
Fox News hosts tried to break the news of Roy Moore's defeat to Trump gently, and assured him that it wasn't his fault.

Donald Trump's favorite morning show on Fox News told him exactly what he wanted to hear on Wednesday morning.

Just hours after the accused child molester whom Trump had endorsed for the U.S. Senate lost in one of the country's reddest states, "Fox & Friends" hosts calmly assured Trump that it was no big deal.

"This was not a referendum on Trump," announced co-host Ainsley Earhardt. "I feel like it was a referendum on Harvey Weinstein."

Fox & Friends host on Doug Jones winning in Alabama: "This was not a referendum on Trump. I feel like it was a referendum on Harvey Weinstein" pic.twitter.com/cqcXJStgQk — John Whitehouse (@existentialfish) December 13, 2017


Added Todd Piro, "And even that said, it is not that much of a win. Less than two points, as it stands now."

Comforting news, indeed. Of course, none of it made any sense.

For the record, Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein has been accused of lots of awful things spanning decades of predatory behavior. But he has not been accused of molesting children, or cruising shopping malls in search of teenage girls, as Roy Moore was.

So how the Moore loss can be seen as a "referendum on Harvey Weinstein" doesn't compute.

Also, it seems unlikely that Alabama voters went to the polls on Tuesday thinking about how to send a message to a Hollywood producer.

Note that moments after Moore's stunning loss in a state Trump won by nearly 30 points last year, Fox News was back to bashing special counsel Robert Mueller, as the right-wing cable outlet continues its war against the Republican prosecutor. It's all being done in the desperate hope of saving Trump's presidency.

"To put it mildly, this is insane," The New York Times stresses in a Wednesday editorial. "None of these [Mueller] attacks or insinuations are grounded in good faith."

In terms of Moore, Fox News has been a remarkably dishonest player for weeks as the child molestation scandal unfolded. The morning after the Washington Post broke the blockbuster story about multiple local women making claims against him, Fox News devoted less than four minutes to the stunning revelation, according to a Media Matters tabulation.

All of which made Tuesday night's win for Democrat Doug Jones that much more painful for Fox, as it struggled to reassure Trump.

Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) may have captured the overwhelming sense of schadenfreude best: