Poor Donald Trump. Not only has he lost the election, it looks as if he has lost the love of his life. I’m not talking about Melania – although some rumours have it that she is “counting the minutes” until she can get a divorce (which she has denied). I’m talking about Fox News.
For years, Trump and Fox News have been in a committed, loving relationship. Recently, however, there has been trouble in paradise, with Trump complaining the network is a “much different place than it used to be”. The relationship might have been salvaged, but then Fox News did something unforgivable: it flirted with real journalism. On election day, it was the first major outlet to declare Joe Biden would win Arizona, sending the Trump administration into a meltdown. Since then, Fox News has continued to infuriate the White House by refusing to encourage Trump’s delusion that he won the election. On Monday, for example, it cut away from the White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, when she claimed that the Democrats had encouraged voter fraud. “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” the Fox News anchor said to the viewers. “I can’t in good countenance continue showing you this.”
Trump’s supporters are outraged their leader’s once-beloved network is treating him this way. Some believe Fox News has gone “full lefty” and have started labelling it “fake news”. Which begs the question: where’s the real news? If you can’t even trust Fox News to fuel your deranged conspiracy theories these days, who can you trust? The internet, obviously. Parler, a rightwing version of Twitter, was downloaded almost 1m times between 3 November (election day) and 8 November – making it the most downloaded free app in the US over the weekend. While Parler, a safe space for those who don’t want their hate speech heavily moderated or their unfounded ideas factchecked, may be experiencing a spike in popularity, I’m not sure it will be long-lived. The interface feels as though it was designed by an extremely angry three-year-old and is difficult to navigate. Parler is not going to take down Fox News any time soon.
You know what might replace Fox News, though? Trump News. According to one school of thought, Trump never intended on winning the 2016 election; the campaign was just a publicity stunt to kickstart his own media network. Now that he has been relieved of his political duties, it’s widely expected he will launch Trump TV. But who knows, perhaps Trump will surprise us all and actually follow through on his campaign promises. “If I lose to [Biden] … I will never speak to you again,” Trump said at a rally in North Carolina rally in September. “You’ll never see me again.” I really hope that is not fake news.
• Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
