That’s right:
President Donald Trump told officials from the Department of Homeland Security to get their marching orders by listening to Fox Business host Lou Dobbs “every night,” former DHS chief of staff Miles Taylor told Anderson Cooper on Friday.
Dobbs, an effusive supporter of Trump, was basically the “shadow chief of staff” for the department, Taylor said in the CNN interview.
“The president would call us and … he would say, ‘Why the hell didn’t you watch Lou Dobbs last night? You need to listen to Lou. What Lou says is what I want to do,’” Taylor said.
“So if Lou Dobbs peddled a conspiracy theory on late-night television or made an erroneous claim about what should be done … at the border … the president wanted us to be tuning in every night,” he added.-
Taylor said he didn’t have time to watch Dobbs while the 250,000-person DHS was “trying to guard against some of the most severe threats to this country.”
“We can’t be watching Lou Dobbs and taking our orders from him, but this happened on a regular basis,” Taylor said.
Analysts have been having a chicken or the egg discussion about Fox and Trump from the beginning. Does Fox follow Trump or does Trump follow Fox? I settled on the idea that it’s a feedback loop, in which they each influence the other.
The scary part of that is that Fox News’ looniest are the ones who influence the president on policy and the president is so brain damaged that he actually thinks they know what they are talking about.
Fox has a lot to answer for. They are as responsible for the death and destruction we are experiencing as the GOP and Trump. Maybe more.