On the Michelangelo Signorile Show, Matt Gertz discusses how Fox News’ admiration for Putin influenced Donald Trump’s worldview
Published
On the Michelangelo Signorile Show, Matt Gertz discusses how Fox News’ admiration for Putin influenced Donald Trump’s worldview
Citation
From the March 6, 2025, edition of SiriusXM Progress' The Michelangelo Signorile Show
MATT GERTZ (GUEST): Another theme of criticism on the right at the time was that Obama was slow to make decisions, wasn't very decisive, and so people like Rudy Giuliani were holding Putin up as what you call a leader. He makes a decision. He executes it quickly. Obama has to, you know, got to think about it before he does anything.
You know, they're talking about someone who, you know, -- what he makes decisions about and executes quickly is executing his political opponents, having them, you know, thrown out of windows, and invading his neighbors. But, you know, they were so, so eager to demonize Barack Obama that they were willing to turn Vladimir Putin into a kind of folk hero on the right.
MICHELANGELO SIGNORILE (HOST): It's very important, and it's something a lot of people don't know. They basically laid the seeds for Trump. You then chart 2015 to 2016, you know, Trump's Russia ties and how those became something prominent in the media. But he must have known that there was, you know, he certainly knew that there was this, you know, group of people within the Republican Party base who would defend him against all of that.
GERTZ: Yeah, and he was 100% correct. I mean, you know, Trump is someone who is very much part of the faction that liked Putin because he thought he was a strong leader relative to Obama, and he would praise Putin on the campaign trail during his first presidential race and, you know, defend his murders of journalists in public interviews. This was really quite shocking at the time.
But as he took over the Republican Party, his supporters in the right-wing media found themselves defending all of Trump's Russia-related ties and antics. One case that I look at is that in July of 2016, Trump called on Russian intelligence services to find Hillary Clinton's emails from her email server.
He said, "Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails." And this was a huge scandal because he was calling on a US adversary to engage in interference with our presidential election, which is not something that, you know, historically, we have taken kindly to.
But people on Fox, you know, Trump's big bastion of support, were playing it off as a joke or a misunderstanding or something that the media had blown out of proportion and turned, you know, into this some sort of -- this scandal.