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Trump pauses tweeting about ‘Fox & Friends’ to say he doesn’t watch a lot of TV

Trump literally tweeted a 'Fox & Friends' clip four tweets before this.

 

David Covucci

Internet Culture

Posted on Jul 12, 2017   Updated on May 23, 2021, 12:07 am CDT

President Donald Trump frequently spends his mornings on Twitter refuting stories he believes to be false, including stories based on comments from White House staff—and the president himself.

On Tuesday, New York Times’ chief political correspondent Mark Leibovich posted a long read about how Washington, D.C., is reacting to Trump. In it, he included a snippet where he witnessed Trump watching a DVR’d episode of Fox & Friends:

It was 12:30, but the president was not eating lunch. He was watching a recording of Fox and Friends from about four hours earlier on a large TV mounted on the wall.

It’s clear the president watches Fox & Friends, as he repeatedly retweets segments from Fox & Friends and has parroted talking points from the show with such frequency that there’s little chance it’s a mere coincidence.

But not so fast, says Trump.

Six tweets earlier—including a retweet of a Fox & Friends clip—Trump was congratulating his son’s performance on… television.

On both Monday and Tuesday, he retweeted four consecutive Fox & Friends segments, in addition to the one he tweeted Wednesday morning.

While unnumbered reports have mentioned Trump’s television habits, the president’s latest tweet may also be in response to a Politico report published on Tuesday that claims, “White House aides feel blindsided by the bombshell revelations around Donald Trump Jr.’s campaign meeting with a Russian lawyer, while the president is using his relatively light schedule to watch TV and fume about the latest scandal, according to interviews with half a dozen White House officials and advisers.”

Debate all you want veracity of his claim that the White House is running like a well-oiled machine. Trump does watch television. And it can be problematic, not because of how the president spends his time, but because his favorite programs—despite the president railing against “fake news”—sometimes contain glaring inaccuracies amid their spin.

This Monday, for example, Fox & Friends produced a segment on the revelation that some of former FBI Director James Comey‘s memos contained classified information.

That’s incorrect. The original report from the Hill stated that four of Comey’s seven memos detailing his conversations with Trump contained classified information. Nowhere is it mentioned that the memo he shared contained classified information.

But here was the president eight minutes later.

Indeed, Fox & Friends later issued a correction about its inaccurate reporting. But, according to Trump, he doesn’t have the time to watch shows like that.

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*First Published: Jul 12, 2017, 10:47 am CDT