On Thursday morning, Donald Trump tweeted this out about an op-ed Chelsea Manning wrote criticizing Barack Obama’s legacy:
Ignore for a minute both the suggestion, coming from Trump of all people, that there is something untoward about calling Obama weak, and the notion that “traitors” ought to at least be polite enough to send thank you cards to the governments they try to undermine. As some noted on Twitter, Trump’s tweet came just minutes after a Fox News report on Manning that appeared to use the same language:
As our Elliot Hannon and others discovered on Tuesday, Trump also tweeted out numbers on Chicago’s violence that appeared to be taken straight from that night’s broadcast of The O’Reilly Factor:
It was expected, of course, that Fox News would adopt and promote the Trump administration’s talking points. But Trump, as president, getting his talking points from Fox News is something else entirely. In August 2015, Trump famously said that he got his military advice from watching cable news. Now, with all of the intelligence and expertise presumably available to him in the White House, that level of reliance on cable will evidently continue. Finally we have a president who, just like real Americans, learns much of what he needs to know about the world from Fox & Friends.
Expect the Fox-to-Trump information pipeline to continue. As Maggie Haberman wrote in Wednesday’s New York Times, while Trump’s morning TV watching routine has been impacted by his new schedule, “Mr. Trump, who does not read books, is able to end his evenings with plenty of television.”
