Donald Trump may have been indicted (again) Wednesday night for conspiring to nullify a United States election, but that wasn't going to stop him from having a nice dinner. And it wasn't enough to stop his dinner guests from showing up to fete him, either. Our national Trump whisperers report that his Bedminster dinner guests last night were Fox News president Jay Wallace and network CEO Suzanne Scott, and they were there to beg Trump, once again, to come on their shitty lie-promoting network for their Republican presidential primary debate.
Because that's what you do when a political figure faces four felony counts of conspiring to overthrow the elected United States government: You slither over to his house and plead for the head crook to come to your network to put on a show.
For context, Trump has been threatening to skip the first Republican primary debate because it's hosted by Fox News, and in the violence-provoking seditious traitor's mind Fox has not been deferential enough to him and his various promoted conspiracy theories. Even worse, Trump thinks that Fox has been too nice to his main rival, stale block of cheese Ron DeSantis, and because Trump knows the secret of manipulating the nation's media is to simply threaten to deny them access to his glorious self, his solution to both problems is to announce that he's only going to show up for debates on networks that do bend their coverage in ways he likes.
Whether or not he'll follow through with skipping the Aug. 23 debate is unknown, because Trump lies about everything, all the time, and it's strictly based on what will carry him through any particular day's news cycle. But he's been aggressive in mocking the Fox News debate and at least pretending he won't be showing up, posting sneers like, "Let them debate so I can see who I MIGHT consider for Vice President!"
It therefore fell to network executives Wallace and Scott to suck up to Donald, because goosing network ratings is considerably more important than whether or not the suckee is facing prison time for an attempted toppling of our democracy. Our Trump-whispering New York Times reporters write that Fox host Sean Hannity was supposed to show up as well. Trump's brain is guided almost exclusively by what he sees on television, and Hannity would have been far more convincing to Trump than a pair of network heads who have next to no TV time at all. Sadly, Hannity couldn't get out of doing his Fox show that evening.
Yeah, I'm calling bullshit on that one. The executives who could have given Hannity his hall pass were both at the damn dinner themselves. If Sean didn't show up, it was because Sean didn't want to show up. And that's probably because Hannity knows Trump better than Wallace and Scott do, and didn't want to be anywhere in the vicinity of Trump and his good china only hours after he got the news that he was facing another decade or two of possible prison time.
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Now, this is not how the Fox News evening had to go. Wallace and Scott did not have to make the pilgrimage to the land of sedition-backing sucking up. They are important people in their own right and could have begged off meeting with the worst and unambiguously most corrupt former president the nation has ever, ever been saddled with.
They could have decided, when the new indictment dropped, to cut Trump loose. It has never been an urgent damn necessity that a man indicted on literally dozens of counts stemming from rank political corruption share time on the Republican debate stage with the other candidates. There's really no issue of "fairness" still at play when one candidate was caught dead to rights with national security secrets stuffed into various places of his spy-riddled social club.
At any point from Jan. 6, 2021 onward, media outlets could have made the decision that they were not going to take actions to promote a political second act for a man that spurred a riot inside the U.S. Capitol. It wasn't a hard choice to make. It is possible to cover the newsworthy things Trump might do while still denying him access to the airwaves to promote himself and egg on new seditious acts, and this isn't something that journalists generally have a hard time with when faced with criminal behavior elsewhere. Journalists cover Mexican drug cartels as criminal enterprises, yet network hosts do not, at least not yet, invite Mexican cartel leaders to 90-minute televised debates so that they can give their own opinions on why Americans should ignore gun and drug laws.
It would be perfectly fine for every media outlet to decide that a man who attacked democracy was not worthy of the debate stage. It would, in less crooked times, have been expected that the Republican Party would pass a quiet new rule scraping that candidate out of the debate lineup.
Where we're at now, though, is a place where a good chunk of all the top Republicans in the nation were themselves co-conspirators in an attempted coup, and so the official Republican stance is that attempted coups are well within the bounds of acceptable political acts. And the media, being vapid and horrible shitmongers who fancy themselves Hollywood moguls rather than democracy's keepers, go along with it.
There is no reason Republicans need to continue to ally themselves with a secret-stealing, hoax-promoting seditionist. There is no question but that Donald Trump was the worst "president" the United States has ever seen, and the most crooked. There is no argument against it. It's perfectly fine for the media to deny camera time to a dangerous man already responsible for political violence, but it's a truly trivial act for media executives to not beg and scrape for his attention.
This goes for CNN, and it goes for Fox News. If you're unwilling to take a stand against an actual attempted coup, at least pick your pants off the floor and attempt to regain your network dignity.
Conservatives cried about how the “woke” (whatever that means) “Barbie” movie would fail. It didn’t. In fact, the film has struck a chord with American and international audiences. Daily Kos writer Laura Clawson joins Markos to talk about the film and the implications of the Republican Party’s fixation on mythical culture wars, which is failing them in bigger and bigger ways every day.
