Tag Archives: Fox News Channel

2020 General Election, Donald Trump, Republicans, Tribalism

Who do you believe? Donald Trump (+GOP leaders, Fox News, Levin, Limbaugh…) or your own eyes?

Image: CBS News.

Sixty-six percent of registered voters blame Donald Trump (either a great deal, 55%, or somewhat, 11%) for the storming of the Capitol building. The consensus of opinion is hardly surprising: Trump was there. He had urged his supporters to come to the Capitol on January 6 — “Be there, will be wild!” he tweeted — after spending months crying fraud after losing the election decisively to Biden (a “fake president”), trying to overturn the results in court after court, in appeals to governors, state legislators, secretaries of state, and others. He implored the crowd of his supporters on January 6:

Now it is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy. And after this, we’re going to walk down and I’ll be there with you. We’re going to walk down–

We’re going to walk down. Anyone you want, but I think right here, we’re going to walk down to the Capitol–

And we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them.

Because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong.

He meandered through a string of lies about the results of the election, made-up charges of voting fraud, complaints of disloyal Republican officials, and — despite his pledge to march with the crowd — drove directly back to the White House. The revved-up Trump enthusiasts took it from there.

CBS.
CBS.
ABC.

Only 28% of Republicans blame Trump for the sacking of the U.S. Capitol. Instead, a majority — 52% — of Republicans blame Joe Biden: 35% place a great deal of blame on Biden, while 17% say he is somewhat to blame.

Chart from YouGov.

There’s nothing in the water that Republicans drink that explains this perception. Rather, Republican voters are — unsurprisingly — listening to the national leadership of their party: the President, Republican senators and members of Congress, and most emphatically, Fox News Channel, along with conservative talk radio and websites on the right trafficking in alternate facts. And these sources have been on a raging campaign of disinformation for months, with nary a dissenting voice.

This is their tribe. And though it was folks at the Trump rally, waving Trump flags (American flags, Confederate flags, Gadsden flags) and banners (“Stop the steal,” “Jesus is My Savior, Trump is My President,” “Unleash the Kraken,” “Q”), and enthusiastically cheering Trump on, who marched to the Capitol, broke through police lines, smashed through doors and windows, and trashed the place — Joe Biden (the fake president), the man who somehow, someway stole an election (without leaving a trace of evidence), was responsible.

To come to any other conclusion contradicts what these voters are convinced they know. For certain. After hearing it day in, day out.

The message from the most influential source (apart from Trump himself) — Fox News Channel — for those in the bubble, is delivered slickly, professionally, with the look and feel of a genuine news report — with clear intent to deceive. When the actual news is inconvenient, shift attention to something else (even something manufactured out of whole cloth).

Kevin Drum offers a summary of the disinformation technique as mastered by Laura Ingraham:

In a nutshell, it goes like this:

    1. Introduce scary story about minor state legislation that has no chance of ever going anywhere.
    2. Invent out of whole cloth a segue into racism as a public health issue.
    3. Conclude that liberals want to lock up white people they disapprove of.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how the pros do it.

Editor’s note: more to come.

(Image above headline: ABC News.)

2020 General Election, Democrats, Republicans

Fox News reveals that most Americans have liberal views on the issues. That’s not Fox’s problem.

Folks on the left had fun on Tuesday night posting images on Twitter of the results of polling by Fox News Channel. Most Americans, the survey found, are decidedly liberal on a host of issues.

Changing to a government-run health care plan: 39% strongly favor; 33% somewhat favor; 14% somewhat oppose; 15% strongly oppose.

Supreme Court action on Roe v. Wade: 71% leave as is; 29% overturn it.

U.S. gun laws should be: 55% more strict; 12% less strict; 33% kept as is.

What should happen to illegal immigrants in the U.S.? 72% pathway to citizenship; 28% deportation.

Increasing government spending on green & renewable energy: 37% strongly favor; 33% somewhat favor; 16% somewhat oppose; 15% strongly oppose.

Donald Trump’s approach to Russia: 4% too tough; 58% not tough enough; 38% about right.

And so on. What Fox (and viewers) discovered is a phenomenon that’s goes back decades. Here’s how Matthew Grossmann and David A. Hopkins described it in Asymmetric Politics:

The American electorate consistently holds collectively left-of-center views on most policy issues even as it leans to the right on more general measures of ideology—as Lloyd A. Free and Hadley Cantril observed nearly five decades ago, the public is simultaneously operationally liberal and symbolically conservative.

