'Increasingly goofy': Analyst hits Fox News' for efforts to spin Trump trial
As Donald Trump's first criminal trial got underway, proceedings received extensive coverage in the media.
But over at Fox News, the story is not the center of the news world — and the network's focus was more centered around Trump's grievances over the trial, which accuses him of falsifying business records to cover up a hush money payment made to adult movie star Stormy Daniels.
According to The Daily Beast's Justin Baragona, "The rest of the cable news landscape has devoted round-the-clock coverage to the trial," but Fox has "mostly dipped in and out."
"Spending the bulk of its time on the pro-Palestinian protests at Ivy League schools, Fox News has centered a large portion of its Trump trial coverage on criticizing the case and the court’s treatment of the former president," Baragona wrote.
Baragona contends that Fox's approach to coverage of Trump's trial is causing its hosts and guests to take "increasingly goofy and zany positions" in order to defend Trump, and he cites a number of examples, including from The Five host Jesse Watters.
Also read: 'Perma-scowl': Observers say Trump is not doing well at hiding frustration from jurors
“The guy needs exercise. He’s usually golfing. And so, you’re going to put a man who’s almost 80, sitting in a room like this on his butt for all that time? It's not healthy,” Watters said during a segment this Monday.
“You know how big of a health nut I am. He needs sunlight and he needs activity. He needs to be walking around, he needs action. It’s really cruel and unusual punishment to make a man do that. And any time he moves, they threaten to throw him in prison!”
Baragona then points to the roundtable show Outnumbered, where GOP operative and regular Fox News guest Ian Prior compared Trump being criminally tried to the fall of Rome.
“The very problem that we have here is we are weaponizing the justice system to go after former presidents. You back up 2,000 years and this is the kind of thing they would do in the Roman Republic that led to the end of the Roman Republic,” Prior said. “Caesar is out there and says if you do not come back to Rome…and face prosecution, what did he do? He crossed the Rubicon and there’s the end of the Republic.”
Then there's Fox & Friends co-host Ainsley Earhardt, whose take on the matter didn't make much sense to Baragona, and he asked his readers to decide what the following commentary means.
“Does this set a precedent for other people who want to run for president?” Earhardt sighed. “What if they've done something like this in the past and they can say, 'Oh, well, they told me in the 8th grade they want to run for president, so since they paid off a girl when they were 30 years old, then that was election interference!'”
But the craziest take, according to Baragona, came from former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich.
“I am deeply worried that tomorrow, a totally corrupt judge and a totally corrupt district attorney are going to try to put a former president of the United States, candidate of his party, and front-runner in the polls in jail. Now, I think this is so horrendous that there has to be some way to reach out to the Supreme Court,” Gingrich said on Monday night’s Hannity.
“This is literally like some of the civil rights workers in Mississippi in the 1960s. The New York system is now so deeply corrupted and it's so bitterly, deeply anti-Trump.”
Read more at The Daily Beast.