Even by Fox News Standards, the Response to Trump Bombing Iran Was off-the-Charts Bananas

Screenshot via YouTube

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Beautiful! Extraordinary! Elite! Incredible! These aren’t just my descriptions of the costumes on The Gilded Age. They’re the words Fox News hosts used Monday as they lavished praise on the American military and President Donald Trump for his decision to bomb Iranian nuclear sites over the weekend. On a jingoism scale of 1 to 100, the right-wing network’s tone was about at the level of that one news anchor on North Korean state TV.

“It was incredible to watch,” Fox & Friends co-host Ainsley Earhardt told viewers of the bombing.

“You have the extraordinary actions of President Trump, and the extraordinary actions of our military,” Kayleigh McEnany, the former Trump White House press secretary, said later in the day on Outnumbered.

“Donald Trump has proved that he is afraid of nothing,” her co-host Tudor Dixon added, “and he is willing to protect America over anything else.”

Trump has been watching Fox News (more than usual, I mean) since Israel attacked Iran earlier this month and was reportedly jealous that fawning praise wasn’t being directed his way. According to a story published Sunday in the New York Times, the cable network may have been instrumental in persuading Trump to join the fight. Not only was the White House keeping an eye on TV to see how prominent Trump supporters were reacting to a potential U.S. military action, but the president was said to be “closely monitoring Fox News, which was airing wall-to-wall praise of Israel’s military operation and featuring guests urging Mr. Trump to get more involved.” Per the Times, some of Trump’s own advisers wished Tucker Carlson Tonight were still on the network, if only so Trump could hear an isolationist voice amid all the hawkish rhetoric.

So if Trump really did carry out the airstrikes and bring America closer to war in part for Fox, the reviews are now in. It was a smash!

The sycophantic coverage began early in the morning on Fox & Friends, which opened with a bizarre montage recapping the weekend’s military operation that was set to a rousing piece of orchestral music straight out of a Michael Bay movie. The segment featured zooms, sound effects, and cuts that flashed American flags and cartoon bombs. “They’ve been playing the world for fortysomething years. They’re not going to play President Trump,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said at the end of the montage. “When he says he’s going to do something, he’ll do it!”

Co-host Lawrence B. Jones excitedly told viewers, “In a massive display of strength, the Pentagon flexed over 125 U.S. aircraft, including seven B-2 bombers, that flew to Iran, dropping fourteen 30,000-pound bunker-buster bombs for the first time in warfare!”

Later, Jones castigated Margaret Brennan, the CBS Face the Nation host, for her heated interview with Rubio on Sunday, accusing her of doing her viewers a disservice by asking questions about what if any intelligence had been used to justify the strikes. “There’s so many other questions you could ask about the operation,” Jones said. He suggested his own hard-hitting question: “How did you pull this off?”

Earhardt, meanwhile, was upset that Democrats were complaining about a lack of congressional approval. “Immediately you had lawmakers that were calling for the impeachment of Donald Trump,” she said, referring to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, among others. “Donald Trump had every right to do this,” Earhardt said, though she did not say why.

Their co-host Brian Kilmeade opted to use an interview with Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas to suggest to viewers that should there be any retaliation by Iranians, they should blame … Joe Biden. Citing U.S. Customs and Border Protection stats that demonstrated that more than 700 Iranians who had arrived at the southern border during Biden’s term had been permitted to stay in the country as their immigration cases were being processed, Kilmeade suggested some of those people could be terrorists in hiding. “People think about sleeper cells here. Do they have a right to be concerned?” Kilmeade asked Cotton.

“Unfortunately, they do have a right to be concerned. As you said, Joe Biden had a wide-open border policy for four years,” Cotton replied, parroting Kilmeade’s own words back to him.

Still, perhaps the most surreal moment came later in the morning, on Outnumbered, during an exchange between McEnany and Emily Compagno, who praised the beauty of the B-2 bombers and compared them with the main character in a superhero movie.

“I want to focus for a second … on our military, the extraordinary work that they did,” McEnany began. “This shows how extraordinary the U.S. armed forces are, how elite, how incredible, in every sense of the word.”

Compagno agreed. “I think it can never be overstated, the intensity and the elite caliber of the collaboration and the constellation of perfection required to pull this operation off,” she added. “Oftentimes, when we see a main character who makes it look effortless, we think they are operating solo, and the reality here is, the beautiful B-2 bombers had a support squad, the superheroes of the century,” she said, referring to the F-22 and F-35 fighter jets.

Anyone else getting goose bumps here? No?

Monday’s adulation on Fox was wild, but it wasn’t anything new. When the strikes were announced late Saturday, the network opted to let Trump surrogate and superfan Sean Hannity lead its breaking news coverage. “Maybe it’s a little early to go there, but this will go down in history as one of the greatest military victories,” Hannity said as details of the airstrikes were still emerging.

“This mission was never going to fail under this commander in chief,” weekend host Mark Levin proclaimed to Hannity. “This is historic, he is historic, the United States military is historic.”