursions a piece of the southern border wall in 2019.
When Fox instructed Trump he wanted to pardon or present clemency for criminals, he largely did as instructed. And regardless of having all of America’s intelligence infrastructure at his fingertips, Trump based mostly his North Korea coverage—together with the specter of nuclear strikes—seemingly based mostly on what he watched on Fox, typically live-tweeting his scorching takes.
Fox determined that migrant caravans had been heading north to the U.S. border, so Trump targeted the total power of his presidency on the problem as nicely, taking cues from “Fox & Friends,” which is named his favourite of the Fox slate of programming.
Habit turns to motion
In his second time period, Trump has not weaned himself off of Fox.
Often, Trump and his household have had public disagreements with Fox, and this has mistakenly been interpreted by some as a critical rift. As an example, Donald Trump Jr. not too long ago moaned that the community doesn’t worship Trump sufficient, and Trump is at present suing Fox proprietor Rupert Murdoch over the Wall Avenue Journal’s reporting on his connections to accused intercourse trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
However on the contrary, Fox and Trump largely proceed to behave as one. Trump has stocked his administration with faces he watched on Fox, transferring figures like Pete Hegseth from “Fox & Friends” to main the Division of Protection.
In response, Fox expresses near-constant help for Trump, decoding his many failures as successes. As an example, when Trump flopped and lied in entrance of the United Nations in September, the community hailed him for supposedly dropping “raw truth” on world leaders.
