HOAX

A deep, dispiriting dive into the nefarious intersection of politics, conspiracy, lies, and money as served up by Donald Trump and Fox News.

There are moments when one feels almost sorry for Trump: His niece has spilled nasty beans about him, and his sister has chided him for lying. It’s all in a day’s work for him. The feeling sorry bit comes when CNN host Stelter suggests that Trump isn’t smart enough to concoct his bizarre gibberish. Instead, it comes straight from the “lie-laundering” Fox News, courtesy mostly of Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, and Laura Ingraham—and even Hannity, according to one of Stelter’s sources, says “that Trump is a batshit crazy person.” Trump lives by the TV, tuned to Fox unless some now-departed bête noire like Shepard Smith appears, and it’s from Fox that he takes his cues. All of them: a circus of disinformation about lab-hatched viruses, caravans full of terrorists from Guatemala, the “Mueller crime family” that engineered Trump’s scarcely mentioned impeachment, and a host of other alternative takes on reality. Stelter provides genealogies for each of Trump’s peevish prevarications, not least of them the insistence that the truth is a “hoax,” a word that “was uttered more than nine hundred times on Fox News in the first six months of 2020.” That numbing repetition, notes the author, erodes the truth with each mantralike utterance. Fox has needed Trump for ratings—its average viewer is 67, an obviously declining demographic—and Trump has needed Fox to serve as echo chamber and think tank. Each obliges the other: “Fox was the gas station where Trump stopped to fill up his tank of resentment,” and Trump lends Fox influence over U.S. policy. In a long, sordid, cheerless, and endlessly dishy narrative, Stelter indicts all parties involved for leaving the country “without a properly functioning chief executive.” (Editor’s Note: The paperback edition is revised and contains 20,000 more words.)

Those inclined to scorn the sitting president will have all the more reason to do so after reading this seething book.