Operationally liberal: when asked their opinions about political issues, majorities consistently take the liberal side (as did the folks FNC polled). In other words, when confronted with specific issues, they approve of public policies that actively address or remedy the situation (and they do so even if, in the abstract, they embrace small government or rugged individualism — symbolically conservative positions).

Symbolically conservative: when asked to characterize their ideology or philosophical outlook, more Americans say they are ‘Conservative’ than ‘Liberal’ — that’s how they view themselves. They embrace traditional American values, which the GOP has branded as its own (and runs with year after year, rather than emphasizing its unpopular policies).

Huge numbers of Republican voters and Trump supporters are operationally liberal and symbolically conservative. They vote for the party that opposes their views and interests. There’s nothing new here. It’s the starting point of Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas?

Unfortunately for Democrats, adopting positions on a range of issues that most Americans are in agreement with hardly guarantees support at the polls. As Grossmann and Hopkins explain: the pendulum swings back and forth (with Democrats winning one cycle, Republicans another) with an electorate that sometimes makes a decision based on specific Democratic issues (in 2018 healthcare was critical), sometimes based on abstract Republican messaging (often, as negative polarization has increased, in broad strokes that demean their opponents: socialists, radicals, elitists).

The level of negative partisanship is so high now, it is harder than ever to break through to the other side to make ones case. That’s a huge problem for the Democratic Party, which Alex Pareene addresses with a question, ‘What if it barely matters what Democrats “talk about” or “campaign on”?‘ His answer isn’t encouraging:

It seems possible … that voters no longer believe that the Democratic Party represents a coalition that includes the working class, and that even if the party puts forward Democratic candidates who support pro-worker policy, it simply will not suffice to reach or convince voters.

It’s inevitable that the FNC mix of propaganda and actual news will clash from time to time. While amusing, that’s not really a problem for the network. What Tuesday night’s polling results show, however, is something that Democrats must grapple with, if the party is ever to regain the White House while enjoying majorities in both houses of Congress. With such a closely divided nation, a constitutional structure that advantages vast stretches of land rather than people, and an opposition party bent on obstruction and paralysis, Democrats have to figure out how to gain the support of folks from red states, who would actually benefit from Democratic policies.

Donald Trump

A “Manipulated Media” tweet exposes FNC’s disinformation in service of the Republican Party

[Editor’s note: original headline revised to avoid confusion.]

Sean Hannity, one of Fox News Channel’s most popular personalities and a presidential advisor (“I never claimed to be a journalist,” he says), found himself the subject of mockery in a Meidas Touch video. The video splices the FNC star’s words with clips of the President of the United States, to create a more accurate commentary than anything we can expect to hear on Fox.

Hannity complained to Twitter (since his words were directed at Trump’s enemies, not at the man himself), which responded by posting a Manipulated Media warning. Meidas Touch was undaunted.

Although FNC has a history of employing manipulated media in its broadcasts, something more significant is going on with the outlet: Fox News Channel manipulates news and information, facts and context, to distract and deceive its conservative audience (which has been trained not to trust what are clearly more trustworthy sources of news, information, facts, and context). That manipulation is the raison dêtre of FNC.

Journalists (like doctors and scientists) make mistakes, but they strive to get things right. “Conservative media do not embrace this journalistic mission (or the ethos of science) to inform accurately. Their job, in the conservative media ecosystem, is to bolster faith in their leader, to cast doubt on facts that might undermine that faith, and to attack and disparage anyone who contradicts the message of the day.”

(Image: Sean Hannity with his conspiracy chart via Vox.com.)

Donald Trump, Republicans, Tribalism

North Dakota Governor Burgum rejects senseless dividing line: “We’re all in this together”

“In our state there’s no requirements regarding wearing masks … and we’re all in this together. And there’s only one battle we’re fighting. And that’s the battle of the virus.

I would really love to see a North Dakota that we could just skip this thing that other parts of the nation are going through where they’re trading a divide – either it’s ideological or political or something – around mask versus no mask.

This is a – I would say – senseless dividing line. And I would ask people to try to dial up your empathy and your understanding.

If someone is wearing a mask, they’re not doing it to represent what political party they’re in or what candidates they support. They might be doing it because they’ve got a 5-year-old child who’s been going through cancer treatments. They might have vulnerable adults in their life who currently have COVID, and they’re fighting.

