Fox News Is Dutifully Parroting Trump’s Partisan Attacks on CNN’s Moderators. It Won’t Work.

In a development as predictable as a lousy writer referencing the swallows’ return to Capistrano, former President Donald Trump and his media minions have started laying the groundwork for his claim to the status of World’s Biggest Victim™ just days before the CNN presidential debate.

The ref-working crusade kicked off in earnest on Monday, when Trump press secretary Karoline Leavitt appeared on CNN to relentlessly attack Jake Tapper and Dana Bash. CNN anchor Kasie Hunt dumped out of the interview when Leavitt refused to stop going after the pair, who are moderating the debate on Thursday.

The transparent attempt to pick a fight with the debate hosts was the most notable example among several in which Trump surrogates pushed the claim that Trump would be debating not just President Joe Biden, but also Tapper and Bash.

Fox News has dutifully parroted those claims. The network seized upon a misleading video clip posted to X, formerly Twitter, by professional troll and disinformation warrior Jack Posobiec, showing several times in which Tapper compared Trump’s rhetoric to Adolf Hitler’s.

(One might think a network that claims to be a news outlet would know better than take cues from Posobiec, who was not just a chief promoter of the spurious Pizzagate conspiracy, but also is reported to have brought a “Rape Melania” placard to a protest in an attempt to make anti-Trump demonstrators appear pro-rape. Never mind that Posobiec is often treated as a reliable source on the most-watched cable news network in the country.)

The clip in question features Tapper saying the following on December 17: “The dehumanizing rhetoric of Adolf Hitler is once again alive and well on the national political stage. This time, of course, in the United States, this time, given life by former president and current Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump, whose thoughts on immigrants were made shockingly crystal clear over the weekend.”

What’s missing from the clip is the rally speech Tapper is referencing, in which Trump warned about rising crime from undocumented migrants and said, “They’re poisoning the blood of our country. That’s what they’ve done.” After airing that portion of his speech, Tapper went on to say:

“Poisoning the blood of our country.” If you were to open up a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, you would find the Nazi leader describing the mixing of non-Germans with Germans as “poisoning.” The Jew, Hitler wrote, quote, “poisons the blood of others.”

This, according to Hitler, posed an existential threat to Germany because, quote, “all great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning,” unquote. There’s really no other way to say it. Donald Trump’s language mirrors this directly. And this wasn’t a one-off.

Of course, Tapper is entirely accurate in his explanation of how Trump’s rhetoric mirrored that of Hitler. This context was left out of Fox News criticism of the CNN anchor.

Since last Sunday, the Tapper-Hitler clip has been discussed or aired nearly two dozen times on Fox News. Not only does the network apparently see no problem with Trump’s extreme rhetoric about immigrants and the parallels between that and the words used by Hitler, it is willfully eliding that context in an effort to smear a responsible journalist ahead of a presidential debate to help their preferred candidate win.

Indeed, while CNN has had its share of openly liberal hosts and contributors on the air, particularly during the Zucker era, Tapper and Bash are far from the caricatures that many on the right have made them out to be.

Dana Bash is as well-sourced a reporter as you will find in Washington, D.C. She has earned a reputation for being tough but fair, particularly among Republican officials she has on Sunday’s State of the Union, a show where she shares hosting duties with Tapper. Few journalists in political news have a sturdy enough reputation to pull off this debate; she’s near the top of the list.

To suggest that Jake Tapper is a big old lefty would shock a whole slew of lefties who see him as more center-right than even centrist.

Lest we forget that Tapper was practically worshiped by conservatives when he was a White House reporter for ABC News and regularly had the temerity to ask the Obama administration tough questions. Or that the chair of the Clinton campaign called him a “dick” during the 2016 general election. Or that, just this weekend, his D.C. home was surrounded by a dozen ill-informed protestors who called Tapper and his kids “war criminals” over his entirely fair coverage of the Israel-Hamas War.

That Tapper and Bash are being smeared as leftist Trump haters is not a sign that Tapper or Bash have changed. It’s yet further proof that the Republican Party and the conservative media ecosystem have drifted onto another plane of reality — one where Trump is god and his critics evil.

I suspect Tapper and Bash knew precisely what they were getting into when they signed on for the thankless task of moderating a debate in such a divided time, not just politically, but over facts, truth, and meaning itself. And Trump’s pre-emptive complaining about the refs is simply what he does.

But as I repeatedly told members of the 9- and 10-year-old championship-winning flag football team I coached, when it comes to bitching about bad calls, the only people that complain about the refs are the losers. And Trump and his media surrogates bitching and moaning days before the debate is evidence there’s concern about how this might turn out.

Now here’s why these attacks on Tapper and Bash are a fool’s errand: they almost certainly won’t work, and here’s why.

Yes, there will almost certainly be moments when both candidates will be held to account, and regardless of the outcome, the Trump camp is certain to complain. That’s what snowflakes do. But it’s as clear as day that these professional journalists understand their reputation as fair and honest arbiters is at stake. The idea that they would forego their future standing in lieu of advocacy goes against everything each of them has stood for, which led to them getting this high-profile and massively important responsibility in the first place.

As for cable news wars? It’s almost always good fodder for sites that cover the intersection of politics and media. Still, I’m old enough to recall when the Obama administration went full-throated in their attacks on Fox News in 2009, in the first year of Barack Obama’s time in the White House.

Fox News pushed back hard on those attacks. They didn’t get much support from their competitors, save one notable voice on ABC News: Jake Tapper, who not only referred to Fox News as a “sister network” in an animated exchange with then-Press Secretary Robert Gibbs but also took great offense with the White House’s claim that Fox was “not a news organization.”

If only Fox hosts would show Tapper the same grace he showed them 15 years ago. Or maybe Gibbs was on to something — Fox News rarely looks like a news organization these days.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.