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Because that's what you do when a political figure faces four felony counts of conspiring to overthrow the elected United States government: You slither over to his house and plead for the head crook to come to your network to put on a show.
For context, Trump has been threatening to skip the first Republican primary debate because it's hosted by Fox News, and in the violence-provoking seditious traitor's mind Fox has not been deferential enough to him and his various promoted conspiracy theories. Even worse, Trump thinks that Fox has been too nice to his main rival, stale block of cheese Ron DeSantis, and because Trump knows the secret of manipulating the nation's media is to simply threaten to deny them access to his glorious self, his solution to both problems is to announce that he's only going to show up for debates on networks that do bend their coverage in ways he likes.
Whether or not he'll follow through with skipping the Aug. 23 debate is unknown, because Trump lies about everything, all the time, and it's strictly based on what will carry him through any particular day's news cycle. But he's been aggressive in mocking the Fox News debate and at least pretending he won't be showing up, posting sneers like, "Let them debate so I can see who I MIGHT consider for Vice President!"
It therefore fell to network executives Wallace and Scott to suck up to Donald, because goosing network ratings is considerably more important than whether or not the suckee is facing prison time for an attempted toppling of our democracy. Our Trump-whispering New York Times reporters write that Fox host Sean Hannity was supposed to show up as well. Trump's brain is guided almost exclusively by what he sees on television, and Hannity would have been far more convincing to Trump than a pair of network heads who have next to no TV time at all. Sadly, Hannity couldn't get out of doing his Fox show that evening.
Yeah, I'm calling bullshit on that one. The executives who could have given Hannity his hall pass were both at the damn dinner themselves. If Sean didn't show up, it was because Sean didn't want to show up. And that's probably because Hannity knows Trump better than Wallace and Scott do, and didn't want to be anywhere in the vicinity of Trump and his good china only hours after he got the news that he was facing another decade or two of possible prison time.
Campaign Action
Now, this is not how the Fox News evening had to go. Wallace and Scott did not have to make the pilgrimage to the land of sedition-backing sucking up. They are important people in their own right and could have begged off meeting with the worst and unambiguously most corrupt former president the nation has ever, ever been saddled with.
They could have decided, when the new indictment dropped, to cut Trump loose. It has never been an urgent damn necessity that a man indicted on literally dozens of counts stemming from rank political corruption share time on the Republican debate stage with the other candidates. There's really no issue of "fairness" still at play when one candidate was caught dead to rights with national security secrets stuffed into various places of his spy-riddled social club.
At any point from Jan. 6, 2021 onward, media outlets could have made the decision that they were not going to take actions to promote a political second act for a man that spurred a riot inside the U.S. Capitol. It wasn't a hard choice to make. It is possible to cover the newsworthy things Trump might do while still denying him access to the airwaves to promote himself and egg on new seditious acts, and this isn't something that journalists generally have a hard time with when faced with criminal behavior elsewhere. Journalists cover Mexican drug cartels as criminal enterprises, yet network hosts do not, at least not yet, invite Mexican cartel leaders to 90-minute televised debates so that they can give their own opinions on why Americans should ignore gun and drug laws.
It would be perfectly fine for every media outlet to decide that a man who attacked democracy was not worthy of the debate stage. It would, in less crooked times, have been expected that the Republican Party would pass a quiet new rule scraping that candidate out of the debate lineup.
Where we're at now, though, is a place where a good chunk of all the top Republicans in the nation were themselves co-conspirators in an attempted coup, and so the official Republican stance is that attempted coups are well within the bounds of acceptable political acts. And the media, being vapid and horrible shitmongers who fancy themselves Hollywood moguls rather than democracy's keepers, go along with it.
There is no reason Republicans need to continue to ally themselves with a secret-stealing, hoax-promoting seditionist. There is no question but that Donald Trump was the worst "president" the United States has ever seen, and the most crooked. There is no argument against it. It's perfectly fine for the media to deny camera time to a dangerous man already responsible for political violence, but it's a truly trivial act for media executives to not beg and scrape for his attention.
This goes for CNN, and it goes for Fox News. If you're unwilling to take a stand against an actual attempted coup, at least pick your pants off the floor and attempt to regain your network dignity.
Conservatives cried about how the “woke” (whatever that means) “Barbie” movie would fail. It didn’t. In fact, the film has struck a chord with American and international audiences. Daily Kos writer Laura Clawson joins Markos to talk about the film and the implications of the Republican Party’s fixation on mythical culture wars, which is failing them in bigger and bigger ways every day.
Embedded Content
RELATED STORIES:
CNN tried to ignore Trump's coup attempt
CNN ratings tank alongside its reputation after Trump 'town hall'
Trump's actions on Jan. 6 were 'pretty much a crime,' says Rupert Murdoch