Turns Out Fox's Assurances About the Trump Town Hall Were Bald-Faced Lies
"Real Journalism, Fair and Balanced" is but a distant memory.
When the news broke that Fox News would be holding a live town hall with Donald Trump at the same time as the Republican presidential debate Trump was skipping because that was the time Trump wanted, event host Bret Baier assured disgruntled conservatives of two things: that he and Martha MacCallum would press Trump with “tough questions” from themselves and Iowa voters, and that they would “fact check [in] real time.”
Both of those statements turned out to be lies.
On Wednesday night, Trump paraded his general wretchedness as expected, with highlights including an idiotic ramble expressing amazement that the words “I'm going to be a dictator” could possibly have been construed badly, and a horrendous repetition of his abortion sellout that Big Life is giving a pass. But what got the lion’s share of the online attention the next day were the bald-faced lies he told about both his Covid-19 record and Ron DeSantis’s.
Hot Air’s David Strom has a useful summary of the relevant segments, in which Trump astonishingly claimed that as “a federalist” he actually never shut down the country during the pandemic, completely passing the buck to governors while claiming DeSantis shut down Florida “violently,” insisted that his White House’s top Covid czar Anthony Fauci “was not a huge factor in my administration,” and that “if you go back and look at the records, you will see that the biggest fan of Dr. Fauci was Ron DeSantis."
It was a performance so shameless and brazen in its dishonesty that it’s an open question whether Bill Clinton in his prime would have dared attempt it. As is detailed by Strom, in Community Notes to the Trump campaign’s tweets of the relevant clips, and plenty of others (I ran down the real facts of their respective records myself for LifeSiteNews here), it’s never been in dispute that DeSantis complimented the Trump administration and its chosen Covid point men in March 2020, relatively early in the pandemic, which is not remotely what "biggest fan of Dr. Fauci" means.
Like most people, DeSantis initially accepted the information and guidance he was getting from the Trump administration, and as is only common sense during a national emergency, was diplomatic and respectful to the team assembled by the president of his same party. Then when he got his hands on more reliable data, he apologized to the people of his state, reversed course, and established the strongest anti-lockdown record in the country.
By contrast, Trump went rhetorically back-and-forth on reopening and Fauci throughout the year, but ultimately kept him onboard and embraced him through the end of his presidency (including giving him a presidential commendation on his last day in office that he now denies culpability for) took personal credit for lockdowns (remember “the authority is total”? So federalist!), attacked states for reopening (when he wasn’t praising DeSantis as a great governor for keeping Florida open), presided over official communications urging governors to lock back down as late as January 2021, and has never took responsibility for any of it. Instead he simply lies and pretends the facts were almost a full 180 in the opposite direction.
We all lived through it. It’s all abundantly documented, from video to news coverage to the real-time reactions before career interests required grifter pundits to rewrite history. See the aforementioned links, as well as the excellent work by the Brownstone Institute and this devastating thread by author Michael Senger.
For an honest, decent, informed human being, there is simply no getting around the fact that the Covid catastrophe could not have happened without Trump's health agencies, Trump's Covid Task Force, Trump's Fauci, Trump's daily briefings, Trump's administration's reports and data and death projections, Trump's "guidances," Trump's name on checks not to go to work, Trump's signature on massive payouts to businesses to stay closed, Trump's criticism of those who reopened "too soon" that combined to created massive pressures and incentives on states to lock down lest they be pilloried as anti-science murderers. And that’s before getting into all the things he directly forced to lock down because they were in federal jurisdiction—including military cemeteries.
Sounds like prime fodder for a “real time fact check,” right? Maybe some “tough questions” in follow up? Oddly enough, neither of those things happened.
At the midpoint of Trump’s performance as his own Baghdad Bob, MacCallum meekly said that “a lot of people say you listened too much to Dr. Fauci,” and that “Ron DeSantis would definitely argue with your characterization of how he handled it.” Which wasn’t pushback at all; just setup for Trump to keep lying, completely unchallenged.
When Trump was done, how did Baier react? By moving on to the next subject.
Between this from two people who were supposed to be Fox’s “real journalists” as opposed to their opinion personalities, and sham pundits who will give Trump a complete pass on Covid while pretending to want the “architects” of the catastrophe to “go on trial,” it is no longer possible to deny one harrowing, depressing reality: conservative media is no longer better than the liberal media it originally rose to counter. With a handful of outmatched exceptions, It is no longer interested in even trying to be; it’s content to do and be the exact same thing as the leftist press—just on behalf of different partisan interests.