And so, again, I would just love to see our state, as part of being North Dakota Smart, also be North Dakota Kind, North Dakota Empathetic, North Dakota Understanding to do this thing. Because if somebody wants to wear a mask, there should be no mask shaming. You should look at them and say: That person’s wearing a mask because for them there’s additional risk in their life.

. . .

The first thing that somebody ought to assume is they’re doing it because they’ve got people in their life that they love and that they’re trying to take care of. And I just think, let’s just start there.” — Governor Doug Burgum

That a Republican governor would make these remarks is newsworthy because, “In 21st century American politics, truth is tribal.” And the Republican tribe — of Donald Trump and Fox News Channel — have contradicted and criticized the judgments of doctors, scientists, and public health authorities regarding the risks posed by a worldwide pandemic, whenever those judgments have conflicted with the Republican message of the day.

The message today is, Get back to work, go out and spend (and never mind the risks). But in the rarefied world of the Fox News on-air personalities and of White House personnel, best practices (as developed by medicine and science) aren’t rejected quite as cavalierly. Not behind the scenes and away from the cameras.

By late February at Fox News headquarters, the CEO had directed the installation of hand-sanitizing stations and the disinfecting of offices, and cancelled an event to pitch ad sales to Madison Avenue. Rupert Murdoch called off his 89th birthday party to keep himself and his friends safe.

At the White House, President Trump (and those around him) are tested regularly. There is even contact tracing and a requirement to wear masks. While touring the Ford plant last week, Trump explained why he wasn’t wearing a mask. “It’s not necessary. Everybody’s been tested and I’ve been tested. In fact, I was tested this morning. So it’s not necessary.”

The President tours a Ford plant.

The message could be: We’re all in this together. The priority could be: let’s put testing and tracing, and social isolation when infection is found, in place for everyone. The priority could be: let’s ensure that PPE is available for all health care workers, grocery workers, and the men and women in meat packing plants — for everyone being urged to get out and reopen the economy.

The public message of the Trump reelection campaign — Reopen the economy — has polarized the country, because ensuring safety has not been a priority. There is no plan to defeat the coronavirus or to protect the public (in either tribe). Instead, we get denial — from the Trump camp and Fox News — signaling to the base that there is no threat, or that the threat is overblown.

So, mask shaming has become a thing. In a world where WME — the white male effect — is a thing, where doctors and scientists and government experts are ridiculed, where conspiracies are pushed and hoaxes alleged, where anti-intellectualism is endemic, where public protesters (with and without guns) pointedly refuse to take steps to protect themselves and others (by wearing masks or socially distancing), in this world, the President seals himself off in the West Wing and protects himself when out of public view.

Anonymous photo behind the scenes at Ford.

As we approach the ghastly milestone of 100,000 deaths, the United States continues to lead the world in the number of infections and fatalities from COVID-19 — a testament to the failure of national leadership.

Governor Burgum, your heart and your head are in the right place.

Donald Trump, Off the Rails, Republicans

“I’m not a doctor, but I’m, like, a person that has a good you-know-what” — President Donald Trump

The President of the United States brainstorms at a coronavirus briefing.

Jesse Watters: The President’s spitballing and he’s asking questions. ‘Would it be possible to maybe target the virus through a cure using certain ingredients and using sunlight?‘ You didn’t believe the President was putting anyone in danger, did you?

Dr. Deborah Birx: No. He gets new information. He likes to talk that through out loud. And really have that dialogue. And so that’s what dialogue he was having. I think he just saw the information at the time, immediately before the press conference. And he was still digesting that information.

Out loud on live television in a briefing to provide information and reassurance to the American public.

While some of the usual suspects jumped to Trump’s defense — among the most relentless, Scott Adams, who has decided that critics who disagree about the brilliance of Trump’s riffing on a cure, must lack intelligence …

— but mostly, even those in Trump’s camp, perceived the obvious: this wasn’t the time or place for musings that could have been spoken by a grade school student after learning that sunlight is a disinfectant. Parsing the words to win a Twitter argument misses the point. (Of course this is straight out of a well-worn playbook: missing the point is the point.)

Jonathan Chait suggested:

If Trump’s presidency has demonstrated any scientific principle, it is the Dunning-Kruger effect, which describes how people who have a low ability to perform a task tend to overestimate their own ability to do it — or, to oversimplify it, they are too incompetent to recognize their own incompetence. “Maybe you can, maybe you can’t,” Trump allowed. “I’m not a doctor. But I’m like a person that has a good you know what,” tapping his head to indicate his gigantic brain.

Philip Bump and Ashley Parker (“Thirteen hours of Trump: the president fills briefings with attacks and boasts, but little empathy”) describe Thursday’s coronavirus briefing:

President Trump strode to the lectern in the White House briefing room Thursday and, for just over an hour, attacked his rivals, dismissing Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden as a “sleepy guy in a basement of a house” and lambasting the media as “fake news” and “lamestream.”

He showered praise on himself and his team, repeatedly touting the “great job” they were doing as he spoke of the “tremendous progress” being made toward a vaccine and how “phenomenally” the nation was faring in terms of mortality.

What he did not do was offer any sympathy for the 2,081 Americans who were reported dead from the coronavirus on that day alone — among nearly 53,000 Americans who have perished since the pandemic began.

They document, in detail, how these briefings have morphed into (what Parker has dubbed) the Coronavirus Show, featuring self-congratulations, attacks on the media and political rivals, fabrications by the President, and often medical advice from a man who is “not a doctor.”

“Like his campaign rallies, the president’s portion of the daily briefings are rife with misinformation. Over the past three weeks, 87 of his comments or answers — a full 47 minutes — included factually inaccurate comments.”

This is what passes for leadership in a country that with any other president in recent memory (or with John McCain, Mitt Romney, or Hillary Clinton) — would have by this time (even if one or another of them might have been caught flat-footed initially) a national strategy to defeat the coronavirus.

Moreover, the world is a witness. The pandemic:

is shaking fundamental assumptions about American exceptionalism — the special role the United States played for decades after World War II as the reach of its values and power made it a global leader and example to the world.

Today it is leading in a different way: More than 840,000 Americans have been diagnosed with Covid-19 and at least 46,784 have died from it, more than anywhere else in the world.

Yet Trump’s catastrophic failures, and his aversion to accountability, are not as significant politically as the Republican Party’s continuing obeisance to him. Never mind the mounting deaths — soon to exceed the number of Americans killed in the Vietnam War over two decades. Never mind our country’s declining influence and security across the globe. The GOP is getting tax cuts, deregulation, and judicial appointments.

Donald Trump, Off the Rails

One constant in Trump’s erratic vacillation: A furious flight from accountability

Accountability is anathema to Donald Trump. Between now and November 3, he will frantically flee from even a modicum of responsibility for the tens of thousands of deaths from coronavirus that will continue to take place on his watch. Fox News Channel, with the rest of the conservative media universe, the White House, the Trump campaign, and every Republican official in Washington will pull out all the stops to prevent Trump from being called into account for the ongoing disaster he is presiding over.

The President’s dithering, fabrications, and missteps have aggravated the public health calamity:

The Trump administration received its first formal notification of the outbreak of the coronavirus in China on Jan. 3. Within days, U.S. spy agencies were signaling the seriousness of the threat to Trump by including a warning about the coronavirus — the first of many — in the President’s Daily Brief.

And yet, it took 70 days from that initial notification for Trump to treat the coronavirus not as a distant threat or harmless flu strain well under control, but as a lethal force that had outflanked America’s defenses and was poised to kill tens of thousands of citizens. That more-than-two-month stretch now stands as critical time that was squandered. the coronavirus

Trump’s baseless assertions in those weeks, including his claim that it would all just “miraculously” go away, sowed significant public confusion and contradicted the urgent messages of public health experts.

As the pandemic spread around the globe and deep into our country, Donald Trump denied and diminished the grave threat to Americans. Jeremy Peters reports on how conservative media amplified, and sometimes inspired, Trump’s tall tales. This is part of Job #1 – venerating Donald Trump and impugning his critics – for Fox News Channel, conservative talk radio, et al. (Accurate information isn’t a priority.)

Peters describes a four step process: blame China (while sometimes adding conspiracy theories to the tales told); play down the risks (just as Donald Trump did for weeks and weeks, until his turn on March 16—though he still shifts back to denial); share ‘survivor’ stories (coronavirus is really no worse than a “bad cold”); and then, when the infection rate and the body count make denial impossible to sustain, pivot and blame the left: the President is a victim of his political enemies.

