Nearly two-thirds of Americans disapprove of Donald Trump's tweeting. But after Fox News host Ainsley Earhardt misleadingly said, “A lot of people like it,” Trump denounced the opponents as “the enemies.” Not one of the three Fox cohosts conducting the interview challenged him.
In Part two of their interview with him today, the Trump TV lapdogs at Fox & Friends brought up his tweeting. Transcript below via The Washington Post, with light copy edits and my emphases added:
BRIAN KILMEADE: Let’s talk about you Tweeting, if we could. You’ve attacked, recently, McCain, the FBI, Democrats. Is there a method to the attacks or is it just venting?
TRUMP: No method, really. It’s just—it’s not venting either.
[…]
But it does allow me to go around dishonest media. I don’t have to go around you folks. I don’t have to go around a lot of the media.
But I do have to go around some media. And it does allow me to do that, because the following is so large, between Twitter and Facebook and all of the different things. I have so many millions of people, it allows me to give a message without necessarily having to go through people where I’m giving them a message and they’re putting it down differently from what I mean. I do.
EARHARDT: A lot of people like it. They say you’re tough. They’re glad you’re going after people when they attack you.
But you have people on both sides of the aisle...
TRUMP: Yes, you do.
EARHARDT: -- that are saying you’re going after your enemies on Twitter. They want you to stop it. Will you?
TRUMP: Well, most of the people that want me to stop it are the enemies, I’ll be honest with you. The enemies would like me to stop it.
I—if I felt the media were honest, all of it, or most of it, I wouldn’t do it. But it is a modern-day form of communication, especially when you have, you know, tens of millions of people like I have.
In fact, as Fortune reported last month: most Americans want Trump to delete his Twitter account.
Overall, 64% of people say they want Donald Trump to shut down his personal Twitter account, according to a poll by Quinnipiac University. The view was shared across all parties, genders and age groups, with those aged 18 to 34 most wanting him to stop the tweets coming, by a 71-26 margin.
An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll came up with similar results last month:
Nearly seven-in-ten Americans say that Trump's use of Twitter is a bad idea, and only nine percent say they strongly support his use of the 140-character medium to announce policy positions and express his personal point of view. Sixty-nine percent of respondents in the survey said that Trump's tweeting is bad, agreeing with the statement that "in an instant, messages can have unintended major implications without careful review."
Fox News has been attacking Barack Obama since 2008 for having said, during his first presidential campaign, that Republicans “cling to guns or religion or antipathy towards people who aren’t like them." But Trump TV seems to have no problem with a sitting president calling Americans “enemies.”
Watch Kilmeade, Earhardt and cohost Steve Doocy tacitly endorse Trump’s authoritarianism below, from the February 28, 2017 Fox & Friends.
Crossposted at News Hounds.
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