Everyone has seen those stages of grief graphs that psychologists make, which are very real and should be watched closely, the ones that begin with shock, denial, anger, bargaining, etc. etc.? Right now the MAGA cult is definitely caught somewhere between denial and anger which is unsurprising since they lived much of their lives in denial and anger even prior to losing the election.

Fox News must cater to many of these MAGAs and thus they feed that need. (To be fair, we have seen and reported on instances where Fox News absolutely cut off people making unproven or false claims at times, this was just not one of those times.)

Mediaite brings us a fascinating transcript in which John Roberts, Fox’s White House reporter who is normally somewhat reliable in terms of asking Kayleigh tougher questions and giving more accurate reports, sort of … well, left the planet for a brief jaunt. As Mediaite says, just so that their entire context is present, we’ll write out the entire Roberts quote about Trump “winning” (something) and then Tapper’s beautiful response.

Roberts is talking to Wallace who is buying none of it:

Roberts: I’m told that it’s possible the president may take some questions this afternoon. Obviously I imagine the first questions would be about where he is in terms of if he is going to continue to fight this battle to try to unearth a new votes that could turn around the current vote count or if he will concede. The president does seem, though, in a way, Chris, to be winning even as he is losing in the current vote count because for his die-hard fans, he is trying to make the case that he didn’t really lose the election, that it was taken from him. Is that an argument that he can credibly make?

Wallace: Well not in terms of the numbers, at least so far. Unless we see something from these lawsuits that we haven’t seen so far, which is serious fraud and fraud of a dimension that would overturn that it would actually overturn the results, he’s not losing the states, for instance Pennsylvania, by 500 votes, like Florida in 2000. He is losing it by 40 or 50,000 votes. So unless we see fraud of that dimension, I don’t know that he can incredibly say that the election has been taken from him. But that doesn’t mean he won’t continue to make the argument and as we know, Donald Trump got more votes than any person in history running for president this year.

Roberts: Except Joe Biden.

Wallace: Except for Joe Biden this year. So there are tens of millions of people who love this president and who are in the Trump base and I suspect they will be susceptible to the argument that somehow this election was taken from him.

The whole conversation is just sooooo Fox News. Trump got his ass-kicked but he is actually “winning” in that his supporters believe his claims that fraud occurred. (His die-hard ones do, not anywhere near all of them. His die-hard ones will believe anything).

Meanwhile, Tapper had a bit of fun with the report, to say the least:

A report from Earth 2 https://t.co/mWiM6ep1OF

— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) November 13, 2020

And then the perfect Twilight Zone scene:

https://t.co/mWiM6ep1OF pic.twitter.com/fLTJFQHweG

— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) November 13, 2020

Very very well done, Jake. We give credit where due. Tapper has simply refused to “play along” with this whole idea that Trump actually can steal this election or has made a credible reference to fraud. And thus mocking – rather than engaging  – a colleague on the ridiculousness of it, is probably the perfect response.

****

Peace, y’all
Jason
[email protected] and on Twitter @JasonMiciak