In a tweet this Thursday morning, President Trump had a few people scratching their heads after he praised the soaring Stock Market and asked his followers how it was affecting their “409K’s” — which is a thing that doesn’t exist.
“STOCK MARKET AT ALL-TIME HIGH!” Trump exclaimed. “HOW ARE YOUR 409K’S DOING? 70%, 80%, 90% up? Only 50% up! What are you doing wrong?”
Fox News reporter John Roberts was among those baffled:
John Roberts✔@johnrobertsFox
Former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley is under fire for attacking Democrats with lies in an attempt to defend President Donald Trump – a strategy some say she is employing to get Trump to see her as a replacement for Vice President Mike Pence on the 2020 ticket.
Monday night Haley went on Fox News to deliver what some journalists are calling “categorically false” and “ridiculous, inflammatory and dangerous” remarks.
Haley told Fox News viewers – which includes President Trump – that the “only ones mourning the loss of Soleimani are our Democrat leadership and Democrat Presidential candidates.” Continue reading.
The party line among many of President Donald Trump’s defenders at Fox News is that the recent impeachment inquiry by House Democrats was flawed from start to finish, but Judge Andrew Napolitano hasn’t been shy about offering critical analysis of Trump during the Ukraine scandal — and according to Napolitano, “newly acquired evidence” is reason enough for Democrats to “reopen the impeachment” inquiry.
Appearing on Fox News’ America’s Newsroom on Monday, Napolitano asserted, “If I were a Democrat in the House, I would be moving to reopen the impeachment on the basis of newly acquired evidence — which are these new e-mails of people getting instructions directly from the president to hold up on the sending of the (military) funds (to Ukraine). That would justify holding on to the articles of impeachment, because there’s new evidence, perhaps new articles.”
Napolitano added, “If I were a Republican in the Senate, I would go about my business as if there had been no articles of impeachment — because until those articles of impeachment come over to the Senate, there is nothing for the Senate to do.” Continue reading.
In 2019, conservatives on Fox News became so sure that they were being censored that they took to the popular cable network’s airwaves and refused to shut up about it.
“People are actually discriminating against conservatives every day,” one guest told Tucker Carlson. “They’re gaslighting us.”
According to right-wing psychology professor Jordan Peterson, “social justice warriors” and corporations are censoring voices like his. And Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk claimed that college campuses “have become almost islands of totalitarianism.” Continue reading
The rule of law is a cornerstone of American democracy and is integral to the Constitution. It stands for the principles that no person is beneath the laws’ protections. No person is above the laws’ requirements. And the laws apply equally to all people. That is the theory of the rule of law.
In practice, as the power of the federal government has grown almost exponentially since 1789 and the power of the presidency has grown with it, presidents have claimed immunity from the need to comply with the law while in office. They have also claimed immunity from the consequences of the failure to comply with the law.
That immunity claim is predicated upon the belief that if the president committed a criminal offense and was charged and prosecuted while in office, the diversion of his energies to his defense would interfere substantially with his ability to do his job, which could jeopardize national security.
While many in America may joke that Fox News is now state TV for the Trump administration, in Russia there actually is state TV – and they’re not even pretending anymore about the Russian government’s relationship with President Donald Trump.
The Daily Beast’s Julia Davis offered an in-depth look at various instances of Russian state TV’s reporting on the stunning moment when Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov once again met with Trump in the Oval Office and posed for a photo with the U.S. president, standing above him as Trump sat at the renowned Resolute Desk.
“Russian state media was gloating over the spectacle,” David writes. “TV channel Rossiya 1 aired a segment entitled ‘Puppet Master and ‘Agent’—How to Understand Lavrov’s Meeting With Trump.’ ”
In the new movie “Bombshell,” Chris Wallace’s character has a bit part, striding for a moment alongside Megyn Kelly on their way to a momentous presidential debate in 2015. In real life, though, the veteran Fox News journalist has a more central role in the Washington drama of this historic moment.
Wallace’s Sunday morning interview show is often riveting, creating newsworthy moments — whether he is grilling former FBI director James B. Comey as he did this week or holding White House adviser Stephen Miller’s feet to the fire as he did in late September.
“According to POTUS, Chris Wallace is a partisan hack. In reality, he’s consistently the gold standard for American political interviewers,” Jonathan Swan of Axios noted on Twitter shortly after the Comey interview aired.
Mitch McConnell’s admission on Fox News that he is working behind the scenes with the White House to stack the Senate impeachment trial gives Democrats a potent weapon against the GOP, wrote Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman in the Washington Post.
“If Democrats play their procedural cards right, they can pressure Republicans to allow for a much fairer and more open trial that could actually produce new revelations — and if they refuse, extract a political price for it,” they wrote.
“By telling Sean Hannity that the process of Trump’s trial will be set up ‘in coordination with Trump’s legal team,’ McConnell told the world he wants to rig the process to produce maximal benefit for Trump,” they explained. “But McConnell might not actually be able to do this, if he doesn’t have 51 GOP votes for it — which could be the case, if vulnerable GOP senators don’t want to go along with it. And that allows Democrats to make a public case for a much fairer and more open process — and to try to force those vulnerable GOP senators to take a stand on whether they, too, want a fair and open process.”
Trump “is engaged in the most direct sustained assault on freedom of the press in our history,” said the “Fox News Sunday” host.Fox News anchor Chris Wallace has delivered a blistering assessment of President Donald Trump’s repeated and sustained attacks on the press that report critically on him and his administration.
“I believe that President Trump is engaged in the most direct sustained assault on freedom of the press in our history,” the host of “Fox News Sunday” said at an event celebrating the First Amendment at the Newseum media museum in Washington on Wednesday.
“He has done everything he can to undercut the media, to try and delegitimize us, and I think his purpose is clear: to raise doubts when we report critically about him and his administration that we can be trusted,” Wallace continued, per The Guardian.
In her new book, “Irony and Outrage: The Polarized Landscape of Rage, Fear, and Laughter in the United States,” Dannagal Goldthwaite Young advances the argument that the ironic satire of “The Daily Show” and the outrage programming of Fox News — which debuted within months of each other — play remarkably similar roles for their respective audiences, speaking to their distinctively liberal and conservative psychological orientations to motivate not just voter loyalty, but political engagement.
The twin births of these two forums was no accident, Young explains, both in the book and in Part 1 of her Salon interview, which focused on exploring the main arguments — historical, cultural and psychological — about why these twin genres emerged as they did, and how they continue to function today. In turn, this vividly illuminates the nature of liberalism and conservatism more generally, in a way that’s both sophisticated and down-to-earth.
Young knows her subject both as a scholar (she’s an assistant professor of communication at the University of Delaware) and a practitioner (a long-time improv comic with the troupe ComedySportz Philadelphia), which gives her a breadth of understanding few can match. In Part 2, she answers questions about particular figures — mostly in pairs — who illustrate significant ramifications of her argument. We begin, however, with Donald Trump, whose humor impairment resonates perfectly with Young’s broader picture. As usual, our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
