Sinclair Broadcast Group is at it again, forcing all of its more than 100 stations to air Trump administration propaganda—and the propaganda is only getting more blatant. This time, it’s Boris Epshteyn’s two-part interview with White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and it is absolutely incorrect to say Epshteyn lobbed Sanders softball questions. Rather, he gently stroked her with little puffballs of spun silk, at one point interrupting to assure her that “I think you’re very nice.” For her part, Sanders was typically self-righteous about objections to her lying and her boss’s efforts to stoke racism.
Asked to theorize about the reason for “some of the overarching and really over-the-line heat that you have faced from some folks, sometimes very personal,” Sanders went into one of her stock lines, answering that “I think some people, Democrats in particular, at some point they’re going to have to decide if they love our country more than they hate this president. ”
As if there’s only one possible vision for America, and it’s Donald Trump’s way. That’s the smug, condescending vision of the Trumpers who would have us become a nation of angry, frightened white people raging at the possibility that a brown person or a black person or an LGBT person might expect the idea of freedom to apply to them. And it’s a particularly fine thing coming from the mouthpiece of a man elected with the help of a hostile foreign nation trying to undermine American democracy itself, one who has cozied up to every authoritarian leader he meets while insulting democratic allies.
The bottom line, Epshteyn tells viewers of all of Sinclair’s local news stations in the first segment of the interview to air, is that “Sarah is a good person, a mother of three, and a public servant. I hope that all members of the press start treating her with the respect that she deserves.” In the second segment, it’s that “As you just heard from one of the few Americans who have met with Kim Jong Un face to face, the summit was a success.” Only a minority of Fox News hosts would be this deferential—it is pure White House talking points not just going unchallenged, but being backed up at every turn by the loathsome Epshteyn, with the full power of a major broadcast group behind it all.