Seth Meyers: 'This is what you get when you make a TV star president'

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2020/may/05/seth-meyers-trump-what-you-get-when-you-make-tv-star-president

Seth Meyers: 'This is what you get when you make a TV star president'
Late-night hosts blast Trump’s Lincoln Memorial town hall, the White House/Fox News feedback loop and ‘White House liar’ Kayleigh McEnany

As several states began tentative, and risky, reopening measures, Donald Trump held a town hall at the Lincoln Memorial on Sunday night exclusively for Fox News – which “makes sense”, said Seth Meyers on Late Night, because Trump is “constantly either in a state of watching Fox or appearing on Fox or watching himself appearing on Fox. Eventually Fox is just going to turn into a 24/7 feed of Trump watching himself on Fox like an infinity mirror.”

The White House has basically become a Fox News offshoot of advisers for the president, Meyers continued, such as his new press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, who held her first press conference last week. The hiring of McEnany, a former Fox production assistant, epitomizes “the feedback loop of disinformation and propaganda that exists between the Trump White House and Fox News”, said Meyers. McEnany is known, for example, for defending Trump on cable news in February with “outlandish lies” such as “this president will always put America first, he will always protect American citizens, we will not see diseases like the coronavirus come here”.

Fox News also played a destructive role in what the Washington Post called Trump’s “lost month” of “desperation and dysfunction” as he ignored and then gave up on fighting coronavirus and instead focused, at the behest of aides and his favorite Fox News hosts, on prematurely opening up the economy. The Post reports that frequent Fox News guest and “Trump’s toothless vampire” Rudy Giuliani and host Laura Ingraham lobbied the president repeatedly, in White House meetings and on air, to embrace the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine (“Remember when everyone cared about that for a second? The Tamagotchi of Covid cures,” said Meyers) as a coronavirus treatment (it is not proven and can have fatal side-effects). “Yeah, the TV president who played a TV businessman is listening to TV doctors,” Meyers said.

Still, it’s confirmation that “a Fox host with no medical expertise [Ingraham] is directly advising the president on a deadly pandemic, while that same president hires pundits he sees on TV and fires or punishes actual experts and inspector generals who criticize him”, said Meyers. “This is what you get when you make a TV star president. Because when you’re on TV, no one ever tells you you’re wrong.”