The President of the United States went off on a Twitter rant about the media on Sunday evening. This isn’t news, because the President loves to yell into his computer box about things he saw on his TV box. What made this different, though, was that his target was Fox News.
Trouble in paradise? Or just the fact that if you spend 16 hours a day watching a single channel, you’re occasionally going to get irritated at it? It was not immediately clear what, exactly, aired on Fox News that Donald Trump was cranky about. Because the President uses “TiVo” it can be difficult to match up his anger with the broadcast that inspired it, since he’s often watching on a delay of hours.
Here’s the answer. The Associated Press cited White House insiders in an article it wrote about the President’s colicky tweets about a TV channel, because that’s just the hellworld we live in.
[Trump] was particularly annoyed by Fox correspondent Greg Palkot’s live report from a sports bar in France, where patrons erupted in a “F*** Trump” chant, according to two advisers not authorized to speak publicly about private discussions.
Incredible! Incredible. The Women’s World Cup was not a good one for Trump, as far as international soccer tournaments go, as it featured a feud between him and new American President Megan Rapinoe, which she won on all scorecards by being correct and forceful and eloquent and winning the Golden Ball for best player and the Golden Boot for top scorer and the whole dang World Cup. Trump perhaps thought he could avoid having to acknowledge Rapinoe’s and the USWNT’s triumph by watching Fox News that afternoon, but he could not, as a bunch of Americans in a bar in Lyon took over the Fox report by chanting “Fuck Trump” in the background.
It remains unclear at press time whether the President was mad because he thinks Fox should not have covered the tournament at all, or if he thinks they should have immediately cut back to the studio upon the start of the chant, or if he thinks the reporter intentionally rather than accidentally interviewed the man who started the chant, and who then took advantage of his president-visible platform by declaring the need to “get that racist out of the White House.”
It’s up in the air whether Trump will follow through on his promise to invite the USWNT to the White House, or if he’ll rescind it like he has in the past when a championship-winning team makes clear they have no intentions of going. He’s probably going to stew over this one for a while. But his pique at Fox News? He’ll get over that. He could never stay mad at his true love.