President Trump and Fox News have an unhealthy relation. He barely watches any other channel, and in his Fox interviews he is given complete freedom to spout his lies.
Saturday's edition of Watter's World let the President tell a number of obvious lies without any objections from the host. Among the many falsehoods he told were that the US is "the highest taxed nation", a claim so preposterous it boggles the mind. This has been thoroughly debunked many times, but apparently it's true in his special bubble of alternative reality.
He said that according to recent polls, he was at his "all time high". It was unclear which polls he was referring to, but his popularity started out low and has been dropping significantly since his inauguration. He might have cherry picked an outlier poll, as he usually does when he struggles with reality, but he is definitely not at an all time high in popularity. On the contrary, a Gallup poll made this week shows him at a record low of 37%.
He called CNN "fake news", a tired slur that is now a joke on his expense, and claimed once again that, somehow, he was the one who got CNN:s Jeff Zucker his job. This is a dubious claim at best, but even if that were the case, so what? Would he expect special treatment because of it?
Lashing out both at Alex Baldwin, for his unflattering Trump impersonation on SNL, and the House minority leader Chuck Schumer for his political resistance, as if they were in any way equal in importance, President Trump was left free reign with the narrative, and once again made an appalling mockery of the truth.
Fox news isn't all bad, but in its worst moments it comes across as an unquestioningly loyal state-sponsored television channel in a dictatorship. It's scary to watch how Fox and Trump is heading down a scary path towards totalitarian rule.
Hopefully, there are enough real news media organizations around to sound a loud alarm, and enough checks and balances still in place in the US to stop this. Hopefully.
