If you have either read Gabriel Sherman’s The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News-and Divided the Country or watched the Showtime mini-series based on the book, you know Ailes believed Donald Trump’s occupancy of the Oval Office was dependent on his network’s coverage of the 2016 election.  The most telling moment comes in Episode 6 when Ailes calls Trump following the latter’s attack on Fox debate moderator Meghan Kelly and his pledge never to appear on Fox News again.  Ailes reminds Trump, “We can make you or break you.”  Not surprisingly, Trump calls into Fox and Friends the following morning.

Nice story!  But like most everything else associated with Trump it is just not true.  How do I know?  For three and a half years Fox News and the White House have been attached at the hip and not once has Trump’s job approval rating equaled 46.1 percent, his share of the 2016 popular vote.  For most of the Trump era, that figure has hovered between 38 and 42 percent.  Giving Ailes and the Fox News team the benefit of the doubt, they can and did help deliver a sizable share of Trump voters in 2016.  No small accomplishment.

So where did the other four to eight percent come from?  Hens chasing the Fox News ratings.  The mother hen was NBC.  As I have previously documented, the Peacock Network became the normalizer-in-chief thanks to Trump’s hosting Saturday Night Live, his appearance with David Feherty on NBC’s Golf Channel, and the now infamous guest spot on the Tonight Show when host Jimmy Fallon played with Trump’s hair.

But NBC was not alone.  All of the major networks chose schmoozing over newsing.  They would interview Trump without fact-checking or challenging him on many of his most outlandish and clearly inaccurate statements.  For example, when Trump declared he had no business dealings with Russia, not once was he asked directly, “Mr. Trump, then how do you reconcile that with your son’s 2008 statement at a New York real estate conference,  ‘In terms of high-end product influx into the U.S., Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets.’?”

Equally damning were the occasions when news organizations never followed up on Trump promises to clarify situations raised during the campaign.  When questions arose about Melania Trump’s immigration status upon arriving in the U.S., Trump assured attendees at an August 9, 2016 North Carolina rally, “She has got it so documented.  She will hold a news conference over the next few weeks to address the issue.”  We are still waiting.  And it took four yours for Ms. Trump to admit she LIED when she claimed to be a college graduate with a degree in design and architecture from a university in Slovenia.  On August 31, the reference was removed from her bio on the White House website when it was discovered she dropped out after her first year.  I wonder if Melania’s philosophy of honesty is, “Be late than be never.”

I chose this example because since January 2017,  Trump’s Department of Homeland Security (drum roll) “has investigated possible cases of immigration fraud that resulted in U.S. citizenship, sending 95 of these cases to the Department of Justice for prosecution and denaturalization.”  (Source: Bipartisan Policy Center).  In June 2018, Francis Cissna, director of Citizenship and Immigration Services,  told the Associated Press, “We finally have a process in place to get to the bottom of all these bad cases and start denaturalizing people who should not have been naturalized in the first place.”  I wonder if they have a hotline you can call if you know someone who might have lied on their citizenship application.

The bottom line?  It is not what the Fox does.  It is what the hens do.  Step ONE: Stop lobbing soft-boiled eggs.

For what it’s worth.
Dr. ESP