The pervasiveness of the denial among many of Mr. Trump’s followers from early in the outbreak, and their sharp pivot to finding fault with an old foe once the crisis deepened, is a pattern that one expert in the spread of misinformation said resembled a textbook propaganda campaign.

As the rightwing echo chamber swerves from one fable to the next, yesterday’s account is forgotten. (We’ve always been at war with Eurasia.) Consistency and coherence, truth and facts, don’t matter. But the shifting narratives have this in common: they stoke a fundamental partisan divide. It’s us vs. them. Trump and his conservative base vs. Democrats/liberals/the left, that is to say, the enemies of America.

Peters references Rush Limbaugh’s denunciation of the Four Corners of Deceit (government, academia, science, and the media), which – as it happens – are sources of information independent of the right’s narrative of the day (whatever that happens to be). Limbaugh, with a bigger audience than FNC, deserves a gold star (to go along with his Presidential Medal of Freedom) for yeoman service to the misinformation campaign on behalf of Donald Trump.

Limbaugh, February 24: “Folks, this coronavirus thing, I want to try to put this in perspective for you. It looks like the coronavirus is being weaponized as yet another element to bring down Donald Trump. Now, I want to tell you the truth about the coronavirus. You think I’m wrong about this? You think I’m missing it by saying that’s — Yeah, I’m dead right on this. The coronavirus is the common cold, folks.”

And March 27: “We didn’t elect a president to defer to a bunch of health experts that we don’t know. And how do we know they’re even health experts? Well, they wear white lab coats, and they’ve been in the job for a while, and they’re at the CDC and they’re at the NIH, and they’re up, well — yeah, they’ve been there, and they are there. But has there been any job assessment for them? They’re just assumed to be the best because they’re in government. But, these are all kinds of things that I’ve been questioning.”

The duplicity, the conspiracy theories, the eagerness to play the victim: the charade is over the top because the failure is catastrophic. Donald Trump, who doesn’t focus much beyond the next news cycle, has abdicated a leadership role in this crisis (though he relishes his time on center stage at the daily coronavirus briefings). I noted last month that the United States had no national strategy for combating the coronavirus. It still doesn’t, because President Trump insists that the nation’s governors are responsible for protecting the public, while the federal government will play only a “backup” role.

“Massive amounts of medical supplies, even hospitals and medical centers, are being delivered directly to states and hospitals by the Federal Government. Some have insatiable appetites & are never satisfied (politics?). Remember, we are a backup for them….”

The coronavirus is a national threat, which doesn’t recognize state boundaries. Containment – to be effective – can’t be a patchwork. It makes little sense to fob off responsibility to 50 state governors, who are placed in a position of outbidding each other, and FEMA, for test kits, personal protective equipment, ventilators, and other scarce equipment, as the infection spreads throughout the country. The President of the United States, who possesses authority and commands resources beyond the reach of any governor, could – if he chose – take charge. But he doesn’t.

“Remember, we are a backup for them.”

Doctors, scientists, public health experts, including senior officials in past administrations of both parties, agree that the Trump administration’s disavowal of responsibility will cost thousands of American lives. The failures are ongoing, increasing the death toll (“Trump administration’s lack of a unified coronavirus strategy will cost lives, say a dozen experts”):

The Trump administration has declined to nationalize the medical logistics system and hasn’t executed a national testing strategy. Although the president likely lacks the legal authority to impose a national stay-at-home order, he has declined to urge each governor to do so. Seven states haven’t imposed one, including Texas.

The results are clear: Governors and doctors report critical shortages of gear, it remains very difficult to get tested for the virus, and some Americans still aren’t heeding guidance to keep away from others.

That NBC report references an editorial this week in the New England Journal of Medicine, “Ten Weeks to Crush the Curve,” proposing a strategy for eradicating the coronavirus in a “forceful, focused campaign.” Donald Trump has declared himself a “wartime president” battling an “invisible enemy.” NEJM insists, “It’s a war we should fight to win.” The first step, the step that only a president can take: “Establish unified command.”

This country has never had a Commander in Chief in wartime who deferred to states and localities for leadership. Our erratic, irresolute president can’t settle on a strategy for more than a few hours. This makes little sense, though it is a means to distance Trump from the consequences of COVID-19. It facilitates a dodge of responsibility.

More troubling, Trump’s three years of misrule have undermined the administration’s capacity for effective action. He has hollowed out the executive branch, traded competence for sycophancy, and enfeebled the federal government.

