Why Trump keeps turning Fox News garbage into official policy
President Donald Trump has deployed National Guard troops to Chicago and other Democrat-run cities over the objections of local leaders.
To justify his actions, Trump has falsely claimed that crime is surging and that protests are out of control, lambasting Democratic leaders for purportedly ignoring the problem. This isn’t true in Chicago, and fact-checkers have noted Trump’s rhetoric runs counter to a general trend downward in crime.
Trump, who is known for his prolific lying, has often made serious policy decisions like this based not on facts but on his TV-viewing habits.
Trump is addicted to TV
Trump is addicted to watching Fox News, regularly calling into programs and posting about the network online. And America is suffering as he lashes out based on the right-wing propaganda network’s fictional version of reality.
For instance, on Sept. 27, Trump directed Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to use resources to “to provide all necessary Troops to protect War ravaged Portland, and any of our ICE Facilities under siege from attack by Antifa, and other domestic terrorists.”
That missive seems to have been made in response to Fox News airing footage dated as far back as 2020. And even that footage, taken largely from the racial justice protests that year, highlights isolated incidents of violence and property damage, ignoring the largely peaceful pleas for equality and nonviolence.
By contrast, Portland residents have been uploading videos that show the city in the throes of normalcy, with the city’s eclectic mix of citizens relaxing and enjoying themselves—far from living in a “War ravaged” city.
On Fox News, Portland, Chicago, and other cities with Democratic leadership are constantly on fire and in chaos. It’s the network’s mode of operation, and it’s the same type of dishonesty that led the network to the nearly $800 million settlement it paid out to Dominion Voting Systems for pushing pro-Trump lies in the wake of his 2020 election loss.
A discerning Fox viewer may understand that showing the same footage over and over doesn’t mean new instances of an event are occurring, but Trump likely isn’t that kind of viewer.
Fox News habitually lies about American cities
In 2011, Fox repeatedly showed a single image of a migrant climbing over a border wall as part of the network’s crusade to claim the border was wide open under then-President Barack Obama (a strategy that continued under former President Joe Biden).
It was around this time that Trump was providing commentary to Fox, promoting racist conspiracies about Obama’s birthplace. He later became fixated on the notion that migrants were using a porous border wall as their method to enter the United States, and the idea of building a complete wall between the U.S. and Mexico became central to his 2016 presidential campaign.
In his first term, the Trump-Fox feedback loop—as Media Matters for America senior fellow Matt Gertz has termed it—came to life. Trump watched the network religiously and built his presidency around its obsessions.
When Fox told Trump he needed to pardon or provide clemency for criminals, he largely did as told. And despite having all of America’s intelligence infrastructure at his fingertips, Trump based his North Korea policy—including the threat of nuclear strikes—seemingly based on what he watched on Fox, often live-tweeting his hot takes.
Fox decided that migrant caravans were heading north to the U.S. border, so Trump focused the full force of his presidency on the issue as well, taking cues from “Fox & Friends,” which is known as his favorite of the Fox slate of programming.
Addiction turns to action
In his second term, Trump has not weaned himself off of Fox.
In June, Trump launched military strikes against Iran shortly after “Fox & Friends” aired segments urging conflict with Iran. Earlier that month, Fox News weekend host Mark Levin even led a delegation to the White House to push for military intervention in the region.
Occasionally, Trump and his family have had public disagreements with Fox, and this has mistakenly been interpreted by some as a serious rift. For instance, Donald Trump Jr. recently moaned that the network doesn’t worship Trump enough, and Trump is currently suing Fox owner Rupert Murdoch over the Wall Street Journal’s reporting on his connections to accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
But to the contrary, Fox and Trump largely continue to act as one. Trump has stocked his administration with faces he watched on Fox, transferring figures like Pete Hegseth from “Fox & Friends” to leading the Department of Defense.
In response, Fox expresses near-constant support for Trump, interpreting his many failures as successes. For instance, when Trump flopped and lied in front of the United Nations in September, the network hailed him for supposedly dropping “raw truth” on world leaders.
Trump is the most influential Fox News viewer in the world. When American citizens see the National Guard marching down their streets with assault rifles, they can thank a president whose brain has apparently fused with his television.