Donald Trump’s obsession with Fox News is not surprising. The extent to which the obsession stems is this: He wakes up every morning and receives his “intel” from Fox and Friends around six o’clock in the morning, and goes to bed after “pillow-talk” with Sean Hannity, generally around the time Hannity ends, which is ten o’clock at night.
It’s no secret that he plays favorites with the media. He has called CNN “Fake News CNN,” and has called the New York Times “The Failing New York Times.” All the while, Trump has consistently played up the Fox News morning show as a place where reliable information can be obtained (hint: it’s not).
Playing favorites and having biases favoring certain networks is quite normal; we’re all human and have our biases favoring and rejecting what we want. Where the “positive bias” can be problematic is when it turns into an obsession.
The fact that Senior White House staffers are thrown curveballs before the formal “daily intel briefings” take place, usually as late as 11am, should be alarming. But, they are to shoulder as much blame for Trump’s obsession with Fox News. This is the PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. He has UNLIMITED access to the HIGHEST levels of information about the goings-on in not just the country he runs, but the world.
He has the information at hand to knock down whatever minutia from bloviators like his personal cheerleaders, Judge Jeanine Pirro and Sean Hannity, spew. Whenever anything in the daily briefings contradicts what he might have heard from Ainsley Earhardt, Steve Doocy & Brian Kilmeade during his Tweetstorms at 6 o’clock in the morning, he has a choice: believing people that only common civilians have access to, or intelligence experts THAT ONLY HE HAS ACCESS TO, and with the most experience of how the world works.
As usual, he believes the people that common citizens have access to, and goes off on anything that might be somewhat controversial, leaving staffers with the task of trying to trying knock down whatever might have been stirred up by any talking head from a news network.
These staffers wouldn’t have to shoulder this burden if they nipped this obsession with the media right from the get-go. These staffers that work with Trump know how he is whenever the media reports anything positive or negative about him. It’s not easy to wean the narcissistic man-child off his fab five, but if it would be THAT difficult, then DON’T TAKE THE JOB!
Eventually, Trump will come to realize that he can’t have “yes men” surrounding him when he is the leader of the free world, and that he will appoint some people that have experience and the strength to tell him what he needs to hear, not what he wants to hear.
And, hopefully, takes Sean Hannity’s number off the select few that are allowed to have “pillow-talk” with Trump.
