Commentary: We’ve now learned that, on January 6, Fox news hosts were texting Mark Meadows, Donald Trump’s chief-of-staff, urging him to beg Trump to take the riot seriously, hours before telling the public Antifa caused the violence.
During the MAGA invasion of the Capitol, Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, and Brian Kilmeade pleaded with Meadows. “Mark, the President needs to tell those people to go home. This is hurting all of us. He’s destroying his legacy,” Ingraham wrote. Then on TV she called the rioters “people . . . antithetical to MAGA,” and suggested that Antifa was involved.
That’s 98 on a hypocrisy scale of 100. Kilmeade wrote, “Please get him on TV. Destroying everything you’ve accomplished.” Hannity wrote, “Can he make a statement? Tell people to leave the Capitol?” They all knew these were Trump’s people.
It’s sad that we’re not surprised. Fox personalities purported to be journalists, but were informal Trump advisors who used their platforms to mislead us. Had Fox existed in 1974, President Nixon might have finished his second term.
Meadows agreed Trump should stand up and dissuade his supporters – inspired by his lies about a stolen election – from further violence. Meadows responded he’d been trying. (So had Donald Trump, Jr. He knew who was responsible, and that Trump’s involvement was obvious.)
Now Meadows claims Trump was moving as fast as possible to minimize the violence. He hopes we’ve forgotten that even when Trump finally spoke, supposedly telling folks to go home, he emphasized that he loved them and that they should be angry about election fraud.
Meadows supposes we’ve forgotten Republican Senator Ben Sasse’s disgust that Trump, according to senior White House officials, was “delighted” by his supporters’ break-in, and confused by others on his team not sharing his excitement.
Jonah Goldberg, a recent Fox News refugee, shines some interesting light on the hypocrisy: “I know that a huge share of the people you saw on TV praising Trump were being dishonest. I don’t merely suspect it, I know it, because they would say one thing to my face or in my presence and another thing when the cameras and microphones were flipped on. And even when I didn’t hear it directly, I was often one degree of separation from it. (‘Guess what so-and-so said during the commercial break?’”)
Goldberg says he’s “a conservative who passionately believes the conspiracy-mongering, demagogic, populist, personality cult nonsense that defines so much of prime time Trumpism is not conservatism rightly understood, or even conservative in any meaningful sense.” Conservatives believe in free-enterprise, national security, and limiting governmental social programs. Trump believes only in Trump. (For example: Trump was clearly pro-choice, until he was seeking the Republican nomination.)
Conservatives preach the Constitution. Trump tried an end-run around it. Trump’s vague “stolen election” claims were so silly they failed in every court, even with judges he’d appointed. Trump tried to steal the election right in front of us, and nearly succeeded.
Trump’s robbery attempt included the January 6 effort to stop the vote count and have Vice-President Mike Pence let Republican Legislatures decide the election – but also includes the rash of state voter-suppression laws aimed at a more successful effort to veto the voters in 2024.
Clearly January 6 ain’t over. And good people who listen to Fox “personalities” should know those “personalities” don’t believe their own words.
For example, most conservative pundits are vaccinated – but not recommending listeners get shots.