Donald Trump’s Megaphone

Source: The Dispatch | December 15, 2021 | Jonah Goldberg

Fox News news hosts knew that Trump’s lies were lies—and they amplified them anyhow.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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