Fox News had a shining moment this week when correspondent Ed Henry had Scott Pruitt squirming in his chair over questions about his swampy behavior. But leave it to Fox & Friends to return us to our regularly scheduled programming. The morning show is President Trump's favorite, mostly because he and the hosts have formed a kind of feedback loop where they inform and repeat each other's unreality. So it was Friday morning with the essential bit of nonsense known as "voter fraud."

Trump had one of his public episodes Thursday where he turned a speech on the economy into a rant about, among other things, how "millions and millions" of people in California vote multiple times each election. Being a capital-J journalist, Fox & Friend's Brian Kilmeade repeated this line verbatim without any further context or evidence that it is true:

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Needless to say—although it apparently is needed—this is not true. Politifact has assessed Trump's repeated claims of widespread voter fraud as a "Pants on Fire" lie. The Brennan Center for Justice backed this view on Twitter:

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More false claims about voter fraud from the president. We’ll say it again: study after study has shown that voter fraud is vanishingly rare, and voter impersonation is nearly non-existent. https://t.co/VUiCtSvcfn https://t.co/iHUbBe83dk — Brennan Center (@BrennanCenter) April 5, 2018

Here's ABC News weighing in on one such study from a few years back:

Out of the 197 million votes cast for federal candidates between 2002 and 2005, only 40 voters were indicted for voter fraud, according to a Department of Justice study outlined during a 2006 Congressional hearing. Only 26 of those cases, or about .00000013 percent of the votes cast, resulted in convictions or guilty pleas.

And if you really needed further proof, here's Fox News' own Shep Smith debunking Trump's claim yesterday:

So far the White House has provided no evidence of any kind to back up these claims. Fox News is not aware of any reliable studies or information that suggests that there is widespread voter fraud anywhere in America.

Want some more evidence? Trump assembled a voter fraud commission chaired by Kansas secretary of state and infamous voter fraud hawk Kris Kobach that was disbanded before it assembled any evidence at all of widespread election corruption.

(Also, voter fraud makes no sense as a cost-benefit decision. If you were here illegally, why would you risk deportation to cast a vote that ultimately will make no difference in the outcome?)

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The reality is that "voter fraud" is a completely fabricated issue for which there is no sound evidence. It is simply repeated, over and over, by conservative officials as justification for passing laws, including voter-ID requirements, that make it more difficult for certain people to vote. The laws disproportionately affect poor, minority, and elderly voters, which is not a coincidence.

In some states, Republicans have passed laws allowing gun licenses to serve as valid ID at a voting booth, but not a student ID. This is part of a coordinated, multi-pronged effort, along with gerrymandering, to put a thumb on the scale of the electoral process.

What Kilmeade did get right is that this performance from the president is one of those classic Trumpian "emotional moments." For Trump, the issue of voter fraud is deeply emotional because he suffered a kind of psychic breakdown shortly after the election as people began to emphasize that he'd lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million. Is it a coincidence that he then started loudly suggesting—again, without evidence—that 3 million undocumented immigrants voted illegally in California? This is a kind of very public, very destructive self-care exercise for the president, where he indulges in delusions to overcome crippling feelings of illegitimacy.

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The problem is that Fox News, and Fox & Friends in particular, continually indulges the president's fantasies. At times, they merely engage in the kind of boilerplate white resentment that has long dominated Fox's offerings. (Friday also saw Ainsley Earhardt suggest that "Jay-Z's complaining about white privilege, but we had a black president for eight years.") But they're also whispering sweet nothings in the president's ear, telling him he's strong and smart and everyone's just out to get him.

Even worse, sometimes they're the ones making policy as Trump tweets out their chyrons or (mis)quotes the presenters. That came to a head on the most recent spending bill, when Trump seemed to backtrack on the morning he was set to sign the bill, at least in part because of criticism on the cable news morning show. Incredibly, this state of affairs has rendered Steve Doocy one of the most influential political minds in America.

In the end, we're left with a situation brilliantly depicted by cartoonist Bendik Kaltenborn for The New Yorker:

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It's worth repeating: what a time to be alive.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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