After years of watching Fox, Trump is shocked to learn reporters check facts

It’s no secret that Donald Trump loves Fox News. He loves the network so much, in fact, that he frequently live-tweets its coverage and uses his Twitter account to promote it. But watching Fox News on a regular basis comes with side effects, as Trump demonstrated Saturday.

In a bizarre press conference at Camp David, Trump hit back at claims made by Michael Wolff in the new book “Fire and Fury,” which purports to give an insider’s look at the first year of the Trump presidency.

Some of the claims in the book are extremely salacious, and many journalists have cautioned readers that Wolff’s credibility is not exactly rock solid. That’s what journalists do — at least most of them.

At Fox News, however, things are done a little bit differently and facts tend to be treated as optional. According to Politifact, 60 percent of the claims they fact-checked from Fox and Fox News have been rated “Mostly False,” “False,” or “Pants on Fire.”

Perhaps that explains why Trump was so shocked to find out that journalists do, indeed, care about facts — regardless of which side they come down on.

Speaking at Camp David, Trump told reporters that he was “heartened” when the media actually took the time to look at Wolff’s history of specious and sometimes baseless claims. He expressed genuine surprise that the “fake news media” pointed out that Wolff’s credibility is not solid, and that his claims should be interpreted with that in mind.

“What I really was heartened by — because I talk about the fake news and the fake news media — was the fact that so many of the people that I talk about in terms of fake news actually came to the defense of this great administration, and even myself, because they know the author and they know he’s a fraud,” Trump said.

In Trump’s eyes, journalists who stuck to the facts were coming to his defense. In reality, they were just doing their jobs.

But when Fox News is your standard, sticking to the facts is anything but ordinary.

Really, though, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Trump thinks everything is “fake news” — because on Fox, most of it is.