Fox News's devotion to Donald Trump can be a double-edged sword. Yes, the anchors get to exert an insane amount of control over what Donald Trump says and thinks, but they also give him a platform to run himself into the ground and exacerbate his legal troubles.

While Fox News has gotten its propaganda and outrage-producing machines down to a science, they occasionally slip up and give exactly the wrong kind of spin that goes against Republican orthodoxy, like when they host guests who complain about people feeling like their kids "deserve" affordable health care and education.

The network had another telling slip-up Monday on the show Outnumbered. As Mediaite reported, during a relatively routine attack on Robert Mueller and his investigation into election tampering, host Dagen McDowell explained why it was a bad idea for Trump to cooperate with Mueller. Specifically, she said, “How in the world could he ever cooperate and sit down with Mueller for an interview knowing that if you tell one lie to Bob Mueller, he will move to file charges?”

McDowell is completely right, of course. Generally speaking, law-enforcement officers, whether they're the FBI or traffic cops, don't love it when people lie to them. They like it even less if they do it under oath or as part of a massive criminal investigation that's already hoovered up people with close ties to Trump and his presidential campaign. But to McDowell, and through the lens of Fox News's nonstop cheerleading for Trump, that's a sign that the investigation is trying to "trap" the president.

This is also a gem because McDowell is acknowledging what most people have known about Trump for a long time now: He's a prolific liar. How likely is he to lie about something specifically related to the investigation? Hard to say. But the odds that he'd lie about something totally irrelevant, like how many hours of TV he watches each day? Absurdly high.