Culture

Fox News And Its Hosts Are Doing Everything They Can To Avoid Talking About Trump’s Imploding Presidency

Fox News would like viewers to ignore how the Trump-Russia extravaganza recently dropped two new chapters, and the week’s not yet halfway finished. First, Trump reportedly spilled “highly classified” information about an ISIS plot to Russians in the Oval Office. Second, the FBI transformed into James Comey’s smirking rejection when the former director’s associates dropped details from a bombshell memo, which revealed Trump’s attempted killing of the Michael Flynn investigation.

Never mind that the Republican president may have committed obstruction of justice, and even GOP House Oversight Chair Jason Chaffetz has pulled out the subpoena pen. Monday night became an almost hilarious exercise in willful blindness, as is easily evidenced above (and below), beginning with Tucker Carlson, who addressed the Comey memo by telling his audience that they’re not seeing reality. “The world is a very complicated place,” Carlson mused. “Washington especially. What you think is happening often really isn’t happening.”

From there, he bizarrely talked about everything except for Trump. Carlson railed against the Clinton Foundation and also — this is amazing — shouted about Penn Station bathrooms to drown out any talk of Trump-Russia ties.

Then the Washington Examiner’s Sarah Westwood noted on Twitter that Bret Baier couldn’t find any Republicans to discuss the Comey memo: “There are not Republicans willing to go on camera tonight as of yet … and we’ll see if that changes.” Alas, Charles Krauthammer also popped onto Special Report to declare how it “is really stunning is that nobody, not even from the White House, has come out under their own name in defense of the president here.”

Elsewhere on the deer-in-the-headlights network, Sean Hannity sounded a siren song for far-right-wingers who love spending too much time on Twitter. Nate McDermott of CNN’s KFile noted how the family of Seth Rich — the murdered DNC staffer who may have perished in a botched robbery — believes “there is a special place in hell” for those who spread conspiracy theories about him communicating with Wikileaks. The Rich theories heated up anew right as the Russia-Oval Office scandal broke.

https://twitter.com/natemcdermott/status/864663463515361280

Fellow conservative John Podhoretz (columnist at the New York Post) has implored Hannity to “realize how horrible this is to the grieving Rich family” and stop disseminating the tin foil hats:

A Rich family spokes person issued a statement that asks people not to rely on “unsubstantiated claims” and “no evidence” while aiming to support a political agenda. Further, they note that “no emails” even come close to suggesting Wikileaks contacts, although a tale about a private investigator finding links arrived in conjunction with this week’s fresh Trump scandals.

(Via Fox News)