Left, Fox & Friends 6:08 a.m.
Right, Trump, 6:47 a.m.
Left, Fox & Friends, 6:09 a.m.
Right, Trump, 6:57 a.m.
We've moved into the "watches Fox News, stews, tweets grievances" stage of the cycle, which, as always, exposes the people who bought the "reads speech on Teleprompter" stage.
If he's still watching, he should be hitting this segment any time now.
President Trump is now raging against Google based on last night's episode of Lou Dobbs Tonight, which he tweeted clips of last night. Some notes on this...
Left, Fox Business, 7:40 p.m.
Right, Trump, 7:47 a.m.
The right-wing media has been trying to turn former Google engineer Kevin Cernekee, who says he was fired for being conservative, into the poster boy for their claim that big tech is anti-conservative. This started with a big profile of him in the Wall Street Journal on Thursday.
His story spread through right-wing media. A sampling:
The implication of these stories is pretty simple: Google is biased against conservatives like you, the reader. But the story appears to have been more complicated. Well down in the WSJ, we discover that some of Cernekee's fellow Republicans at Google thought he was an extremist.
And yesterday, The Daily Caller fleshed that out a bit more: Cernekee made "troubling posts" on Google listservs, including trying to raise money on Chuck Johnson's website to support notorious white nationalist Richard Spencer, described as a "well-known conservative activist."
"Conservatives angry at big tech may view such postings as a cautionary lesson in the importance of vetting their cause célèbres," the article continued. Indeed. dailycaller.com/2019/08/05/goo…
After that story was published, Lou Dobbs ran a story using Cernekee's earlier interview on Fox & Friends to call for the Justice Department to "sit inside the Google complex." Trump liked the segment, tweeted clips from it last night, and is now citing Cernekee as an authority.
This is at least the third time Trump has tweeted angrily about Google after watching a Fox segment about the company.
1. A Fox host told Trump over lunch two weeks ago that Iran was days from a nuke, which he apparently believed over the denials of the former Fox contributor he made director of national intelligence.
2. Then Trump woke up on Friday and saw wall-to-wall positive coverage of Israeli strikes on Iran, and decided he wanted some credit.
3. Now the former Fox host Trump named Secretary of Defense has the U.S. military marshaling forces in the region while a different former Fox host has been in a scorched-earth fight with the first Fox host to capture Trump's attention and stop it.
1. I'm going to thread out the very odd sequence of events that led Fox News anchor John Robert, theoretically a "straight news" guy, to pretend the early hours of June 7 actually happened a day ago in order to avoid pointing out that Donald Trump was wrong about something.
2. A few hours ago at the White House, Trump was asked when he last spoke to CA Gov. Gavin Newsom. Trump replied that they had spoked "a day ago."
Pirro stands out, even among the long list of shills and propagandists Fox employs, as a diehard Trump sycophant. In 2018, my late colleague Simon Maloy wrote that her "advocacy for the president is so aggressive that it often borders on insane -- some of her commentary would be at home in an authoritarian state media apparatus." mediamatters.org/jeanine-pirro/…
Here's a thread of notes on Pete Hegseth, the Fox & Friends weekend co-host that Donald Trump is trying to make Defense Secretary, overseeing the U.S. military, massive Pentagon budget and bureaucracy, and sixth in line to the presidency.
Hegseth is an extreme hawk who has backed attacks on Iranian infrastructure and cultural sites and even floated a “preemptive strike” against North Korea. mediamatters.org/pete-hegseth/t…
Hegseth has complained that military rules of engagement in combat zones are “a huge problem” and were “written for us to lose.” He's backed that up by successfully lobbying Trump to give clemency to alleged and convicted U.S. war criminals. mediamatters.org/pete-hegseth/t…
Takeaway from the truck stunt is Trump won’t say anything bad about the supporter who spoke at his rally and called PR garbage, and indeed doesn’t seem able to even denounce the comment.
He’s just giving those influential Puerto Ricans who have been expressing outrage about the comments all week new material to post about, insane self-own.
Trumpy billionaires are hoping to ride a wave of grievance into power, then use it to cut their own taxes and demolish their competitors.
In exchange for his support, Trump is offering Elon Musk the power to, in Musk's own telling, destroy Tesla's domestic competitors.
The result would reverse the domestic manufacturing renaissance spurred by the Inflation Reduction Act, eliminating good jobs in Republican parts of the country.