The Trump-Fox Feedback Loop

Now we have Jeanine Pirro, queen of plastic surgery and maniacal statements who also needs a brain transplant. She is coming to Washington as inerim US attorney for DC. Pirro adds to a total of now 21, I think, ex-Fox halfwits appointed to high posts by Trump. A 7-year-old piece from my work in progress shows this is nothing new. What a talent pool.

Government by Fox News
4/7/2018

Maybe you knew this but Trump has been consistently calling up Fox News people to solicit their thoughts. He talks to Lou Dobbs, that paragon of business wisdom, on a “semi-regular” basis—even during Oval Office meetings. I sometimes listened to this donkey when he was on CNN a few years ago. Now he helps make government policy.

Fox pundit Larry Kudlow, who has been wrong on almost everything, is now appointed to head Trump’s National Economic Council. He has always been convinced that tax cuts and supply side policies will cure everything. Our new national security advisor Johnny Bolton, that mean-minded Fox News twit, is so far-right crazy he worries some GOP colleagues. No confirmation hearings needed for either appointment.

Trump said, “We’re getting very close to having the Cabinet and other things I want.” Look for more White House advisers to exit. Fox is what he listens to, and that is what influences him—on just about everything. And the network’s sole function, it seems, has become an exercise in propaganda and ass-kissing.

Because he has no solid ideas of his own, Trump seeks out those who simply confirm his own feelings and opinions. For a long time now he has been tweeting and retweeting conspiracy theories and bogus claims as if they were credible reports from credentialed journalists. It doesn’t seem to matter if he gets caught out on something demonstrably false or ridiculous. However, the Twitter community had a field day with the president’s tweet on the size and power of his nuclear button.

Matthew Gertz of Politico claims to have studied this “Trump-Fox feedback loop” for months. In January he wrote:

After comparing the president’s tweets with Fox’s coverage every day since October, I can tell you that the Fox-Trump feedback loop is happening far more often than you think. There is no strategy to Trump’s Twitter feed; he is not trying to distract the media. He is being distracted. He darts with quark-like speed from topic to topic in his tweets because that’s how cable news works.

He most often tweets stuff from Fox & Friends, the network’s most vapid, silly and spurious source of anything political. To speculate about why he indulges in such manic tweeting is to guess. Is it his infatuation with the power of TV? His general stupidity and vacuity about his job? Or does it signal mental instability? I vote for all of the above.

Trump’s taking unconfirmed, false or absurd news and feeding it to the public as truth has another dimension. The GOP Congress often accepts these tweetish pronouncements without any protest or comment, absurd as they may be. As Trump endorses these assertions from Fox News, so does Congress apparently accept whatever he passes along. It’s like the pig farmer feeding his hogs: they will eat most anything he pours into the trough. As my mother famously used to say, “Pigs is pigs.”