Donald Trump’s
Megaphone
Fox News news hosts knew that Trump’s lies
were lies—and they amplified them anyhow.
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Screw it.
I’ve shown a good deal
of restraint since news broke that I left Fox News.
I haven’t done any TV
about it, and I’ve let a lot of nonsense go by without a response.
A major reason I chose
to leave with more than a year left on my contract was that I felt conflicted
about speaking freely. Fox understandably doesn’t like to pay people who
criticize Fox or its talent, and there is something unseemly about it.
So that was one reason
why I left.
Another was that I
didn’t want to be complicit in so many lies.
That’s the thing.
I know that a huge share of the people you saw on TV praising
Trump were being dishonest. I don’t merely suspect it, I know it,
because they would say one thing to my face or in my presence and another thing
when the cameras and microphones were flipped on. And even when I didn’t hear
it directly, I was often one degree of separation from it. (“Guess what
so-and-so said during the commercial break?”) Punditry and politics is a very
small world—especially on the right—and if you add-up all the congressmen,
senators, columnists, producers, editors, etc. you’ll probably end up with
fewer people than the student population of a decent-sized liberal arts
college.
Yes, yes, some people
started to drink the Kool-Aid and actually came to believe their own lies, but
that’s a subject for another time. Suffice it to say, however: Just because
you’ve come to believe a lie that doesn’t make that lie true.
I never deliberately
lied on Fox, but over time I felt like I was becoming complicit in a series of
lies of omission. I’ll come back around to explain that in a moment. But let’s
start with the news of the day.
The Meadows texts.
Too much and too
little has been made of the Meadows texts released this week. On the one hand,
we already knew that lots of Trump boosters were horrified by what they saw on
January 6. Heck, I suspect that the vast majority of pro-Trump Republicans were
horrified. Even Lindsey Graham, who spent much of Trump’s presidency as the
Renfield to his Dracula, famously said he was done with Trump from the well of
the Senate that very day. We know that Kevin McCarthy, a political homunculus
who makes Lindsey Graham seem Churchillian by comparison, was outraged and
expressed his outrage directly to the president during the riot—because he knew
the president was responsible.
So it’s no surprise
that Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and Brian Kilmeade were aghast at the
spectacle. (It is a bit surprising however, that Donald Trump Jr. was
appalled.) The only person who we know for sure wasn’t appalled by what Trump
had wrought was Trump himself.
The significance of
those texts isn’t that they recognized the truth of that day. What’s relevant
is the contrast of that private behavior with their public behavior over the 11
months that followed.
Last night, Laura
Ingraham made a huge deal of the fact that she
condemned the violence on her show on the evening of January 6. And she did.
Although she sprinkled it with all sorts of fan service nonsense about Antifa
provoking the violence and insinuations that the mob was right to be angry
about the allegedly rigged election. But she did say, “Political passions
boiled over today, and it will only serve to make the lives of MAGA supporters
more difficult and even imperil this movement they fought so hard for.”
What she didn’t say is
that the mob’s passions boiled over because of Donald Trump’s lies—and the
megaphone she and her colleagues gave to those lies. From her texts it’s reasonable
to assume that she believed—rightly—that this mob was Trump’s to command
because the mob believed it was doing Trump’s bidding.
But that truth is what
she left out that night—and, as far as I can tell, every night since. In other
words, the central truth of the texts isn’t that what the mob was doing was
condemnable, but that Trump was responsible for the condemnable behavior. By
the time the cameras went on, Laura was still willing to condemn the
president’s mob, but not the president. And if you read the transcript, much of
the show was dedicated to rationalizing the mob’s behavior, with various GOP
congressmen changing the subject to the supposed real outrage of the stolen
election. “Laura, this is bigger than the president of the United States,” Rep.
Lee Zeldin explained. “This is bigger than 2020. What we saw in this
administration of the 2020 presidential election, rogue state actors, state
elections officials, secretaries of state, courts, they usurp state legislative
authority. They decided to administer elections however they see fit. And we
need to have that conversation today.”
Yes, that was the
pressing conversation we needed the day a mob chanted “Hang Mike Pence!” and
bludgeoned cops with flag poles.
Laura spent the next
11 months cleaning up the president’s mess.
“No reasonable person
thinks that what happened on January 6 was, as Biden said, the worst attack on
the Capitol since the Civil War,” she said last July. “Come on, guys. Buffalo head guy
was poised to take over the U.S. Government? Are you kidding me? We’ve had many
protests, many riots in American history. We had many last year that were far
worse than this.” When Capitol police testified before Congress, she dismissed
it all by giving out “Best Performance” awards like they were all
actors. And she said the police had “no one to blame but themselves” for letting
the mob inside the perimeter.
That’s not what she
was texting Mark Meadows.
For months, many
hosts and guests on Fox prime time focused on exonerating Trump, condemning
liberal hypocrisy, and disseminating rumors that Antifa was really responsible.
About that: I’ve never
understood the moral logic that says the riot was bad if Antifa or the deep
state provoked it, but no big deal if it was just a spontaneous uprising. If
Antifa or the deep state were the real culprits, that would be very bad. But
they weren’t. And how was the riot just a tourist visit gone awry if they
weren’t pulling the strings? Either it’s bad to bring bear spray, zip ties, and
paramilitary gear to storm the Capitol, smear feces around its halls, chant
“Hang Mike Pence,” and look to take hostages—or it’s not.
