Brian Kilmeade starts off this Fox & Friends segment with a split screen of Trump talking to "real Americans" while the elite Washington press attends their nerd prom. He speaks with Democratic strategist Richard Fowler, who just won't cooperate with the Fox narrative:
KILMEADE: A tale of two Americans. Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, celebrating President Trump. The other in Washington, D.C. where the media elite held a group therapy session at the White House correspondents dinner. Where do we go from here? And was their deductible satisfied? Democratic strategist and Fox news contributor Richard Fowler. Richard, who made the right choice?
FOWLER: Oh, I think they both made the right choice, Brian.
KILMEADE: Really?
FOWLER: I was at some of the events this past weekend. Now i'm in Miami. It's a lot hotter here than it is there. But here's the thing. The funny part about this is, Donald Trump has attended the White House correspondents dinners for years. The one year he decides not to attend is the year that he's supposed to be the headliner. That's interesting.
Now, don't get me wrong, I politically understand why Donald Trump didn't go to the White House correspondents dinner. There are 30, 40% of his supporters who believe everything that he says and they think that the media is fake, and him going there would support that.
But we all know the truth. Yes, sometimes the media gets it wrong. But 95% of the time CNN and MSNBC, our colleagues, aren't fake news.
KILMEADE: Right. I think it's mislabeled. I don't think anyone has a problem with Rachel Maddow coming out with her school of thought like Sean Hannity. We get it -- I think that the president's real problem is the decision, for example, to take the Mike Flynn story and make it number one and not the story about the Iranian deal with 14 highly questionable people being let go in a top secret deal that no one understood when President Obama was president. things like that. Stacking stories and opinion into the reporting is what throws off this White House.
Look how cleverly Fowler laid the groundwork here. "We're all colleagues, right? We all know CNN and MSNBC aren't fake news..." Kilmeade can't really contradict him, so instead he equates Rachel Maddow's investigative Russia pieces with Sean Hannity's fact-free rants. He really earned his paycheck with that pivot!
FOWLER: Kilmeade, I totally get that herein lies the problem. What we have from this White House, over and over again is, we see this white house likes to peddle in what i like to call squishy facts.
Facts that aren't necessarily the real facts -- case in point. when the president made a headline about his crowd size at the inauguration or the fact that every time he sits down with journalists, like he did with Reuters last week, he hands them a copy of the map where he won. I know Donald Trump is the president of the United States. I accept that, I think 100 percent of Americans accept the fact that he is president of the United States. He occupies the White House.
Here's where the president has to create a balance.
KILMEADE: Finally --I know we have to go-- everything you said is solid. Based in fact, do you think there is a difference in the way the press has covered President Obama as opposed to President Trump?
FOWLER: I don't think so. I think President Obama got a hard time. They got mad at him when he took them to Hawaii over and over again, over Christmas break. They talked over his golfing, like they talk, like they talk about President Trump's golfing. But I think President Trump, a lot of the time, brings this media hate on himself.
Ouch. Once again, Fowlers slips in the knife and twists it. Keep an eye on this guy, he's going places.
