February 11, 2019

Donald Trump claims to be hard working, despite the majority of his schedule marked as “executive time,” but a tweet today inadvertently proved again how important Fox News is to him and how little he cares about facts.

As Mediaite pointed out, Trump tweeted his approval of a disgraceful bit of commentary from Fox News host Jesse Watters Saturday night. Like a troll, Watters singled out a headline from Vox, challenging Trump’s State of the Union claim that crime went down in El Paso, Texas, after a border wall went up, then used that to attack all the media that isn't in bed with Trump the way Fox is.

“That’s a total, dishonest distortion of the facts,” Watters claimed. His argument was that Vox and the media “cherrypicked” their timeline to use the date from the time the wall was authorized “until only 2011 to make it look like crime went up.”

Watters had a hell of a nerve complaining about cherrypicking because he conveniently cherrypicked Trump’s statement to avoid a more blatant lie. Here’s what Trump said (that Watters did not deny):

"The border city of El Paso, Texas, used to have extremely high rates of violent crime — one of the highest in the country, and considered one of our nation's most dangerous cities. Now, immediately upon its building, with a powerful barrier in place, El Paso is one of the safest cities in our country."

Watters conveniently ignored the fact that Trump was flat-out wrong when he labeled El Paso “one of our nation’s most dangerous cities.” And while it’s true that crime decreased in El Paso since 2011, it was on a downward trajectory already.

While giving a pass to Trump, lickspittle Watters deliberately misled viewers with the claim, “Now the fact checkers have become fake news.” This from the guy who regularly hosts the “Diamond and Silk” duo, the geniuses who claimed that Russia got its nukes from Hillary Clinton.

As Mediaite’s Aidan McLaughlin noted, fact checkers make mistakes (like everyone else) “but to dismiss the entire practice as ‘fake’ is, of course, remarkably stupid.” And to that, I’ll add it’s remarkably dishonest.

Trump could not have cared less.

After a weekend with no public events scheduled, Trump spent at least part of this morning catching up on Fox News TV. Instead of doing any fact checking of Watters’ obvious falsehood, Trump lazily regurgitated it, along with a bit of love for Watters:

But perhaps Trump was aware of just how much laziness he was revealing, especially in light of the leaking of his schedules showing so much "unstructured" "executive time." A few minutes after the tweet to Watters, he boasted about being a hard worker.

Unfortunately for Trump, this one episode reveals just how hard he doesn't work.

Watch Watters’ dishonesty that Trump lapped up like a puppy dog above, from the February 9, 2019 Watters World.

Republished with permission from NewsHounds.us

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