A Fox Business channel guest on Monday laid a ton of uninterrupted Dear Leader-esque praise of the president’s handling of the coronavirus crisis that, even for the Trump-friendly station, needs to be heard to be believed.
While responding to a question about whether the president will take further action in restricting Americans’ “freedom of movement and association,” guest Doug Wead, a former special assistant to former president George H.W. Bush, ignored the question and instead gushed about how Trump is handling the crisis overall.
“What he’s doing right now, from the standpoint of history, is almost perfect. It looks like he was born for this moment,” Wead said.
Wead continued by lying about how Trump is “transparent by nature” and went on to name a few things that the president supported by way of governmental transparency, like making public files on the “Warren commission, UFOs, and the assassination of Kennedy” available.
But Wead conveniently omitted how secretive Trump has been on a slew of personal topics like withholding of financial records including his past and current business deals, not to mention his tax returns which Trump promised to release when he was a candidate in 2016.
Wead went on to comically boast that Trump is “beyond ideology” and is dealing with the COVID-19 issue better than Obama would have. Wead then placed the cherry on top by saying: “With Trump, you’ve got a man born for this moment.”
— PoliticsVideo23 (@politicsvideo23) March 16, 2020
Fox Business seemed to signal it was moving towards a more rational way of covering the coronavirus after they pushed out one of their primetime hosts, Trish Regan, last week. The move came after Regan devoted one of her opening monologues to push an irresponsible and false conspiracy theory about how the coronavirus was “another attempt to impeach the president.”
Regan made her argument in front of a graphic that read: “coronavirus impeachment scam” and accused Democrats of creating “mass hysteria to encourage a market sell-off.”
According to the New York Times, a flurry of complaints from inside Fox Business and Fox News followed Regan’s segment, which then led to her program being placed “on hiatus until further notice.”
— PoliticsVideo23 (@politicsvideo23) March 16, 2020
Host Stuart Varney, who allowed Wead to praise the president unchallenged, is a longtime Trump sycophant, enough so that he provided John Oliver in 2019 with plenty of moments to string together an over one-minute video mash-up of Varney doing nothing but gushing over all things Trump.
— PoliticsVideo23 (@politicsvideo23) March 16, 2020
So, the message from Fox Business seems to be: as long as one steers clear of broadcasting extensive false monologues about how the coronavirus was concocted by Democrats to bring down the president, guests can go on and on at length, even if they’re spouting lies about how Trump is handling the crisis.
As for the president himself, on Monday he was asked how he’d rate his response to the coronavirus crisis on a scale from 1 to 10, Trump replied, “I’d rate it a 10.” We’re pretty sure Wead would agree.
