Yet the president of the United States detects a shift!

In another outburst, Trump feted One America News Network (OANN), the slavishly pro-Trump organ that has been welcomed as a “guest” in White House coronavirus briefings so as to pose helpful questions to the president:

Here’s Trump retweeting former campaign aide Corey Lewandowski, citing a Fox News poll with favorable numbers for the president.

Maybe Trump is hoping, as he amplifies this tweet, that people forget how many times he has hammered the Fox News polling operation. As recently as February, Trump wrote, “Worst Polls, just like in 2016 when they were so far off the mark, are the @FoxNews Polls. Why doesn’t Fox finally get a competent Polling Company?” He did likewise last June.

AD

AD

Then again, maybe Trump doesn’t care whether people remember that he has bad-mouthed the reliability of Fox News’s polling operation. It’s not as if his 77 million followers haven’t learned to process a contradiction or two.

Trump later had these thoughts:

The New York Times came to the same general conclusion as an investigative piece published April 4 by The Post. In both cases, the newspapers filled in gaps about what was happening in between Trump’s various benighted comments about the virus. Like this one on Feb. 10: “Looks like by April, you know, in theory, when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away.”

AD

AD

Fox News host Sean Hannity chose the only woman among the six New York Times bylines on the piece, and tweeted at her:

Haberman responded:

And:

Returning to 2015 turns up this New York Times story by James Risen under the headline, “Joe Biden, His Son and the Case Against a Ukrainian Oligarch.”

Maybe Hannity was hoping, as he bashed Haberman and the New York Times, that his viewers would forget how many times he has relied on the newspaper to batter his political opponents. In January, for instance, we noted how Hannity had bashed Haberman & Co. for a piece of damaging reporting on Trump vis-a-vis the Ukraine crisis. Then we chronicled how many times Hannity himself had cited with gusto other New York Times stories — also relying on unnamed sources — that aligned with his outlook.

AD

Then again, maybe Hannity doesn’t care whether his viewers notice that he bashes the New York Times one day, then invokes it as a journalistic authority another day. It doesn’t seem to affect his audience numbers!

AD

Stepping away from the particulars, consider this: Hannity spends Monday through Friday talking on his daily radio show and on his nightly Fox News program. Trump tends to spend hours every day riffing from the lectern in the White House briefing room on the coronavirus, the media and whatever else crosses his brain pan. Perhaps these guys could have taken Easter off?