Trump Stands With the Persecuted Hosts of Fox News

From Esquire

For the third movement of President Trump's truly symphonic Sunday morning tweet storm, he came to the defense of some of his favorite people-hate mongering Fox News hosts.

It’s been an eventful week for two of the network’s biggest names. Jeanine Pirro was publicly condemned by Fox and reportedly suspended from her show after airing an astonishingly Islamophobic segment about Congresswoman Ilhan Omar last weekend. On Monday, misogynistic, perverse, and racist statements that Carlson made years ago on a talk radio program resurfaced, sparking widespread outrage. Both Pirro and Carlson's shows lost sponsors in the wake of the controversies.

Hoping to stem the tide of decent humans responding to bigotry with appropriate disdain, Trump rallied his base to the Fox stars’ defense in a series of tweets that read like a coach's fourth quarter pep talk in the worst high school football movie ever. The president urged the two TV personalities to ignore their critics. "Your competitors are jealous - they all want what you’ve got - NUMBER ONE," tweeted Trump. "Don’t hand it to them on a silver platter. They can’t beat you, you can only beat yourselves!"

While Carlson has sometimes criticized Trump from the right, Pirro is a Trump loyalist and the interview-shy makes occasional phone appearances on the former judge’s show. She and the president, long well-known in their native New York, have been friends for decades.

Trump's twitter feed is no stranger to ridiculously florid prose, but journalist Judd Legum pointed out that one phrase Trump used in his latest screed echoes a text describing the 1683 Battle of Vienna. The battle, which found Christian forces defeating the Muslim Ottoman Empire, is often referenced by white supremacists, including the white nationalist who murdered 50 worshippers at a New Zealand mosque on Friday.

The full quote is "Be strong and prosper in thy way on behalf of the Christian faith," and it striking that Trump deployed this particularly phrase in defense of Pirro and Tucker, who respectively accused a Congresswoman of adhering to Sharia law and called Iraqis "semiliterate primitive monkeys." The use of the phrase could very well be entirely coincidental-the president doesn’t read his own intelligence briefings, so it’s unlikely that he’s got dog-eared accounts of 17th century warfare on his bedside table. But it may be familiar to one of the presidents aides, who sometimes compose his tweets.

"My guess is that Trump is not aware of this text," wrote Legum on Twitter, "but it is certainly something that Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon may be familiar with. Bannon has referenced Vienna in speeches."

Trump has long had a cozy relationship with Fox, but a recent investigation by The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer revealed the extent to which the cable news news channel acts as the Trump administration’s state media. Her report revealed that Roger Ailes may have tipped Trump off to a debate ahead of the network’s 2015 Republican primary debate, and that a former FoxNews.com reporter alleges that the outlet killed the Stormy Daniels story on Trump’s behalf prior to the election. During his first year in office, the president gave two interviews to NBC, one each to ABC and CBS, none to CNN, and 18 to Fox.

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