New Yorker’s David Remnick: The GOP Convention “Was Like A Four-Day-Long Fox-Fest”

New Yorker editor David Remnick detailed the nexus between the messaging of Fox News and that of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump in his comments at the GOP convention, explaining that Trump “adopted Fox rhetoric, Fox fury, and Fox standards of truth and falsehood” along with his own “Trumpian nativist flair.”

Trump has a long relationship with Fox News and Fox News personalities. This close relationship led Trump to receive nearly double the airtime of any other candidate on the channel during the Republican primary. Trump’s camaraderie with Fox was criticized by conservative commentators who labeled the network a “Donald Trump super PAC,” while other media figures have highlighted Fox News’ role in the rise of Trump.

In an article that will appear in the August 1 issue of The New Yorker, editor David Remnick pointed to the Republican National Convention, which he described as “a four-day-long Fox-fest, full of fearmongering, demagoguery, xenophobia, third-rate show biz, pandering, and raw anger,” as evidence of the relationship between Trump and former Fox News CEO Roger Ailes. From the article:

The Ailes-Trump relationship has been turbulent, roiled by the differences of large narcissisms—two immense egos competing for the same ideological berth. Last year, Trump moodily boycotted Ailes’s network, complaining that Megyn Kelly, as a debate moderator, had unreasonably quoted back to him some of his most memorable descriptions of half of humanity: “fat pigs,” “slobs,” “disgusting animals.” Nevertheless, Trump, who admits that he reads almost nothing and gets his information from “the shows,” adopted Fox rhetoric, Fox fury, and Fox standards of truth and falsehood, all with a dollop of Trumpian nativist flair. The Republican Convention in Cleveland last week was like a four-day-long Fox-fest, full of fearmongering, demagoguery, xenophobia, third-rate show biz, pandering, and raw anger. By comparison, Nixon in ’68 was Adlai Stevenson murmuring sonnets at a library luncheon.

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Still, Ailes could take paternal pride in Trump’s acceptance speech. The nominee began with a phrase about “generosity and warmth” (barked, it’s true, as if some kind of threat), but—untethered to statistics or facts, and with his inner volume dialled past eleven—Trump went on to portray a country facing a Clinton legacy of “death, destruction, and weakness,” a nation of lawless immigrants roaming cities and towns, “chaos” in the streets, radical Islamic terrorists opposed by nothing but a pusillanimous government and its popgun military.

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The reckoning was long overdue. Ailes’s most ominous political spawn, however, has so far evaded accountability. Ivanka Trump introduced her father by reminding the Convention of the tremendous “sacrifice” he had made to take a leave from his business to run for office. Now, having conquered “the party of Lincoln,” the most dangerous candidate for the White House in generations is hoping to win on a platform of paranoia. We hear sirens in the night.