The president's DC takeover once again lays bare the Trump-Fox feedback loop

Independent

2 days ago

Flanked by a coterie of former Fox News hosts Monday morning, Donald Trump waved printouts of supposed crime statistics he had cribbed from a Fox News broadcast to justify his federal takeover of Washington, claiming that the city was more dangerous than other capitals around the globe.
'Washington, D.C., is less safe than some capital cities in third-world countries,' Will Cain had breathlessly intoned during a Fox News segment five days earlier.
Meanwhile, Axios reported this week that the president decided to deploy 800 National Guard troops and take control of the city's police department – despite Washington's violent crime rates rapidly declining over the past two years – because of something he saw on his television.
'When he saw a report on Fox about how bad it was in D.C., that was the final straw,' an adviser to the president told Axios. 'He said he wanted it done. So we scrambled and got it done.'
Once again, it appears we have entered the Trump-Fox feedback loop.
From the moment Trump rode down that golden escalator and announced his first White House run in June 2015, he has enjoyed a symbiotic relationship with the conservative cable giant. While there have been bumps in the road -- whether it was his 'soft ban' during the Dominion election fraud lawsuit or his on-again/off-again friendship with owner Rupert Murdoch -- Trump and Fox have remained inextricably linked over the past decade.
(The president is suing Murdoch and The Wall Street Journal, which the conservative media mogul owns, for $10 billion over an article about a 'bawdy' birthday letter Trump allegedly sent deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in 2003. Trump has denied that he wrote the letter, calling it a 'fake thing.')
During his first administration, the president's non-stop cable news bingeing would feed his overactive Twitter fingers, resulting in the spectacle of a Fox News segment influencing Trump in real-time to threaten nuclear strikes against rogue nations – like he did with North Korea in 2018.
Matt Gertz, senior fellow for liberal media watchdog Media Matters for America, has been tracking the Trump-Fox feedback loop since the very beginning, and explained to The Independent just how prevalent the situation was during the first administration.
'In Trump's first term, Fox coverage was at the root of Trump decisions on pardons, federal contracts, staffing, criminal investigations, a wide range of foreign and domestic policies, and nearly 1,300 social media posts that responded directly to what he was seeing on-air,' he said.
Towards the end of Trump's first presidency, CNN chief media analyst Brian Stelter traced the 'grotesque feedback loop' between Trump and the right-wing network in his book Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth. Specifically, Stelter noted how Fox is 'Trump's safe space' where he's 'not going to be humiliated,' all while creating a 'dangerous' vicious cycle of misinformation, such as during the early days of the pandemic.
Stelter also highlighted the role Fox News star Sean Hannity plays in the Trump universe, where he acted as a 'shadow chief of staff' during the president's first term. At the same time, Trump took on the part of 'shadow producer' of Hannity's show, noting that the two pals simultaneously advised each other – whether it was Hannity impacting policy or the president shaping the Fox star's programming.
The second act of the Trump White House, meanwhile, has somehow become even more closely entwined with Fox News than the first iteration. While there was a revolving door between the conservative channel and the administration during Trump's first term, the president has outright used Fox News as a staffing agency during the second go-round, hiring roughly two dozen former network employees.
The optics of the Trump-Fox feedback loop were on full display during Monday's presser. Alongside the president was one-time Fox & Friends Weekend host Pete Hegseth, who now leads the Pentagon, and Jeanine Pirro – the former Fox News star whom Trump recently installed as the US attorney overseeing Washington. At one point, the president even made sure to boast about Pirro's television ratings during her time on The Five.
'The murder rate in Washington today is higher than that of Bogota, Colombia, Mexico City, some of the places that you hear about as being the worst places on Earth,' Trump grumbled at one point, showing bar charts and graphics he got directly from Cain's show.
'Fox's website then completed the loop-de-loop with a story titled, 'Trump claims DC crimes trounce stats from notoriously violent cities worldwide,'' Stelter noted in Wednesday's edition of his newsletter, Reliable Sources. 'I found it unintentionally funny that the writer asked the White House for copies of the charts and citations... when Fox was the source to begin with. (The right hand didn't know what the other right hand was doing.)'
The president, meanwhile, appeared to set the loop in motion on Tuesday when he posted to his social media site about the late-night attempted carjacking of former DOGE staffer Edward 'Big Balls' Coristine, suggesting that he would 'FEDERALIZE this City' if the 'Violent Crime' continued.
While pictures of a bloodied 'Big Balls' may have been the catalyst behind the president's anger in the beginning, he was apparently spurred into action by his Fox friends on TV, according to Axios. Cain, of course, was far from alone in pushing the president to take further action in Washington while fearmongering over the crime in the city.
In fact, Jeanine Pirro joined her old colleague Laura Ingraham on Wednesday night, and the two of them appeared to be in favor of Trump taking federal control of the city. 'I support him totally… If that's what we need to do to get it done, that's what he should do. And I support the president,' she told Ingraham.
'Fox News' programming often shapes Trump's actions, and that appears to have been the case here,' Gertz said. 'For months now, Trump's MAGA allies have been urging him to take a firmer hand over Washington D.C., but the tipping point for him to act was apparently an overwrought segment on his favorite TV channel.'
In recent months, the president has also been swayed by the network's personalities to support Israel's military strikes against Iran, with Fox News host (and Homeland Security Advisory Council member) Mark Levin playing a key role. Gertz also noted that Trump's recent demand that Intel fire its chief executive and his insults of Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) were in response to Fox coverage.
Additionally, just weeks before his second inauguration, Trump cited a retracted Fox News report about the New Orleans terror attack to insist that he'd been proven right that 'the criminals coming in are far worse than the criminals we have in our country,' falsely suggesting the assailant was an undocumented immigrant. In the end, it was confirmed that the suspect was born in the U.S. and that he didn't cross the southern border shortly before the New Year's attack.
Still, in some ways, the Trump-Fox feedback loop isn't quite as pervasive as it appeared during the first term. But as Gertz explains, the main reason for this is that Fox News and the Trump administration are essentially a single unit now.
'Trump seems to be posting about Fox shows and taking advice from its on-air personalities less frequently than he did in his first term. He no longer needs to instruct federal officials to run their agencies the way Fox is telling him to because those officials are often former Foxers themselves — 23 of his appointees previously worked for the network,' he said.
'First-term Trump would take Fox host Pete Hegseth's advice over senior Defense Department officials — in his second term, Hegseth is the Defense Secretary,' Gertz concluded. 'Former Foxers are also running or helping to run the Justice Department, FBI, State Department, Transportation Department, and intelligence community.'