Our president is a Fox News Grandpa, which continues to be an intriguing choice for the most powerful country in the history of the world. Donald Trump is a low-information voter who we made the president. He learns about things through the television, which some reports hold he watches for four to eight hours every day. He often does not read written intelligence briefings, and the stories of how those tasked with briefing him orally have tried to hold his attention and get information across can be comically horrifying. Why listen to reports on the world when your friends in the teevee can tell you exactly what you want to hear? Plus, they might put your tweets up on the screen!

Of course, Trump himself has denied all this, and quite convincingly:

Believe it or not, even when I’m in Washington or New York, I do not watch much television. People that don’t know me, they like to say I watch television—people with fake sources. You know, fake reporters, fake sources. But I don’t get to watch much television. Primarily because of documents. I’m reading documents. A lot.

Back in reality, however, the TV addiction was in evidence once again Tuesday morning, as the president went intergalactic on inflation and the Fed and Mexico and John Dean and, of course, PRESIDENTIAL HARASSMENT! (Even after all this time, the spectacle of the world's most powerful man yelling in all caps on Twitter ought to be something that stops us all in our tracks.) But the really crystalizing moment came when he seemed determined to illustrate the feedback loop that has morphed into being between himself and the Fox News Channel and Fox Business. The president is a Tariff Man, you see, and he's directly reaching out to his best friends from the teevee to help push the party line—because they weren't doing enough already.

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Maria, Dagan, Steve, Stuart V - When you are the big “piggy bank” that other countries have been ripping off for years (to a level that is not to be believed), Tariffs are a great negotiating tool, a great revenue producers and, most importantly, a powerful way to get...... — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 11, 2019

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...Companies to come to the U.S.A and to get companies that have left us for other lands to come back home. We stupidly lost 30% of our auto business to Mexico. If the Tariffs went on at the higher level, they would all come back, and pass. But very happy with the deal I made,... — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 11, 2019

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....If Mexico produces (which I think they will). Biggest part of deal with Mexico has not yet been revealed! China is similar, except they devalue currency and subsidize companies to lessen effect of 25% Tariff. So far, little effect to consumer. Companies will relocate to U.S. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 11, 2019

Even disregarding the merits of the argument, the fact that Trump is tweeting at Fox anchors on a first-name basis, imploring them to back his manically delivered argument on the Tweet Machine, should again be cause for concern. But nobody even seems to bat an eye anymore. Nothing to see here, folks. That's just the president. It's not unlike Trump's ChopperTalk at the end of last month, where he stalked around the reporters' scrum calling Robert Mueller's team of investigators "some of the worst human beings on Earth" and ranting about "Article II." That was just a Thursday in America.

No matter that Trump once again hinted here at a Secret Deal with Mexico after he threatened escalating tariffs against our southern neighbors if they did not block more migrants and asylum-seekers from making their way to the border from Central America. This came not long after we finally renegotiated the NAFTA agreement with Canada and Mexico, with a few modest changes the president and his allies heralded as revolutionary. Trump's threat to re-escalate trade tensions was coldly received by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, whose head of international affairs, Myron Brilliant, went on CNBC to argue against it all. The American president responded to this by calling into the same CNBC show almost immediately after, declaring "tariffs are a beautiful thing when you're the piggybank," because all battles must be fought through the television.

(In fairness, Trump made a good point about the Chamber caring more about its members than the country, a staple of American big business in our new gilded age.)

Soon after Trump announced the Secret Deal had been made so artfully, Mexico's foreign minister denied it really existed. It appears Mexico had already agreed to many of the terms before Trump made and backed away from the tariff threat. No matter: there was an entire praise cycle for President Tariff Man last night on the Fox Business show hosted by Lou Dobbs, the fashy Benjamin Button. The American president then...directly shared clips from the show. Thus persists the all-consuming feedback loop, where Fake News—a label which the president now regularly admits includes any negative coverage—cannot penetrate. It's only Real News here, folks, and it's all positive. It honestly doesn't matter what you do!

Nobody ever illustrated our national state of affairs better than Bendikt Kaltenborn in The New Yorker.

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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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