Watch Trump Admit He Has Binged 8 Hours of Fox Programming Since Last Night

Reed RichardsonSep 10th, 2020, 5:41 pm
 

President Donald Trump is too busy amidst overlapping, unprecedented public health, economic, and racial unrest crises to watch television. What’s more, Fox News’ coverage of him is increasingly unfair and unwatchable.

Also, the President of the United States just admitted that he spent one-third of the last 24 hours binge-watching Fox programming.

All three of the aforementioned statements — their highly contradictory nature notwithstanding — come from Trump’s own mouth. But the last one was made at a Thursday press conference where the President of the United States listed out the eight hours of Fox News and Fox Business Network shows he had consumed just since Wednesday afternoon, when his White House began dealing with yet another firestorm of criticism for Trump’s own damning statements in a book by Bob Woodward.

“I watch some of the shows,” Trump said, before giving a veritable roll call of the networks’ most pro-Trump personalities and platforms. “I watch Liz McDonald, she’s fantastic. I watch Fox Business. I watched Lou Dobbs last night, Sean Hannity last night, Tucker [Carlson], Laura [Ingraham]. I watched Fox and Friends in the morning. You watch these shows.”

Notably, many of those programs had been engaged in barely veiled damage control for Trump during the preceding 24 hours. Dobbs had bizarrely hailed Wednesday as “a day that any president could only dream of.” Tucker Carlson Tonight unabashedly threw Sen. Lindsey Graham under the bus for facilitating Woodward’s interviews with Trump — while devoting little attention to Trump’s lying to the public. While Hannity featured an interview with the president himself, which, par for the course, merely teed up Trump campaign talking points and helpfully bathed Trump with praise to rebut the damning revelations from the Woodward book: “You taking it very seriously was very clear then,” Hannity offered, at the start of a series of unending softballs. And on Thursday morning, Fox & Friends, in a clumsy attempt at justifying Trump misleading the country, analogized his downplaying the deadly risk of Covid-19 to not divulging an imminent terror attack on Akron.

This wasn’t supposed to be the case, recall. In fact, Trump has repeatedly claimed throughout his first term that he simply doesn’t have time to watch TV since he’s too busy running the country. And, if anything, the coronavirus pandemic that has — so far — claimed more than 190,000 American lives would seem to require even more of a president’s attention.

And even if he could carve out just a few spare moments in his precious free time, why watch Fox anyway? Recently, he has bashed Fox News’ weekend coverage as a “total waste of time” and encouraged his supporters to abandon the network for even more Trump-friendly competitors like Newsmax and OAN. And even amid his Wednesday night Fox binge, Trump took time to once again trash Fox News’ polling while calling into that very network, as Hannity meekly offered no defense of the news side’s polling.

Of course, Trump’s obsessive TV watching habits are well established, as is his lying about them and many other things, but his off-hand Thursday comments only serve to betray how much of his focus as president is now concentrated on basking in self-aggrandizing media praise — even as, and increasingly because, this country is struggling.

Watch the video above, via MSNBC.

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

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