Fox News’ firewall is holding even in the face of devastating new revelations about President Donald Trump’s abuse of power, as the network’s hosts continue to shield their audience from damning revelations and instead tell them that he has been vindicated.
The broad contours of Trump’s abuse of power were clear from the earliest days of the scandal: Trump used the levers of government for his personal interest by pressuring Ukraine’s government to open investigations into one of his political rivals. The House’s impeachment inquiry into Trump’s misconduct has been filling in the details since its initiation in late September, shocking revelation by shocking revelation. And Wednesday’s hearings were particularly devastating for the president.
In the morning, Ambassador Gordon Sondland, who as Trump’s envoy to the European Union played a key role in the scheme, testified that he had, at the president’s behest and with the knowledge of senior members of his administration, pressured the Ukrainians to publicly commit to investigating former Vice President Joe Biden as well as the conspiracy theory that Ukraine had meddled in the 2016 presidential election. Sondland said this had been a “quid pro quo” in which linking the announcement of these investigations would be exchanged for a proposed Oval Office meeting between Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, and that he later came to believe that $400 billion in U.S. military aid to Ukraine that had been withheld by the Trump administration had been conditioned as well.
That evening, Laura Cooper, a Defense Department expert on Russia and Ukraine, testified that Ukrainian officials had inquired about the hold on the aid as early as July 25 -- the day Trump asked Zelensky during a phone call for “a favor,” to investigate the 2016 election conspiracy theory and Biden. This debunked a Republican talking point that no quid pro quo could have been proposed with regard to the aid because the Ukrainians were unaware it had been frozen. She also said that putting a hold on the aid may have been illegal. Meanwhile, the State Department’s David Hale testified that he had been told during an interagency meeting by a representative from the Office of Management and Budget that Trump had ordered that the aid be withheld.
That testimony amounts to an incredibly damning portrait of events, in which the president illegally withheld military aid to a country embroiled in a war with Russia so he could dangle it in exchange for the announcement of an investigation into a political foe. “I think you can divide the Trump presidency into two periods, before November 20th, 2019, and after, because now we know,” Jeffrey Toobin exclaimed on CNN. But that’s not what Fox’s audience is hearing. The network’s pro-Trump propagandists are serving up an alternate reality in which Wednesday was a great day for the president.
“It is over! It’s done! This is the end of this!” Fox host Sean Hannity bellowed in a triumphant kick-off to his radio show Wednesday afternoon. “This couldn’t be a better day for President Trump,” he later added. “It just could not get any better.”
Hannity’s radio show prefaced the network’s evening programming, which Trump himself urged his Twitter followers to watch: