Do you remember the Before Times — as in before Thursday — when the United States, for all its flaws, had not yet fully committed itself to a path towards economic and hegemonic suicide in the most stupid act of geopolitical self-harm since Napoleon looked east towards Russia and said, “Come on now, winters there can’t be that bad”?
Then our great president, Donald Trump, the bronze-colored North Star of our earthly firmament, said fuck it, let’s tariff the hell out of every nation on Earth except our suddenly great allies Russia and Belarus, upend the almost-century-long world economic order that has led to levels of prosperity for America unseen by any nation in recorded history, and underpants gnome our way to some sort of market dominance that no one outside of the insane rump of America known as MAGA could possibly care about.
The markets and the rest of the planet reacted as predictably as literally anyone with a functional brain stem could have told the MAGA Right it would. World leaders denounced the US and started contemplating trade pacts that would completely exclude America. Economists everywhere drank themselves into comas just before tariffs on booze imports make the cost of French wine and tequila far too pricey for their salaries.
But you would not know any of that if you get all your news from Fox. The right-wing network spent its day submitting to Donald Trump tickling its tonsils by doing all it could to hide the damage from its viewers. If you turned on Fox or navigated to the home page of its website, you might have been unaware that your 401k was losing value like it was a copy of Action Comics #1 that someone just set on fire:
We’ve watched a lot of Fox News over the years, and we can say that the stock market ticker comes and goes. But is there any doubt the network would have showed it if stocks had gone soaring? Of course not.
But because tariffs are bad policy that are dropping the value of Americans’ retirement funds, we get this message instead: The Golden Age is starting! No need to check, just trust us on this!
Fox reportedly spent the day alternating between this sort of context- and information-free soothing, and trying to distract its viewers with its usual culture war tripe. For example, here is Harris Faulkner on her midday show bringing viewers the news that really matters:
The last we heard, athletes taking a knee in protest of an issue was the most un-American thing you could do! We distinctly recall hearing this quite a bit during Trump’s first term.
Against our better judgment, we looked up this story to get some context for it, because there is always the Fox News version and the real version.
The kneeling took place at the Cherry Blossom Open, an annual fencing event sponsored by the sport’s governing body, USA Fencing, that takes place at the University of Maryland. The kneeler, Stephanie Turner, was supposed to face off against a transgender woman. She instead took a knee and was awarded a black card, which in fencing is a penalty resulting in disqualification.
Would you be surprised to learn that Turner is a Christian? You wouldn’t? Good for you:
Despite the repercussions, Turner told OutKick that her Christian faith led her to take a stand against unfair competition.
“I prayed to God and I just asked him for guidance and I called members of my church to help me to figure out what I wanted to do,” Turner said.
Turner said that, in the past, she would simply avoid events that had transgender fencers competing. But in this case, she decided to leave it in God’s hands.
Ah, so she specifically went in with the intention of making a point and getting herself some sympathetic coverage in right-wing media, including at least one hit on Fox News itself. Good to know.
“I prayed, and I said, ‘God, if this is something that you want me to do, please put Redmond in my pool round or my direct elimination and I will take a knee. But, if this is not something that you want me to do, then… show me by not having… he and I fence face-to-face,’” she said.
Of course, Turner and Sullivan were eventually paired against one another and Turner followed through with her protest.
Congrats to Fox viewers. When their retirement accounts show a balance of zero, at least they can keep themselves warm with the rage of knowing that amateur fencing competitions allow transgender people to compete.
By late Thursday afternoon, Fox’s Will Cain was getting downright metaphysical in talking about the tariffs:
If you can’t watch the clip, what Cain means by “down” is that the market is about where it was in October, just before Trump was re-elected. He neglects to mention that this is Day One. On Day Two, the market dropped to almost where it was a year ago, meaning in one day, your retirement funds lost almost all the gains they had made over the last year.
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And that is before we get to retaliatory tariffs by other countries on American goods, or other countries leaving America out of new trade pacts because they don’t need us anymore.
If you flipped over to Fox Business with the thought that surely a business channel would be more honest, well, close. FBN did keep the stock ticker up all day. It also ran long segments in which its anchors praised Trump’s bravery, engaged in some xenophobia against China, and all but begged everyone to accept some suffering now in exchange for an imagined future where centuries of hard-earned economic knowledge turn out to be wrong and Donald Trump turns out to be right:
“Is it patriotic to always stay in debt? Is it patriotic to spend my entire paycheck so that the economy is good? Is it patriotic so that my kids can’t afford to go to college, I don’t have a retirement, I don’t have a decent home, is that patriotic?” he continued. “Is our patriotism tied to Wall Street, or should it be tied to our own personal ability to achieve the American dream? We need to rethink all of this!”
We’re not sure how higher prices are going to help people spend less of their paychecks, but we’re not the sorts of business geniuses that get hired by the Fox empire.
By Thursday night, we guess it was getting a little tough for Fox to hide the day’s financial news, so it resorted to stuff like having Laura Ingraham go full-on “Kevin Bacon screaming ‘All is well’ at the end of ‘Animal House’”:
Don’t panic, Dear Leader is right and every economist on the planet is wrong. Thanks, Baghdad Barb.
Meanwhile, American companies started announcing layoffs that they tied directly to Trump’s tariffs hurting their businesses and giving them a need to retrench. Sorry to the newly jobless, but just think: In six months or a year or a decade or an eon or some unknowable length of time in between, something great will happen. Maybe. Probably. Probably maybe.
See you in the shantytowns!
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