In case you missed it, Trump, poor boy, is having a tweety hissy fit because he feels Fox News has betrayed him:
Read this from Daily Beast:
The president on Wednesday morning had a tantrum about the network giving coverage to Democrats. Fox News, he said, “isn’t working for us anymore!”
and this from RawStory:
Robert Murdoch and the powers that be at Fox News may see the handwriting on the wall. If they are positioning themselves to remain the dominant Republican cable news channel if Trump loses watch not only for stories calling out Trump for his lies, be alert for how much air time they give to Trump’s primary challengers. So far Joe Walsh and Bill Weld have declared and Mark Sanford is apparently considering it.
Trump is already bashing them and trying out nicknames.
I watched Chris Mathews on Hardball interviewing Joe Walsh and found him to be refreshing candid for a Republican and also highly articulate and powerful as he pulled no punches in attacking Trump’s character. As I write this the interview isn’t online yet but will be here when it is.
Here’s a video of Walsh being interviewed by George Stephanopoulos on ABC.
Welch is a conservative. Bill Weld, in contrast, is considered a moderate Republican. He isn’t attacking Trump as directly as Welch although according to
VOX which interviewed him (here) “he is deeply opposed to Donald Trump. He worries that Trump is going to drag America into autocracy ‘if people don’t raise their hands and don’t think straight and think for themselves.’ ”
Between the two we have one candidate who is attacking Trump mostly as a person who is unfit to be president, and another who is mostly attacking his policies.
If Mark Sanford decides to declare it isn’t clear how directly he will take on Trump’s vcahracter and manifest unfitness. However these remarks to Time Magazine give a clue:
“It’s daunting, and it’s intimidating, and it’s overwhelming in human terms. Nobody wants to be a human piñata … [for] the President who seems to come up with a nickname for anyone. But at the same time I feel called to do it.”
“There are a lot of us who have worked for years in the Republican party and feel lost not only by the way in which traditional tenants of the party have been seemingly cast aside, whether that’s on debt spending, whether that’s on free trade, whether that’s on civility and tone, I mean, does it mean that you have to hurl insults and frankly be mean to be a Republican? Is that the brand? I think there are some legitimate questions given the tone and tenor and focus of the administration that a lot of Republicans would have about, where are we going with this? What’s it mean to be a Republican these days? Is this it?”
Now can you imagine Fox News not only breaking free from being a propaganda machine for Trump but also regularly interviewing these challengers?
If you see this happening you will see that they are preparing for a world without Trump. If you also see that “Fox and Friends” tones down their sycophantic gushing over Trump or even fires whoever is the most brainwashed Trumpian (I have no idea who this might be) you will know something major is in the works. Maybe, considering this VOX story “Fox & Friends wants you to believe Trump would have G7 at Doral even if he didn’t own it — Their defense of one of Trump’s most corrupt proposals suggests they think their viewers will believe anything” it is all of them.
You’ll really know Fox News and Grandpa Rupert has dumped Trump big time if Tucker Carlson takes a sabbatical to write the second book he’s contacted with Simon and Schuster to write He signed an eight-figure, two-book deal with Simon and Schuster. (His first book in the series, Ship of Fools: How a Selfish Ruling Class is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution, was released in October 2018. Wikipedia)
This story from Aug. 27th is about the media too, but has a very different slant: The media needs to get with it about Trump’s psychopathology and there are experts who can help them.