Fox’s Britt Hume Gives Mixed Warning About Trump

Bitt Hume is a conservative. A journalist who spent much of his career with ABC News before moving to Fox and becoming a powerful voice there. He certainly knows DC and politics. Even if you don’t agree with his conservative journalistic slant you have to admit that much. So, when he talks politics and Trump he’s someone worth paying attention to even if you know going in he’s going to spin what he says to a conservative point of view.

In this brief piece from Huffington Post Hume seems to speak with a forked tongue. Well, that’s being charitable. I think it was more like he was trying to straddle a razor sharp sword and talk out both sides of his butt.  Hume, like his network wants to have it both ways when it comes to Trump because Fox wants to hang on to MAGA viewers. So what he’s just done is say worries about a second Trump Presidency becoming a Dictatorship are overblown, yet warning Republicans they won’t like the consequences if Trump is the nominee. I’m not kidding. Let’s start with his downplaying the threat:

“It seems to me it’s all a little overwrought,” he told Bret Baier on Monday over concerns Trump plans to become a dictator if he wins. “We had four years of Donald Trump, and he blustered and bragged and threatened and so forth, and yet he didn’t bring us to the brink of dictatorship.”

He went on to be dismissive of what took place on January 6 saying “What was labeled an insurrection lasted three or four hours, and it was no match for the constitutional restraints which exist and would exist in a Trump second term.”  WTF? As I said Hume is staunchly conservative and it’s clear from his work, especially after the move to Fox but he IS knowledgeable about the workings of DC. He knows damn well the machinations of what went into fomenting that riot, AND that it was part of a multi-faceted strategy to keep Trump in power. He knew, I mean knew he was spouting a huge load of b.s. but he wasn’t done:

“What was labeled an insurrection lasted three or four hours, and it was no match for the constitutional restraints which exist and would exist in a Trump second term,” he said.

Hume of course is trying to keep from alienating Fox’s audience. He knows damn well how serious the threat is. But Fox’s bottom line is more important to him than the truth. He’s just playing his assigned role as a “senior” voice at the network, again trying to have things both ways in telling their viewers Trump’s antics both before and what would come are no big deal. Yet also trying to offer a nuanced approach to talking about Trump and Trumpism. The problem is that Americans overall long ago lost the ability to process nuance and with Fox viewers the ability, or even the desire to do so is almost non-existent. Hume knows this as well as anyone at Fox.

Yet Hume still warns Republicans (Fox viewers) there is a danger in continuing support for Trump and  he’s fairly blunt about it:

“He’s more likely to drive the Republican Party into defeat at the hands of Joe Biden than he is to drive the country toward dictatorship,” he said.

Basically on the one hand Hume is telling Fox’s audience Trump’s criminal acts committed trying to hold onto power were no big deal and it wasn’t nearly as bad, or as close a call as it actually was. And that it wouldn’t happen again if Trump got another chance. Yet he’s still saying putting Trump at the top of the ticket is a bad idea because Trump has, and would continue to cause the GOP to lose elections.

That’s the nuance he and his network is trying to hide behind. As in yes, it was as bad as critics say and would be even worse if Trump got back in the WH but let’s not think about all THAT. Instead let’s look at all the elections we’ve LOST because of Trump, and will keep losing as long as he’s leading the GOP.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t think Fox viewers will get the message. Nope. They will, especially once Trump weighs in tell themselves Hume has become a “Never Trumper”, has surrendered to the “Deep State” etc. and Fox itself is suspect for giving this guy a platform.

Like I said, Hume knows better. He knows he was slinging copious amounts of smelly brown organic excrement but doesn’t care. HE is getting very well paid. And he’s old. Eighty years old! What does he care at this point what happens? He’ll die rich and comfortable, having lived with the too prevalent conservative attitude of “I got mine, YOU go f**k off if you didn’t get yours.”

I’m a senior citizen myself but never had kids. But you know what? I CARE about the country and world we are going to leave for future generations. It’s infuriating that people like Hume don’t use their voice to try and leave a better world than the one they’ve created in the era of Faux Nooz.