Fox tries to praise Trump, accidentally promotes a huge failure

Donald Trump’s “Fake News Awards” show turned out to be fake news itself, but Trump’s Fox News sycophants just went ahead and pretended it was real anyway.

Trump conceived of the “show” during a self-created crisis over his unstable threat of nuclear war several weeks ago, and the idea was a failure from the start. First, he said he would announce “THE MOST DISHONEST & CORRUPT MEDIA AWARDS OF THE YEAR” on Jan. 8 at 5 p.m., then moved the event to Jan. 17 because, he said, “The interest in, and importance of, these awards is far greater than anyone could have anticipated!”

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders even promised “trophies” to a dubious press corps.

But when the day finally came, there was no show, just a tweeted link from Trump to a Republican National Committee blog that immediately crashed. That blog didn’t feature any awards show or trophy presentation, but rather, a list consisting mostly of minor or immediately corrected news stories, bookended by an opinion piece and Trump’s demonstrably false assertion that there was “NO COLLUSION!”

The awards were such an embarrassment that the RNC isn’t even featuring them on its homepage.

Trump’s epic failure did not faze his fans at “Fox & Friends,” who rarely allow reality to intrude on their worship of Trump. On Thursday morning’s program, the co-hosts repeatedly referred to the debacle as an “awards show,” even though there was no actual awards show.

Ainsley Earhardt teased the segment on “the most anticipated awards show of the year,” which Fox News reporter Carly Shimkus kicked off by announcing the “awards show winners,” and which concluded with co-host Brian Kilmeade anticipating “next year’s show.”

With nearly three weeks to prepare, and with a stated belief that these “awards” were “highly anticipated,” neither Trump nor the RNC were able to successfully execute the simple task of publishing a blog post.

But more importantly, failure or not, this was yet another extended attack on the free press, and it took place during a week in which Trump despotically ejected a reporter from the Oval Office for doing his job, and another respected reporter received death threats for doing hers.

Trump’s “awards show” was, indeed, a hilarious failure, but his assault on one of our most cherished freedoms is no laughing matter.