Rush Limbaugh cast himself in a similar light — part fact checker, part coach rallying the team at halftime. “You’re going to know everything you need to know about this latest faux scandal,” he promised, adding, “Everything you’re seeing is deception.”
Even Michael Savage, a conservative host who has been critical of the president at times, joined in circling the wagons. “There is a war going on right now,” he told his audience this week, adding, “They haven’t given up trying to destroy us.”
With the president facing an impeachment inquiry, and a whistleblower report made public Thursday that raised new questions about whether he tried to cover up his efforts to enlist Ukraine’s help in discrediting a political rival, allies of the White House in the pro-Trump media wasted no time constructing their own version of events.
Their narrative omits key facts, like Trump’s entreaty to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy: “I would like you to do us a favor.” It portrays the president’s political opponents and the mainstream media as contemptible and corrupt persecutors, blinded by hatred and their failure to bring him down so far. “Russia, Russia, Russia. Racism, racism. And recession. And now it’s going to be Ukraine,” Jeanine Pirro, a friend and fierce defender of Trump said on the Fox Business channel.
Their words echo those of the president himself, who once declared, “What you are seeing and what you are reading is not what’s happening,” and beseeched his followers to “stick with us,” and not to believe what “you see from these people, the fake news.”
The potential political benefit is significant. Limbaugh, Levin and Sean Hannity have a combined weekly radio audience of nearly 42 million listeners. Combined with the programming on Fox News and stories from Trump-friendly outlets like Rasmussen Reports, which publishes a daily tracking poll of the president’s approval ratings that is typically several percentage points higher than other surveys, the conservative media is wrapping Trump and his supporters in a security blanket of their own facts, data points and story lines about the Ukraine controversy.
“It’s victory at the expense of truth,” said Michael Harrison, the publisher of Talkers Magazine, which tracks the talk radio industry. The desire to win the argument and the election, he added, has resulted in media where “you don’t hear debate anymore; it’s just preaching to the choir.”
In the world of conservative media, Trump is a popular, unbeatable figure. In reality, his numbers in the Gallup presidential approval poll have never climbed above 46% (he is the first president never to reach 50% in their survey, which dates back to the Truman administration). His campaign’s internal numbers have shown him losing badly to former Vice President Joe Biden in key battleground states. Trump has dismissed the numbers as “fake polls.”
A common defense from the right has been to flip the criticism and accuse liberals of fabricating their own reality. Levin, who has a Sunday evening Fox News show in addition to his daily radio show, said this week that Democrats and the mainstream media had created an “unreality” that was designed to “humiliate the president, to try and dispirit you, and to drag down his poll numbers and defeat him.”
The president’s media defenders often characterize the investigations and media coverage not merely as political attacks on Trump but as a culture war against people who support him.
Savage was one of Trump’s first talk radio boosters during his 2016 campaign. But he had been publicly doubting the president and criticizing him for failing to keep promises like building a wall on the southern border. The issue of impeachment has helped reignite Savage’s passions.
“It’s not about Trump is it?” he said on his show. “It’s about us. It’s about our love for America. It’s about our love for our own borders, language and culture.”
Richard Nixon played to similar “us versus them” grievances during the Watergate investigations and also blamed the media, which he said “hate my guts with a passion.” That approach helped keep a sizable chunk of Americans behind him even when he resigned. Roughly a quarter of Americans said at the time that Nixon’s conduct was not serious enough to warrant resignation, polls showed.
Nixon, of course, had nothing like the pro-Trump media to defend him. Talk radio in its current format, with its heavy tilt toward conservative provocateurs, did not develop until the 1990s. In Nixon’s day, cable news was still a few years away and the most popular hosts on the radio talked about subjects like extraterrestrial activity.
Trump’s allies repeatedly invoke the special counsel investigation into his campaign’s dealings with Russia during the 2016 election, which failed to produce the smoking gun-type revelations that many on the left had predicted. The president’s critics, they say, are once again engaging in a smear campaign to declare him guilty before all the evidence is out.
As Savage said on Wednesday, “He is already in the hay wagon on the way to the guillotine because of the fascist vermin in the media.”
They also appear to have learned an important lesson about how Trump and his attorney general, William Barr, managed the narrative of the release of the special counsel report: They are moving fast to tell the story on their terms. And that is a story in which Biden and his son Hunter Biden — not Trump — have covered up wrongdoing involving their Ukrainian interests.
Hannity, whose radio show each day begins with an announcer declaring that he is “Fighting the Trump-hating liberal media one day at a time,” called the Biden angle “the real story.”
Limbaugh told listeners, “Joe Biden may be the most corrupt politician in Washington bar none.” Then he offered a novel theory of the origins of the Ukraine-Trump investigations. “This effort going on here is actually a twofer,” he said. “It is designed by the Democrats to take out both Trump and Biden and clear the way for anybody else, probably Elizabeth Warren.”
Trump has also characterized the investigations as a Democratic conspiracy to weaken his standing, which he said is formidable. “Democrats feel they’re going to lose,” he said Wednesday, pointing to Rasmussen numbers that had his approval rating at 53%, which he insisted was too low. “They say you could add 10 to it. A lot of people say you can add more than 10 to it,” Trump said.
On Fox Business this week, Pirro made a similar point. Democrats, she said, were going to “shoot themselves in the foot and he’s going to win in 2020, and that’s the end of that chapter.”
Lou Dobbs, another friend of the president’s and Fox host, smiled and agreed. “That’s a pretty good chapter for America if he does indeed. And he will.”
This article originally appeared in
.