Trump and Fox News Invent Fake Opponents Because They’re Afraid of Biden

As this extraordinarily unprecedented election season rattles on, Dona;d Trump continues to lag behind Joe Biden in every national poll, as well as in most of the crucial swing state polls. It must be humiliating to be losing so badly to someone you characterize as a mentally deficient socialist

Joe Biden, Donald Trump Baby, Fake News

The truth is that Trump is terrified about his abysmal reelection prospects. And he’s even more terrified of Joe Biden, a bona fide, old school moderate with bipartisan credentials. Given Trump’s hardcore wingnuttery, it’s impossible for him to present any kind of marketable image to a nation that already knows him as an extremist with totalitarian tendencies. He openly advocates for aggressively fascist, police-state tactics to muzzle free speech. He craves the sort of lifetime rule that his heroes Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un enjoy. To that end he has implemented initiatives to suppress voting and refuses to respect the democratic process. He has called for the persecution, and even execution, of his political foes, including Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

Having no path to rehabilitate his abhorrent personality and horrendous record, Trump has embarked on a campaign to bring Biden down to his level. But even that is utterly implausible. Consequently, Trump is employing a desperation strategy aimed at trying to persuade voters that a Biden presidency would be subservient to the most radical leftist fringe of the Democratic Party.

Trump, with help from Fox News, has been hammering on a preposterous theory that Joe Biden is a puppet of the radical left. They are elevating Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or Bernie Sanders, or Kamala Harris as the real leaders who will drive the policy of a Biden administration. As appealing as that sounds, it just isn’t remotely true.

Biden won an overwhelming number of votes in the Democratic primaries. That doesn’t mean that progressives won’t advocate for their agenda, just as activists of all stripes do. but it does mean that a center-left agenda will dominate the Biden White House. What Trump and Fox News are doing is substituting who they prefer to run against because they are afraid to run against the solidly moderate Biden. But what these radical rightists don’t get is that if a progressive agenda gets enacted it will be because that’s what the American people want. And that’s a concept that Republicans can’t comprehend and have never pursued.

The problem with Trump’s strategy, other than how it’s cutting against reality, is that it does nothing to soften his own jagged edges. He isn’t even trying. This week he congratulated a QAnon crackpot, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who won a GOP congressional primary. He followed that up with congratulations for Laura Loomer, whose bigoted hostilities got her banned from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Medium, PayPal, Venmo, GoFundMe, Uber and Lyft. Then on Wednesday morning Trump tweeted this:

Seriously? Trump is actually calling for a boycott of an iconic American company that is headquartered in the swing state of Ohio and employs 64,000 people. Brilliant! And why? Because they sent out a memo asking employees not to promote political candidates of any party on company time. Or more accurately, because his fee fees were hurt that some Deplorable might have to wait until after work to put on his MAGA hat.

This isn’t the first time that Trump has attacked an American company and it’s American workers. It isn’t the second or third or fourth time either. Here are at least ten times that Trump has expressly ordered his cult disciples to boycott U.S. workers and the companies that employ them, including Harley-Davidson, CNN, Apple, Macy’s, Fox News, Univision, HBO, Rolling Stone, AT&T, and now Goodyear.

As for Fox News, they have taken this Trump campaign theme and blown it up across their network. Every host has parroted the “Biden is a radical leftist who will be controlled by other radical leftists in the party” line ad infinitum. On Laura Ingraham’s White Nationalist Hour, she tried to paint Biden as “pretending” to be a “faith and family candidate.” That’s what this campaign has come to. Fox News is actually comparing Biden’s life of reverence and fidelity to Trump’s life of phony piety, vulgarity, adultery, greed, pride, and lies. The right has tried on the Antichrist for size, and it fits like a glove.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.