Susan Glasser tells the story in the New Yorker:

“When you are done being angry about all the crazy, nasty, inconsistent, and untrue things that Donald Trump says each day about the coronavirus and other matters, remember that the flood of words is cover for an Administration that in some ways barely exists relative to its predecessors, especially when it comes to crucial areas of domestic, economic, and international security—or even straightforward crisis management. Turnover at the upper levels of Trump’s White House stands at eighty-three per cent, according to a Brookings Institution tracker. In his Cabinet, Trump has had far more turnover than Presidents Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama, and both George Bushes. The capacity of the federal government to respond to this catastrophe—even if Trump had been so inclined—has never been weaker. The virus was not of Trump’s making, but his government’s incoherent, disorganized response to it was utterly predictable.” [My emphasis.]

It is not just the White House that has lost capacity. Vacancies in the Treasury Department have already begun to impair administration economic policy. And, as Jonathan Bernstein suggests, Trump’s economic policies are already shaky:

Trump … likes the idea of big, unprecedented action, which is a perfect match for the current situation. But in three-plus years, he still doesn’t appear have any idea how the government works, what he’s supposed to do to make things happen, or anything about the economy outside of how it affects him personally.

Donald Trump’s shortcomings have been evident for all to see throughout the past three-plus years. National Republicans, making a cynical trade-off, have given him a pass. With the arrival of COVID-19, the country is paying dearly for Republicans’ political calculations.

Now, still all-in with Trump, the party will scramble furiously to avoid a reckoning.

(Image: On April 1, Trump brought out the generals.)

Donald Trump, Off the Rails, Republicans, Tribalism

Donald Trump & his Republican Party have failed to protect the country

The Executive Branch of the government of the United States is uniquely empowered to plan, implement, and coordinate measures to ensure the nation’s public health. The Trump administration has failed miserably to do so.

I agree with Senator Tom Cotton (circa February 28), “The single most consequential and valuable thing done to stop this virus from already spreading throughout the United States was when President Trump decided to shut down travel to China last month.”

Unfortunately, that action— taken January 31 — was hardly sufficient to keep the virus from spreading throughout the country. It would be bad enough if all Trump did in the intervening weeks (until his abrupt shift on March 16) was sit on his hands. Instead, for weeks in his every public utterance, he lied about the state of affairs in the country and diminished the increasing threat.

“We have it totally under control. One person from China and it’s going to be just fine.” (January 22) “We pretty much shut it down — coming in from China.” (February 2)

“You know, in April supposedly it dies with the hotter weather.” (February 10) “When it gets warm, historically, it’s been able to kill the virus.” (February 14)

“People are getting better. They’re all getting better.” (February 25)

“And the 15 — within a couple of days, it’s going to be down close to zero.” (February 26) “It’s going to disappear one day. It’s like a miracle: it will disappear.” (February 27) “And you’ll be fine.” (February 28)

“They’re going to have vaccines, I think, relatively soon.” (March 2) “Not only the vaccines, but also the therapies. Therapies are sort of another word for cure.” (March 3)

“We’re talking about very small numbers in the United States.” (March 4) “Our numbers are lower than just about anybody’s.” (March 6)

“It’s really working out. And lotta good things are gonna happen.” (March 10)

“And we are responding with great speed and professionalism.” (March 11)

“It’s gonna go away.” (March 12)

“No, I don’t take responsibility at all.” (March 13)

“They’ll all be great. We’re going to be so good.” (March 15)

“This came up — it came up so suddenly.” (March 16)

And Fox News Channel, the loudest, most influential voice of the Republican Party (next to Trump himself), reinforced the President’s message every step of the way:

News reports of the coronavirus, in the view of Fox News’ personalities week after week, was a hoax manufactured by Democrats to attack the President, an illness no more worrisome than the flu, an overblown brouhaha of scant significance. Dismiss, distract, diminish, disparage. Unfortunately, there is much evidence that the President of the United States often takes his cues from his favorite TV network.

This charade has been incredibly effective at convincing the Republican base. The rest of us, not so much. A recent Axios/Survey Monkey poll, which asked whom Americans trusted to protect them from the coronavirus, found high confidence in prominent health agencies:

Centers for Disease Control — 75%; National Institutes for Health — 68%; their state’s health department — 68%; their local office of emergency management — 67%; and the World Health Organization — 60%.

