If you’re just now tuning in, Donald Trump has been livid with Fox News for some weeks now. He’s been tweeting vitriol at them, “Remember who put you there!” and asking his friends, “What the hell is wrong with Fox?” Maybe it’s the Murdoch sons, whom Trump describes as “very liberal” but in all events, Fox is not doing what Fox is programmed to do, in Trump’s mind, which is: to 1) agree with him on all things, 2) amplify his positions 3) give him supporting material for his views, which he can then repeat and retweet. That’s their job and boy, today, they really stepped out of line and the cognitive dissonance in Trump’s tiny mind must be banging like an anvil.
Shep Smith started out a piece Thursday,
“any notion that we’re in a manageable trade dispute with China is now dispelled. This is a trade war. America just fired another shot. And you are about to pay. The trade talks with the Chinese effectively collapsed today. The president announced new tariffs today. The markets were retreated today — in a big way. The Dow was up nearly 300 points. Then the president tweeted about the new tariffs. That was 1:30 this afternoon. See it. Now the Dow is down 228. A more than 500-point plunge. What does this mean?”
Well, we can tell you one thing that it means. Trump is furious. It’s bad enough the stock market turned on him, but the same afternoon, Fox News does as well? Here’s what got the ball rolling.
…buy agricultural product from the U.S. in large quantities, but did not do so. Additionally, my friend President Xi said that he would stop the sale of Fentanyl to the United States – this never happened, and many Americans continue to die! Trade talks are continuing, and…
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 1, 2019
…We look forward to continuing our positive dialogue with China on a comprehensive Trade Deal, and feel that the future between our two countries will be a very bright one!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 1, 2019
So now Trump’s going to put an additional tariff on China. Could it be that he really believes that a tariff is defined as a check which another government writes to the Treasury, because that’s what he’s been plying his base with, tales of “billions of dollars being deposited into the Treasury.” Unfortunately, that heretic Shep Smith kept going on and explaining things, and there was no discussion of giant checks being written to the government. Smith actually described a tariff as a tax — fancy that? You mean it’s not a check, like Trump says it is? Oh, noes. The WalMart Patriots aren’t going to like this one bit. The moo moos and the flip flips are going up. Here’s what else Smith said:
“everything the Chinese sells to the U.S. will be taxed at a higher rate. Every toy, every piece of clothing, every bag of tea, every drop of oil, and American consumers are the ones footing the bill. First, the importers will pay it, then the distributors will pay up, and the stores will pay it, then they will pass it to you. The buck stops with you. You pay. That’s how this works. Always. It’s a new tax on things you buy, and the president says it starts next month. Big picture: If you and everyone else is paying more for stuff, over time you will have to buy less of stuff, that hurts the economy here and everywhere else. That is what trade wars do.”
Now you can bet your britches that Trump is stewing over this confrontation from Fox News as he wings his way to talk to the MAGAts in Cincinnati tonight. And as previously stated, this is not the first dereliction of duty on the part of Fox, so far as Trump is concerned, and he is righteously pissed. Daily Beast:
“I’ve been good to them,” Trump said in these last few weeks, according to another one of the three sources. The president, a remarkably avid consumer of cable news, sounded surprised and frustrated that he was seeing too many people to his liking on the [Fox] network treating him “unfairly” on their shows. […]
But for all the drama and fuss, the dirty little secret is that a lot of people working at Fox News—on- and off-camera—aren’t worried about Trump’s hurt feelings and his latest mean tweets. In fact, some are pleased. […]
Network insiders told The Daily Beast that president’s complaints have made little impact given the overwhelmingly positive coverage Trump has received across many Fox primetime shows throughout his presidency. Trump’s Fox News tweets have only generated buzz in the building when he’s targeted specific news personalities, including Leland Vittert and Shep Smith.
“I think the reaction is more of an eyeroll than anything,” one Fox News staffer told The Daily Beast.
They’re rolling their eyes at his nibs? Plus, they’re committing the occasional random act of journalism and actually telling the truth? Good Lord, what can this mean? In any other organization of worship, heretics like Shep Smith would be not only excommunicated, but executed for heresy. And the acolytes are rolling their eyes?
Trump should be in rare form when he arrives in Cincinnati. This is his first campaign rally since North Carolina. He was asked what would happen if the crowd broke into a “Send her back!” chant and Trump said, “if they do the chant, we will see what happens, but I prefer they don’t.” Somebody better clue in Mike Pence’s nephew and the other chant-leaders that get the crowds ginned up, or Cincinnati could be wilder than North Carolina. Trump’s in a very bad mood.
Maybe he’ll be in a bad enough mood that his body will get him.
My prediction? He’ll be openly praising that other right wing network, OAN. That’s Trump’s character. If he’s rejected, he behaves like a two year old and makes it clear that he’s the one doing the rejecting.
Jackass.
