Despite Donald Trump, his allies, and his supporters fuming at Fox News for its accurate projections as votes continue to be tallied, the president is still leaning heavily on the network to advance his delusions of a reelection victory. Beginning on Saturday, when the majority of media outlets, including Fox News, decided that the math made a Joe Biden win inevitable, Trump continued the weekend routine he has maintained since becoming president: watching his favorite sycophants on Fox News and compiling clips and quotes of them singing his praises for tweeting purposes. This time around, his sample platter of Fox coverage has been deployed for a more nefarious purpose: to delegitimize Biden’s projected victory in the minds of his supporters.
As part of his messaging blitz arguing that fraudulent vote counts in battleground states are what cost him the election, Trump is planning yet another series of rallies to work his base up into a frenzied rage. And Fox News’ willingness to entertain his delusions is critical to his war drumming. A key example of this came on Sunday morning, as Trump live-tweeted Fox contributor Newt Gingrich’s Fox & Friends claim that Democrats and the Biden campaign “are thieves. The big city machines are corrupt. This was a stolen election. Best pollster in Britain wrote this morning that this clearly was a stolen election, that it’s impossible to imagine that Biden outran Obama in some of these states. Where it mattered, they stole what they had to steal.” (Twitter attached a warning to the president’s posts that read, “This claim about election fraud is disputed.”)
Hours later, the president urged his followers to tune in to talk-radio host Mark Levin’s Sunday night show on Fox so they could understand the “Mail-In Ballot Hoax!” He subsequently promoted a segment from Levin in which lawyer and Trump ally Ken Starr claimed that “to count every vote may be a crime,” while Levin floated the possibility of the Republican-dominated Pennsylvania legislature bypassing the state’s popular vote and trying to award the state’s electoral votes to Trump. (Republican Pennsylvania House members announced on Monday evening that they will call for an audit of election results, and won’t certify those results until the audit is complete.)
The Gingrich and Levin posts are just two of Trump’s 16 tweets since Friday night that used Fox segments to disregard the results of the election, the majority of which were hit with content warnings by Twitter. Another one of the president’s promoted weekend hits came courtesy of Jonathan Turley, who Trump quoted as saying, “We should look at the votes. We’re just beginning the tabulation stage. We should look at these allegations. We’re seeing a number of affidavits that there has been voter fraud. We have a history in this country of election problems.” He went on to describe a “systemic problem,” adding, “This is about how these ballots were authenticated, because if there’s a problem in the system about authentications, that would seriously affect the ENTIRE ELECTION. And what concerns me is that we had over a hundred million mail-in ballots in cities like Philadelphia and Detroit with a long series of election problems (to put it mildly).”
This line of thinking is not confined to opinion shows. The network’s “hard news” coverage included chyrons that made claims such as, “President Trump Legal Team Preparing Lawsuits in Swing States Over Claims of Voter Fraud,” “Trump to Revive Campaign-Style Rallies Over Election Fraud Allegations,” and “Sen Cruz: 2020 Election Isn’t Over; Trump Still Has ‘A Path to Victory,’” as noted by CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy. However, since major networks made the call for Biden just before noon on Saturday, the news side of Fox has used the term “president-elect” to describe the former vice president. “The path is clear for the new president-elect,” anchor Martha MacCallum said while breaking the news of a projected Biden win. In one instance over the weekend, Fox reporter Peter Doocy quickly corrected his labeling of Biden. “Sorry, the former V.P.—the president-elect, right?” he said.
Efforts from the network’s opinion personalities to downplay the reality of a Trump defeat have backfired on its news division. Fox News anchor Sandra Smith was irate after a guest panelist, Cleta Mitchell, argued that “just because [media outlets declare] that somebody’s president, that doesn’t make them president. I think everybody wants to know that this was done properly and legally and people trust the results,” a remark that elicited an eye roll and a frown from Smith. Despite the fact that Mitchell’s comments are similar to those from Fox contributors like Gingrich, Smith declined to entertain conspiratorial thinking. “What? What is happening?” she said after Mitchell demanded that “every one” of Trump’s unproven election fraud claims be thoroughly investigated. Speaking off-camera to her colleague, Trace Gallagher, she added, “Like, Trace, we’ve called it.”
Two days after Smith’s moment of frustration, Fox Business hosts Lou Dobbs and Maria Bartiromo laid out cases backing Trump’s claims in much more extreme terms than Mitchell. “The radical Dems are also working with the corporate-owned left-wing national media, doing their very best to nullify the votes of 71 million Trump voters. And let’s be very direct, many are trying to steal this election from President Trump,” Dobbsseethed during his Monday night show, saying that the only “doubt is the extent of” the election scheme. “The president has roundly rejected the national left-wing media for its overreach, its presumption in calling Joe Biden the president-elect Saturday…there is no official winner until every legal vote is counted, every disputed vote is resolved.” Bartiromo, meanwhile, appeared on Hannity’s radio show to say that she has “not given up on [Attorney General] Bill Barr and his motivations” to get involved in the election controversy. “I am expecting a full-on investigation of these irregularities that we’re seeing in terms of voting and the ballots. That needs to play out,” she concluded.
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