Trust in President Trump registered at 84% among Republicans, but only 20% among independents, 9% among Democrats, and 42% overall.

The President changed his tune (and his tone) on March 16, as he acknowledged for the first time the severity of the health crisis and issued strict new guidelines for Americans to avoid infection, though when asked, “Was there a change in tone?”, he dissembled:

“I didn’t feel different. I’ve always known that this is a real — this is a pandemic. I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic. All you had to do is look at other countries. I think it’s not in 120 countries all over the world. No, I’ve always viewed it as very serious. It was no different yesterday than days before.”

Much too late, facing an imminent disaster, the White House has advanced beyond denials and wishful thinking.

This awakening might have happened more quickly if Congressional Republicans had pushed back against the nonsense coming from their leader. Instead, they spread nonsense of their own (Devin Nunes); or whispered their concerns to VIPs, while reassuring the public and selling stocks ahead of the market disaster (Richard Burr); and then, when the consequences started raining down, tried to slink away to let others clean up the mess (Mitch McConnell). They unleashed the President when they (with the lone exception of Mitt Romney) acquitted him in the Senate — still focused on the next election cycle.

No one in the Republican Party wants to buck the President. They’ve allowed partisanship, tax cuts for their richest donors, and federal court appointments to trump the security of the nation. For more than three years, that reckless bet has paid off handsomely.

As we head toward November 2020, it may pay off once again. But the steep cost to the nation — to our health and economic well-being — of Trump’s misrule is harder to hide now, no matter what diversions the President, Congressional Republicans, and Fox News Channel cook up.

(Image from Los Angeles Times website on March 18, 2020.)

Democracy, Off the Rails, Tribalism

Worlds collide, truth fractures — the Lesson on Day One of the public impeachment hearings

The nation is divided. The opposing sides cannot even agree on plain as day, garden variety, eyes wide open facts. Yesterday, from my vantage point, the evidence presented by Deputy Assistant Secretary of State George Kent and Ambassador William Taylor was devastating for President Donald Trump.

Rank and file Republicans, who buy into the world according to Fox News Channel, didn’t see the same thing. Meanwhile even Republican Congressmen who don’t push unhinged conspiracy theories, fail to push back against them. And this (as Ronald Brownstein points out) suggests that the rule of law across party lines is endangered.

Screenshots by Danielle Misiak via Mother Jones.

“The larger question the hearings may raise, then, is whether the partisan divide has widened to the point where Republican voters and elected officials alike will not consider valid any process controlled by Democrats, no matter how powerful the evidence it produces. If that’s the case, it points toward a future in which partisan loyalties eclipse, to a growing extent, any shared national commitment to applying the rule of law across party lines. Even given the decades-long rise in political polarization, such a rejection of common standards would constitute an ominous threshold for the nation to cross. . . .

The willingness of rank-and-file Republican voters to dismiss the concerns of such nonpartisan voices underscores the extent to which the party has grown resistant to outside information that challenges its ideological preferences…. [argument attributed to Alan Abramowitz, political scientist at Emory University] . . .

A recent survey by the Public Religion Research Institute found that the roughly 45 percent of Republicans who identified Fox as their primary news source expressed nearly unbroken opposition to impeachment. Just 2 percent of Fox-dependent Republicans said they back Trump’s removal, compared with 10 percent of those who don’t rely on the network, the poll found. The indifferent response to the evidence against Trump on Ukraine “is maybe the best example so far of how the Fox News bubble just totally consumes a different reality—which, of course, is not actually reality….” [quotation from Andrew Baumann, Democratic pollster] . . .

In that environment, it’s easy for Trump to convince much of his base that any charge against him—even allegations from nonpartisan diplomats and national-security professionals—is inherently a liberal plot to silence him and his supporters. Very few Republican elected officials have challenged that conspiratorial argument.” — Ronald Brownstein, “Just How Far Will Republicans Go for Trump?“

Conservatives with convictions that don’t budge because the political winds change direction, who have been loyal Republicans but can’t deny Donald Trump’s unfitness as a leader, are horrified by their party’s opportunistic embrace of the man. Peter Wehner served in the Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush administrations. He couldn’t bear the thought of voting for Hillary Clinton; he laments the “increasingly radicalized” Democratic Party. But he sees with clear eyes the GOP circa 2019:

“What makes the Trump era so unusual isn’t partisanship and political tribalism, which have been around for much of human existence. It is the degree to which the transgressive nature of Trump—his willingness to go places no other president has gone, to say and do things that no president before him has done—has exposed the Republican Party. There is hardly a pretense any more regarding what the party, and the right-wing media complex, are doing. They are driven by a single, all-consuming commitment: Defend Donald Trump at all costs. That is the end they seek, and they will pursue virtually any means necessary to achieve it. This from the party that once said it stood for objective truth, for honor and integrity, and against moral relativism.

