In a recent article in The New Yorker, historian Jill Lepore criticized the January 6th Report (issued by the House January 6th Committee) for making it seem as if “Donald Trump acted alone and came out of nowhere.” As if “the rest of the country doesn’t even exist.”
My complaint precisely. Blame for the ridiculous reductionism lies, of course, not just at the doorstep of the January 6th Committee. It also rests with commentators, even experts, who typically find it comforting and convenient to blame a particular single individual for whatever went wrong during his four years in the White House.
This ahistoricism came to mind again this week when it came out – no surprise, of course – that everyone who was anyone at Fox News knew they were lying when they insisted for months and then years on end that the 2020 presidential election had been won not by Joe Biden but by Trump. (Their bald-faced lies became hard evidence this week through a suit brought by Dominion Voting Systems against Fox News.)
Why did Fox persist in its fabrications? Essentially for two reasons. Those at the network did not want to end on Donald Trump’s enemies list. And they did not want to alienate their viewers, who happened to be one and the same as Trump’s base. Put differently, the leading players at Fox, both those on the air and in C-suites, lied and lied and then lied some more primarily for money. They were voraciously greedy.
In my book The Enablers I made clear that what happened during the Trump presidency was just not his doing. It was in consequence of many different players, followers, some of whom were so slavishly loyal to the president they were enablers. These included the folks at Fox about whom I wrote: “The relationship between Donald Trump and Fox News was as it had always been – symbiotic. Or reciprocal, or transactional, take your pick…. President Trump stood to gain politically from his access to Fox News. Fox News stood to gain financially from its access to Donald Trump.”
So, this week’s big news about Fox was old news. It confirmed what we already knew – that the folks at Fox, the followers at Fox, were in Trump’s hip pocket to further line their own.