Back in November, responding to a question about whether Roy Moore should drop out of Alabama’s special election, Donald Trump launched into a seemingly unprompted tirade about his television habits. “Believe it or not, even when I’m in Washington or New York, I do not watch much television,” he told reporters aboard Air Force One in the midst of his grand Asian tour. “People that don’t know me, they like to say I watch television—people with fake sources. . . . But I don’t get to watch much television. Primarily because of documents. I’m reading documents. A lot.”

Though the rant seemed off the cuff, on Monday The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple revealed that Trump had been inspired by a list of questions The New York Times sent to the White House to fact-check an article about, among other things, just how much time the president spends in front of the TV. That article was published over the weekend, and it did not want for detail: Trump apparently spends “at least four hours a day, and sometimes twice as much as that” watching TV, tuning into CNN for news, MSBNC for rage, and Fox & Friends for “comfort and messaging ideas.” The president, of course, furiously denied the charge on Twitter, telling his followers that the estimate was “wrong!” and insisting “I seldom, if ever, watch CNN or MSNBC,” a claim that might’ve held a little more weight if he didn’t routinely respond to both networks’ reporting in real time. But he didn’t bother denying his Fox & Friends habit, perhaps realizing it was a lost cause:

So you can imagine Trump’s panic, nay, terror about the Thursday morning news that Walt Disney Co. had agreed to buy “key” assets of 21st Century Fox in a deal valued at $66.1 billion. What would that mean for his beloved show? Would Disney chief Bob Iger, a Democrat who resigned from the White House’s advisory council, take his Friends away from him? Where would he be able to turn for atta-boys and Obama bashing? Who could he count on to convince Americans that this Russia fracas is much ado about nothing? The prospect was apparently so terrifying that, according to my colleague Gabriel Sherman, Trump took nothing to chance:

As has been reported several times, Fox News itself is not among the assets that Disney would acquire—a fact Rupert Murdoch presumably conveyed to the president. With that enormous, Steve Doocy-shaped weight off his shoulders, Trump was free to get down to the business of further demonstrating that he is knows nothing about business. During Thursday’s press briefing, Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters, “The president spoke with Rupert Murdoch earlier today, congratulated him on the deal and thinks that, to use one of the president’s favorite words, that this could be a great thing for jobs. And he certainly looks forward to and is hoping to see a lot more of those created.” That’s right: the C.E.O. president, who wrote a book called The Art of the Deal, is not aware of the fact that corporate mergers typically result in job losses rather than gains. In fact, according to Axios, Disney said in an investor call on Thursday that it “expects to achieve $2 billion in ‘cost synergies’ by 2021,” which is usually corporate jargon for “clean out your desk.”

Trump’s favorite show aside, his call to Murdoch also has the potential to create the appearance of favoritism, especially as the Justice Department moves to thwart the merger of AT&T and Time Warner, the latter of which owns CNN. As my colleague Joe Pompeo reported, the D.O.J.’s anti-trust chief told AT&T C.E.O. Randall Stephenson that if he wanted the department to green-light the deal, he would have to sell off Turner Broadcasting, the parent entity of CNN, which AT&T would acquire, or ditch DirecTV, the satellite provider it bought in 2015. And then, of course, there’s the fact that the AT&T-Time Warner deal is a “vertical merger,” which regulators are usually cool with, whereas the Disney-Fox deal is a ”horizontal merger,” a traditional red flag. Luckily, the president has zero personal bias when it comes to CNN.

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