Chris Hayes: Trump Is ‘First and Foremost a Fox News Viewer’ Who Has Brought ‘Delusional Madness’ to WH

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes opened his show Friday talking about President Donald Trump as a “symptom” of what’s been happening in U.S. politics in the last few years.

Hayes brought up today’s good jobs numbers and recalling when, during the Obama administration, Trump was throwing out there that they “cooked the books” on unemployment numbers.

“Unemployment went down a lot under Barack Obama. If you look at this chart, that’s the reality,” Hayes said tonight. “But Trump got his people thinking the opposite of the truth.”

Hayes went on to say “what I’m describing here is totally asymmetrical”:

“There is only one side doing this. Conservatives and the now Republican president. No one on this network is going to come to you today — on this job day — and say that Trump is cooking the books. It’s not true. I’m telling you right now the jobs numbers are the jobs numbers. Because one side is attached to facts in a way that the other side just is not anymore.”

He said that “Donald Trump brought that same delusional madness into the White House” because he “is being impeached for using the full force of the state, the most powerful position in all of the human world to pursue an equally insane conspiracy theory like the ridiculous Crowdstrike thing that he keeps going on about that he asked the Ukrainian president to investigate.”

“President Trump is as much a symptom of this as he is the cause,’ Hayes added. “The man is first and foremost a Fox News viewer. That’s his central identity. That’s what’s going on in the brain. And there’s an entire ecosystem built around the alternate reality that is untethered from fact, the same one that tells them that the jobs numbers are made up. That same ecosystem is now telling people that the deep state is out to get Donald Trump, that Ukraine actually meddled in the election, not Russia. That there are imaginary servers somewhere in a vault in Kiev that will blow the whole thing open.”

You can watch above, via MSNBC.

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