Before Thursday night's final presidential debate, Axios circulated a tweet that anticipated a line of attack Donald Trump was likely to hurl at his Democratic challenger Joe Biden. "Watch for President Trump to address Joe Biden as 'the big guy' or 'the chairman' at tonight's debate as a way of dramatizing the Hunter Biden emails," it said.
I didn't get it. I'm paid to follow the news and I honestly had no idea what this supposed gotcha attack line meant. Sure, I've vaguely kept an eye on Trump's smears against Biden's son Hunter, and I generally know that Rudy Giuliani has been promoting some wackadoodle tale about Hunter leaving a laptop crammed with incriminating emails at some computer shop. But since I wasn't personally writing about it for the site, who has time to dive down that rabbit hole to nowheresville when, amid a lethal pandemic, you're juggling a full-time job with full-time child care or, worse yet, trying to figure out how to put food on the table for the next meal?
The answer to that question is, Trump and Fox News watchers, and that's it. Naturally, Trump did find a way to launch his completely and comically baseless allegation against Biden. "If this stuff is true about Russia, Ukraine, China, other countries, Iraq. If this is true, then he’s a corrupt politician," Trump said. "So don’t give me the stuff about how you’re this innocent baby. Joe, that calling you a corrupt politician ..."
Biden interrupted, "Nobody’s calling me ..."
Trump cut him off. "They’re calling it the laptop from hell," he responded, repeating the phrase twice to make certain none of his cultists missed the reference.
By "they," Trump means himself. He dropped that phrase on Fox News just a couple days earlier. "This is the laptop from hell," Trump told a relatively baffled crew of hosts of Fox & Friends on Tuesday morning. Trump then suggested that the emails revealed "the big man" had to get a certain cut of whatever plot or deal he was alleging, which again, remains completely unexplained and incomprehensible. Meanwhile, Trump's bestie Rudy Giuliani has been calling this cockamamie scheme "the hard drive from hell." And just to clarify how bogus this attack is, the FBI has actually opened an investigation into whether Giuliani's revelations are part of a Russian disinformation campaign.
Welp, that's one rabbit hole explained ... and about 20 minutes of my life I'll never get back.
At the debate, Trump actually worked in several other goodies for his cultists, using "Russia, Russia, Russia," a pet phrase Fox host Sean Hannity used to ridicule Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. Trump also referenced "AOC plus three" at one point, a derogatory reference to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and three other members of Congress who Trump and Fox hosts have gleefully pilloried for their progressive politics. Oh, and they all just happen to be women of color, a perfect racist-sexist nexus for right wingers.
Another few minutes of my life down the drain. Sorry, folks, for taking you on this journey.
When I first saw that Axios tweet Thursday, I quote tweeted it, writing, "I have literally no idea what this means. Neither will a single voter Trump needs to win now."
Following the debate, Angelo Carusone, president and CEO of the progressive media watchdog Media Matters for America, tweeted, "If Trump ends up losing, his reliance on Fox News will have helped pave the way. He's so foxed up right now that he can't see the field."
Fox News has been a boon to Republicans for decades, creating an entire media ecosphere ripe and ready to breathe life into whatever message conservatives wanted to pound home. The outlet did that very successfully for years by taking news that was at least minimally related to reality and then morphing it into political weaponry to be wielded by Republicans and other right-wing actors. Republicans' ceaseless Benghazi investigation that cost taxpayers millions and resulted in absolutely no finding of wrongdoing—let alone indictments—was a successful venture in using the Fox machinery to help kneecap Hillary Clinton's presidential bid.
But eventually Fox became such a comfortable safe-space for Republicans to disassociate with reality, it turned into a stumbling block. Donald Trump, who has spent his life living in a state of unreality, supercharged this effect. The sea of toxic conspiracy theories that he and his coterie swim in quickly overran Fox until the sludge it was spewing was no longer even minimally related to reality any longer.
On Thursday night, Trump did nothing to help himself with any of the 60-some percent of voters he must win over to be viable in this election. It's poetic justice that Fox News has helped hermetically seal him and most Republicans from any hints of reality that might give them a fighting chance in this election.