We are facing a profound political crisis. What the Republican Party is saying and signaling isn’t simply that rationality and truth are subordinate to partisanship; it is that they have to be obliterated for the sake of partisanship and the survival of the Trump presidency. As best I can tell, based on some fairly intense interactions with Trump supporters, there is no limiting principle—almost nothing he can do—that will forfeit their support. Members of Congress clearly believe Trump is all that stands between them and the loss of power, while many Trump voters believe the president is all that stands between them and national ruin. In either case, it has led them into the shadowlands.” . . .

“The Republican Party under Donald Trump is a party built largely on lies, and it is now maintained by politicians and supporters who are willing to “live within the lie,” to quote the great Czech dissident (and later president) Vaclav Havel. Many congressional Republicans privately admit this but, with very rare exceptions—Utah Senator Mitt Romney is the most conspicuous example—refuse to publicly acknowledge it.

“For what purpose?” they respond point-blank when asked why they don’t speak out with moral urgency against the president’s moral transgressions, his cruelty, his daily assault on reality, and his ongoing destruction of our civic and political culture. Trump is more powerful and more popular than they are, they will say, and they will be targeted by him and his supporters and perhaps even voted out of office.” — Peter Wehner, “The Exposure of the Republican Party“

(Image above headline: CNN on YouTube.)

Off the Rails, Republicans, Short & Sweet ... Short & Sour

Profound ignorance: why Fox News and the conservative media bubble are critical to the GOP

NBC News reported on Congressman Justin Amash’s first town hall meeting back in his district after coming out in favor of the impeachment of Donald Trump: “Cathy Garnaat, a Republican who supported Amash and the president said she was upset about Amash’s position but wanted to hear his reasoning. She said that she will definitely support Trump in 2020 but that Tuesday night was the first time she had heard that the Mueller report didn’t completely exonerate the president.”

“I was surprised to hear there was anything negative in the Mueller report at all about President Trump. I hadn’t heard that before,” she said. “I’ve mainly listened to conservative news and I hadn’t heard anything negative about that report and President Trump has been exonerated.”

Republicans, Tribalism

Horrors! Brit Hume is embarrassed by presidential campaign coverage

The occasion? Senator Kamala Harris, while campaigning in South Carolina, purchased a colorful sequined jacket.

Robin Abcarian notes that “manly” endeavors, such as Brit Hume’s skydiving with Bush 41, a publicity stunt for the campaign of the former president’s son, apparently do not count as embarrassing. Nor did Hume display any discomfiture about pitching softball questions after the jump to the candidate’s father about W’s campaign.

Abacarian chalks this up as sexism and a double standard. Maybe so, but I’ll offer another theory: it is shameless partisanship by a TV personality working for a cable channel, Fox News, that is bound at the hip to the Republican Party.

Sean Hannity serves as a co-host with Trump at his campaign rallies and acts as a presidential advisor by phone, while offering fawning coverage on the air. Nothing new here.

Tucker Carlson erupts, when confronted with a point of view (millionaires and billionaires should pay higher taxes) that’s the polar opposite of the Republican Party’s prime directive and then told that, in his role at Fox, he is “not meant to say these things.” Of course he’s not, nor does he need to be told.

Bret Hume, never doubt for a moment, is as much in the corner of the Republican Party as anyone at the conservative network. It’s not vintage ’80s clothing, or journalistic standards, or the peculiar way campaigns are run that’s agitating Hume. It’s simpler than that. This woman is running to replace Donald Trump in the White House. Oh, my.

March 2, 2019 update: Let’s add another Fox News on-air personality to the Republican hack list: Jeanine Pirro, whose starring role at Trumpetts USA events – yes, this is a thing and it enriches the President of the United States – was featured in a recent Erik Wemple column, which concluded that “the race to the bottom at Fox News has hit the homestretch. So long as Hannity has set the standard for ethical corruption with direct support to Trump World, how can the network even consider stopping someone like Pirro from speaking at an event from which the president profits?”