Donald Trump swatted at Fox News on Monday after anchor Neil Cavuto advised viewers against self-prescribing hydroxychloroquine, an unproven COVID-19 drug the president says he has been ingesting for about two weeks as a preventive measure against the virus. “@FoxNews is no longer the same,” he tweeted shortly after Cavuto’s segment warning that hydroxychloroquine “will kill you” if taken by certain at-risk patients. “We miss the great Roger Ailes. You have more anti-Trump people, by far, than ever before. Looking for a new outlet!”
Trump retweeted nearly half a dozen posts thrashing Cavuto by name, including one tweet accusing him of spreading “sheer stupidity” and “#Fearporn fiction” and another describing the host as “an asshole” who is losing his ratings battle to CNN. A third post retweeted by the president, written by Wayne Allyn Root, a fringe conspiracy theorist who claimed the Las Vegas mass shooting was a “coordinated Muslim attack” and that the neo-Nazi “Unite the Right” Charlottesville rally was orchestrated by “actors & infiltrators” paid by Jewish billionaire George Soros, wrote Cavuto off as “foolish & gullible” and thanked Trump for “[lighting] the way” about the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine, even as medical experts argue that its usefulness against the coronavirus is not proven and one Department of Veterans Affairs study found that COVID-19 patients taking the drug were more likely to die than those without it.
During the Fox News segment that triggered Trump’s Twitter tear, Cavuto explained, “The fact of the matter is, though, when the president said, ‘What have you got to lose?’ the number of [hydroxychloroquine] studies [show] the population have one thing to lose: their lives.” He went on to say that “if you are taking this as a preventative treatment to ward off the virus, or in a worst-case scenario you are dealing with the virus and you are in this vulnerable population, it will kill you. I cannot stress that enough. This will kill you.” However, as the president noted in additional retweets, Cavuto is working against his own colleagues. Prime-time host Laura Ingraham has aggressively hawked hydroxychloroquine as a miracle cure for weeks, and Lou Dobbs, Tucker Carlson, and the hosts of Fox & Friends have all dedicated segments portraying the drug in a positive light. Sean Hannity went so far as to strongly advise his own viewers to get ahold of hydroxychloroquine if they can.
The president’s love-hate relationship with Fox has played out in its entirety over the past 24 hours. Despite trashing the network on Monday, Trump—who began his work week by telling his supporters to buy a new book by an ardently pro-Trump Fox host—immediately followed his tweet on Fox News hiring “anti-Trump people” by praising his go-to morning show, Fox & Friends, for beating “Morning Psycho (MSDNC) in the Ratings!” In late April, Trump condemned the network for pushing “Democrat talking points” and trying to “become politically correct.” And in perhaps his most overt threat against the network, Trump added that while his supporters might be watching “in record numbers” right now, they “are angry” and “want an alternative [to Fox]…So do I!” In his past fallouts with Fox News, the president has resorted to promoting One America News, a conspiratorial network with much lower ratings and production standards than Fox, but one that is far more sycophantically pro-Trump.
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