Judging by the video that Kamala Harris’s campaign is circulating, her aides are pleased with one particular exchange during her interview with Fox News’s Bret Baier. In it, Harris dressed down Baier for playing video of Donald Trump that sanitized away his threat to unleash the military on “the enemy within.”
Many observers immediately surmised that this moment—which showed Harris digging in hard against Baier—could wreck Trump’s most cherished spin about Harris. As Andrew Egger noted at The Bulwark, Harris punctured the “right-wing caricature” of her as “an insipid airhead with no ability to think on her feet.”
But this is a seminal moment for another reason as well. It starkly revealed the degree to which Fox News—and by extension Trump’s other right-wing media propagandists—has constructed an informational universe around Trump that, at the most fundamental level, is comprehensively fictional.
MAGA’s biggest deception of all may be its portrayal of Trump as enjoying public support that is not just authentically, broadly, deeply majoritarian but also is only constrained from realizing its full explosive potential by interference from corrupt institutions like the media and the Deep State. The reality is the opposite: Without the massive propaganda support system he benefits from—and the gravitational pull it exerts on mainstream news outlets—Trump, who has never enjoyed majority support in this country, probably could not long politically survive.
Harris’s confrontation with Baier illustrates the point. After Harris pointed out that Trump has threatened to target an “enemy within,” Baier said that Fox News had asked Trump to address those comments at its town hall on Wednesday. Baier then played Trump’s response at that town hall, but he left out the footage of Trump recommitting to targeting the........