President Donald Trump’s crazed claims about the Reflecting Pool were a ready-made Fox News story, repeatedly embraced by hosts like Jesse Watters earlier this summer.
But now the story has fallen apart, and Fox is barely interested. The network isn’t even mustering up a defense for Jeanine Pirro, previously one of its most prominent pro-Trump hosts.
Pirro now runs the US Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia. She crossed Trump last Friday by undermining his “vandalism” cries about the Reflecting Pool. Now Trump is considering removing Pirro from her post, sources told CNN on Monday.
The schism between Trump and Pirro, whose friendship dates back more than 30 years, is big news almost everywhere. But MAGA media is looking the other way, perhaps because the spat makes both figures look bad.
Fox News only covered the dispute once on Monday, for under a minute, on the evening newscast “Special Report.” Most of that time was spent on a clip of Trump insulting Pirro. “She folded like an umbrella,” he told the press corps Monday afternoon.
Fox correspondent Lucas Tomlinson then said, “Pirro’s office said there’s no evidence of vandalism, instead calling it ‘botched installation.’”
His brief report left out the fact that Fox hyped the “vandalism” claims back in June.
An analysis of cable news transcripts shows that Fox devoted 184 minutes to the Reflecting Pool drama during the week of June 22, when Trump touted six arrests in connection with alleged vandalism at the national landmark.
Trump’s allegations of “great damage due to the Vandals and Radical Left SCUM that hate our Country” led to fiery cable news segments.
When former Olympic canoeist David Hearn was charged with felony vandalism, Pirro held a press conference and asserted that “he damaged the pool.”
Pirro later went on Watters’ prime time show and scoffed when he said, “A lot of people, when this first happened with the pool, didn’t believe the president that there was vandalism.”
The former Fox host looked outraged at the possibility that people didn’t believe the president. “Someone was intent on doing incredible damage to the pool,” Pirro insisted.
Last Friday, her office dropped the case against Hearn and several other people. In a court filing, her office said the Interior Department wasn’t forthcoming about the reality at the Reflecting Pool — which was “a botched installation and not vandalism.”
Since then, Fox has only mentioned the new development briefly, with coverage totaling about seven minutes.
During the same timeframe, CNN and MS NOW have covered the story dozens of times.
This is a pattern that repeats itself often: Pro-Trump commentators and influencers will take a Trump claim really seriously even if it’s silly or spurious; then, when the claim is disproven, those same commentators will barely post or talk about it at all. Trump devotees are left with incomplete (at best) information.
On Saturday, Trump said of Pirro, “I don’t know what she was thinking?” But her office’s filing explained her thinking very clearly.
The pro-Trump media’s attitude, though, borders on willful ignorance.
Monday night on Fox News, Laura Ingraham dismissed the topic during a monologue railing against democratic socialism. “Every moment that the voters and the commentariat waste obsessing about things like Trump’s Reflecting Pool drama, the ballroom,” she said, “that’s just another moment they’re giving to the socialists to run the table.”
Watters made no mention of Pirro, the Reflecting Pool or the case’s collapse on his show.
