Ezra Klein: Donald Trump, Fox News, and the logic of alternative facts

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Donald Trump, Fox News, and the logic of alternative facts
The Nunes memo and the FBI texts gave Trump the alternative story he needed.
By Ezra Klein@ezraklein Feb 9, 2018, 11:40am EST


If you’re a liberal, the past week in politics looked like a series of strange self-owns from the Fox News/Trumpist wing of the Republican Party.

First there was the memo from Rep. Devin Nunes, which Sean Hannity hyped would reveal a scandal “worse than Watergate” but proved a dud upon release. Instead of corroborating a conservative line that the case against President Donald Trump was politically motivated, it instead confirmed the New York Times’s reporting that the FBI’s inquiry began with Trump adviser George Papadopoulos’s loose talk.

Then there were new text messages between FBI lawyer Lisa Page and her lover Peter Strzok, an FBI agent who later served on, and was then fired from, Robert Mueller’s probe. Page and Strzok’s past personal texts showed they hoped Trump would lose the election. The new set included a provocative line: Then-President Obama wants “to know everything we’re doing,” Page said.

Conservative reaction was instantaneous. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) said the texts revealed “Obama’s personal involvement in the Clinton email scandal and the FBI investigation of it.” House Judiciary Committee member Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) said that “it means the president [Obama] wants to know what they’re doing to stop Trump.” Trump himself tweeted: “NEW FBI TEXTS ARE BOMBSHELLS!”

All of this proved wrong. As ThinkProgress’s Judd Legum noted, the date of the texts — September 2, 2016 — was after the initial investigation into Clinton’s emails was closed and before the discovery of emails on Anthony Weiner’s laptop (which happened on September 28, 2016, and briefly led to the Clinton investigation being reopened). The Wall Street Journal then reported that the texts referred “to preparation to brief Mr. Obama about Russian interference in that year’s election.” That aligns with the public timeline: We know Obama confronted Vladimir Putin about Russia’s election meddling on September 4, during the September 2016 G20 meeting, so it makes sense that he was being briefed a few days before that.

Finally, Fox News dropped a report on Thursday showing that in March 2017, Sen. Mark Warner, the Virginia Democrat who has been helping lead the Intelligence Committee’s Russia investigation, texted with a Russian oligarch in order to get information on, and potentially meet with, Christopher Steele, the author of the infamous Russia dossier. It isn’t clear what wrongdoing this is supposed to show — it’s reasonable enough that a Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee would have wanted to interview Steele, given that his work was influential — but it elicited a predictable Trump tweet:

Link to tweet

Less predictable was Sen. Marco Rubio’s sharp response, accusing both Trump and Fox News of trying to spin a scandal out of nothing, and noting that Warner didn’t “get caught”; he’d told the Intelligence Committee exactly what he was doing:

Link to tweet

Fox News knew that Warner had disclosed the texts to the committee but didn’t mention it until the seventh paragraph of the story, and didn’t explain that Sen. Richard Burr, the Republican chair of the Intelligence Committee, was aware of Warner’s efforts until the very end of the story.

One way of looking at this past week is as a failure for the conservative spin machine. All three stories crumbled upon contact with the barest scrutiny, embarrassing the outlets and politicians that credulously or cynically promoted them.

The other way of looking at it is as a stunning success, one that gave Trump and his defenders exactly what they wanted.

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https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/2/9/16991410/trump-fox-nunes-fbi-warner-texts