Similarly, if you are
very angry about the BLM riots—and I am—how does that make January 6 okay (as
Hannity intimated just last night)? Violent mobs
are bad, period. A “law and order” conservatism that says, “As long as liberals
fail to condemn thuggish violence for their side, we feel no obligation to
condemn thuggish violence on our side,” cares neither about law and order nor
conservatism.
Moreover, we now know
that the January 6 mob was orchestrated as part of a larger effort to steal the
election on behalf of Donald Trump. As Kevin Williamson brilliantly puts it, “A riot that is part of
a coup d’état is not very much like a riot that is part of
a coup de Target.”
I have no idea if
Hannity and Ingraham knew what Trump was trying to do with John Eastman and all
that. But given how chummy they are with the administration, I see no reason to
give them the benefit of the doubt. And we do know that prior to January 6, they and their
colleagues stoked the very passions that “boiled over.”
Whatabout
whataboutism?
Okay, about me.
During the Trump years
a lot of people found safe harbor in changing the subject or playing tu
quoque games. It only makes sense. If you can’t defend
something indefensible, bring up something the other side did that’s not
defensible either and talk about that. To any inconvenient charge or fact about
Trump, his defenders would respond, “What about …?” the Democrats, Antifa,
Hillary, the New York Times, Barack Obama, Hunter Biden, the
designated hitter rule, whatever.
There are three chief
advantages to such rhetorical tactics. First, we live in an idiotic age where
people believe that the alleged hypocrisy of a critic nullifies the merit of
criticism. A parent who smokes is a hypocrite for telling his kid not to
smoke—but that doesn’t mean the kid should therefore smoke.
Second, it’s what the
audience wants to hear. And no “principle” explains cable news opinion shows
more than “the customer is always right.” The Fox audience craved permission to
be saved from its own cognitive dissonance and whataboutism as an exit ramp
from having to confront the actual facts.
Finally, it lets you
avoid explicitly lying. You just don’t answer the question that matters by
pointing out the flaws of the other team.
The problem, at least
for me, is that if you follow this approach too long you’ll eventually become
complicit in a larger deceit. And that’s where the lie by omission comes in.
For example, let’s say
someone asks you, “What do you make of the credible evidence that Donald Trump
is a sexual predator?” And you answer, “What about Bill Clinton!?” (Forget that
this is not actually a defense of Donald Trump in the same way the smoking
parent’s hypocrisy isn’t an affirmative case for smoking.)
Asking “What about
Bill Clinton?” can be—and often was—an indictment of the questioner’s double
standard. After all, plenty of people in the mainstream media smugly dismissed
attacks on Bill Clinton’s predatory priapism as nothing more than prudish
partisan nonsense. It’s a fine point to make—and I’ve made it many times.
Here’s the difference, though: I believe both Bill Clinton and
Donald Trump should be held to account for their behavior. But if all you’re
ever allowed to say is the stuff about Bill Clinton without referencing Donald
Trump, you’re left sounding like all you care about is the other side’s
hypocrisy.
The whole point of
these whataboutist games is to exempt yourself from consistency. If your only
goal in pointing out this double standard is to let Trump off the hook for
arguably worse behavior, you’re adopting the same double standard you claim to
be condemning.
This kind of thing has
been the overriding ethos of Fox opinion hosts and pundits for five years (with
a few honorable exceptions). It wasn’t always explicitly whataboutist.
Sometimes the whataboutism was simply implied. Don’t talk about Trump’s lies,
mistakes, or misdeeds, just focus on the hypocrisy or hysteria of liberals who
point out Trump’s lies, mistakes, or misdeeds. Sometimes the technique becomes
so ingrained there’s no double standard at all, simply a ridiculous
non-sequitur. “Democrats are arguing that Trump welcomed and incited a violent
incursion into the Capitol,” Laura Ingraham once
fumed, “when it is they who are enticing illegals to bust through
our borders, exploit our resources, and commit crimes.” Uh, what?
For most of the Trump
years, when I was invited on Fox it was to talk about anything but Trump. And
as a conservative, I was perfectly willing to criticize Democrats and
progressives. But opportunities to criticize Trump were studiously
avoided. (Though sometimes I managed.)
With one exception, I
was never told by anyone what I should or shouldn’t say. But—outside of Special
Report with Bret Baier and Fox News Sunday—I was really
only welcome to train my fire leftward. Eventually, I felt like a cog in the
whataboutist machinery. And as a conservative who passionately believes the
conspiracy-mongering, demagogic, populist, personality cult nonsense that
defines so much of prime time Trumpism is not conservatism rightly
understood, or even conservative in any meaningful sense, I felt I couldn’t
associate myself with it. Perhaps I waited too long, but because I consider
myself a writer, not a TV personality, I consoled myself by telling the fuller truth in print.
Regardless, while I will miss many decent
people who try to do what they can where they can at Fox, I am utterly content
with my choice. Let me repeat my favorite line from Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
“You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let
the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.”