Liberal Forum

The World of Cable News Is Trump’s Reality

Trump lives and breathes cable news.

It’s not just that, like so many ill-informed, emotionally immature, and insecure older white men, the guy who has the most powerful and sensitive job on earth reportedly wastes at least five hours a day with Fox et al.

It’s that the crazy world of Sean Hannity and Fox & Friends is his reality.

Because Trump possesses little actual knowledge about the real world outside his family and paid fluffers, the lunatic conspiracy theories that make up the programming day at Fox and, to a lesser degree, CNN and MSNBC—with a dollop of Bannon-supplied Breitbart—are the equivalent of Scripture.

Not only are Trump’s tweets often plagiarized versions of stupid Fox News arguments; so, too, are his legislative proposals and executive orders.

When members of Congress, world leaders, and even his own aides want to reach Trump, they often get themselves booked on TV to make sure he’s paying attention.

Anthony Scaramucci got his job by impressing Trump this way.

He lost it after complaining about a leak regarding his dinner with Trump, Fox host Sean Hannity, former Fox News honcho Bill Shine, and Fox News co-host Kimberly Guilfoyle.

Shine and Guilfoyle have both been floated as candidates for top White House jobs, while Hannity couldn’t stand the pay cut.

Now the white-nationalist lunatic Stephen Miller is rumored to be ready to replace “The Mooch” because he had an argument about immigration with CNN’s Jim Acosta.

According to National Security Council staffer Sebastian Gorka, Miller received high fives after his appalling performance.

Gorka himself is a longtime associate of a Fascist-friendly organization in Hungary who, according to Axios’s Mike Allen, “was effectively a non-entity…until he began tearing shreds of CNN anchors.”

This cable-as-reality dynamic took a giant step into totalitarian territory when, according to a recent lawsuit filed by Rod Wheeler, a Fox News contributor and former homicide detective, Fox colluded with the White House—according to the suit, allegedly Trump himself—to push the phony/crazy story that ex-DNC staffer Seth Rich had been murdered because of his links to WikiLeaks.

The story, designed as an “alternative fact” to the likely-but-still-murky Russian role in the drama, was shamelessly and obsessively peddled on Fox, particularly by Trumpists like Sean Hannity and the cast of Fox & Friends, until Rich’s parents publicly objected.

It was based on the “reporting” of Malia Zimmerman, a FoxNews.com fantasist who has repeatedly reported on events for which no evidence exists.

A closed circle in which an administration colludes with a faux-independent media to purposely mislead the nation on behalf of its program of political control is one that has no room for democratic practice of any kind.

It’s long past time to stop treating Trump like any other legitimate leader and Fox like an actual news network.

They are, respectively and collectively, a metastasizing cancer on our body politic.