I wonder if he’s going to explain to the people of Cincinnati his fantasy of tariffs and all the money he’s made for America. Of all his lies, the tariff re-definition is the worst of all.
Those people are totally lost. They are bizarre, delusional people. I think the farmers might be ready to flip him the bird. Who knows? Up is down, black is white.
Not as many farmers as you might think. We the taxpayers are subsidizing keeping them afloat with multiple bailouts Trump is bribing them with. The problem that he hopes to somehow put off until after November 2020 is that so many of the contracts American farmers had to sell soybeans and other crops to China are now being filled by farmers from Mexico, Brazil and even Russia. All those years/decades building up the market and it’s disappearing like a tornado sweeping through the fields vacuuming up the crops.
The problem is generation after generation of small town farmers and the communities who have been happy for the help that LIBERALS fought to provide them in the form of crop insurance, programs to stabilize prices etc. but they STILL hate Democrats. Where I grew up isn’t unique – the typical farmer doesn’t say the word Democrat without preceding it with the world goddamned. It’s almost always what I heard from the time I can remember from farmers back where I was born and lived my first 26 years and it hasn’t changed. Many, if not most farmers would rather be working and providing goods to the Chinese market they worked so hard to open up but they aren’t too proud to take the taxpayer funded handouts to keep afloat. And given the generational hatred of Democrats that’s in their DNA they will rationalize the hell out of the matter to credit Trump for “saving” them and that once this trade war is over China will dump all those new supplier countries and start buying from U.S. farmers again. We will probably get some of that market back but you know what? The business won’t go to small family operations but rather to major agribusiness. And major agribusiness will swoop in and buy up more family farms for much less than they are worth.
It will be a repeat of policies that existed to expand international markets prior to Reagan who turned around and used the Cold War to drive a boatload of family farms out of business after they’d invested in machinery needed to produce at a level to fulfill those international markets. The grandparents of current farmers will remember that but they won’t blame the GOP.
I doubt the current generation will admit they and their families have been wrong about the GOP all these years and finally look to Democrats.
and most of the payments he’s sending farmers are going to Big Ag and even foreign-owned companies.
So does that mean that Fox is changing the bait because they have seen that donny is not shiny in the future?
Oh God, I do hope so!
My take on it, is that Fox is looking at the big picture. Obviously, Trump will be out of the picture at some point and they need to stay in business. So, they’re going to do what will keep them afloat and not just pander to the Tangerine Tot any more.
Also, the big money is fleeing the GOP in droves. It’s not just farmers losing big on the tariffs nonsense, after all. And that’s before you get into the ongoing implosion of the NRA, the hostile takeover of the RNC so it can serve as Trump’s unofficial slush fund and his repeated attacks on CEOs who rightly call him out for making moves that make it hard to do business. At this point, I suspect the old GOP power brokers want him out as bad as we do, maybe more.
I heard a rumor that the Mercers were not going to contribute to Trump’s 2020 campaign. I need to follow that up. But it’s a definite that Jennifer Pritzker, who is a billionaire, is not going to support him. I think it’s time to write about this.
I sure do hope you’re right and this is a sign that the GOP power brokers want him out, too. Oh, heavenly thought!
My list of non-contributors to Trump’s reelection campaign include the Mercers, the Koch brothers network AND the Chamber of Commerce. And really, why would they, for all the reasons previously? Even read a hearsay article from Politico about Mitt’s daughter, you know, the current RNC head, getting a kiloton of pushback for trying to push WinRed, her answer to ActBlue, on GOP candidates over any other means of funding. And then there’s the GOP House members’ squabbles over THEIR allotments…
The picture all this is painting is that the money is drying up. And just as I suspected, the GOP is falling into, dare I say, disarray on account of that.
About the Mercers; they bought what was left of Cambridge Analytica. Hmm..what are they trumping up now?
Trump is riding one of those, “saucer sleds”, an aluminum dish with handles on the edge for hanging on, there is no way to steer one, it goes any way the shape of the ground and the affects of gravity pull it down the hill … his sled is on one of the biggest melting faster glaciers out there … he is dropping faster every day, spinning this way and that … his lies are becoming SO radical, his time in the Oval office is limited , we need the House investigations out there to catch Pence and others so, no way Pence can slither into the Oval Office … I’m beginning to see the stage left move out of the Republican party in the House and others seemingly fed up with Trump’s worrisome attack on our Constitution …
HA! I LOVE the imagery! Trump on a saucer sled, on a melting glacier!! Bwahahahahahahahahaha! Oh, man, that’s good. I may steal that image.
Also, like Bareshark says in his comments, I believe the big money pacs are finding a few million in the RNC, but where are the funds owed to us as taxpayers for shipping the fart mouth around to all his golf course playtimes? He has cost us millions of dollars just to play and never do anything good for us … Over 100 million so far …. the committee has NEVER payed what they should for his rant trips as well, never pay more than the cost of a 737, not the AF-1, (747)