President Donald Trump is back in anti-immigrant rant mode. And with it, anti-NAFTA mode. Once again it looks like he’s being directed by his top team of strategists, his treasured troglodytes at Fox News. It’s as if Fox has become the state network. It could well go under another name: Trump TV.

Yet again, Mr. Trump has threatened to terminate the North American free-trade agreement, this time on account of Mexican border battles. The threat, which came on Easter Sunday, should not stir any panic. But nor can it be entirely dismissed, not when, as it appears, the President is deep in the grip of Foxthink.

He spent part of the weekend listening to his favourite Fox gasbag, anti-immigrant hardliner Sean Hannity, whom he invited down to Mar-a-Lago. He also tuned into the show that is his chief source of intellectual nourishment, Fox & Friends. The program spoke of a caravan of hundreds of Hondurans heading menacingly toward the U.S. border. A border-patrol official who was interviewed advocated Republicans use the nuclear option by enacting tough laws to stop the traffic while ignoring the yelping of Democrats.

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Moments after the show, Mr. Trump followed up on Twitter, warning of a “dangerous caravan” moving north and touting the “nuclear option” on immigration. He added that Mexican leaders “must stop the big drug and people flows, or I will stop their cash cow, NAFTA.”

It was another illustration of this becoming the Fox echo chamber presidency, of his making policy pronouncements and insults on the fly on the basis of what he has just heard on Fox & Friends.

When he boasted about having a bigger nuclear button than the North Korean leader, it was Fox inspired. When he excoriated his Justice Department for not looking into “all of the dishonesty going on with Crooked Hillary and the Dems,” it was Fox-fuelled. So much so that one of its co-hosts said, “And now the President is tweeting about this.” Another time he tweeted out his gratitude to Fox for a segment berating former president Barack Obama’s foreign policy. “Thank you to @foxandfriends for the great timeline on all of the failures the Obama Administration had against Russia, including Crimea, Syria and so much more.”

There are trackers of the Fox-Trump feedback loop such as Matthew Gertz of Media Matters, who have found dozens and dozens of examples. The symbiosis is remarkable.

Fox, of course, has long been the favourite whipping boy for those not occupying its intolerant right-side corner of the political spectrum. Critics have gone on about how it has polarized the country by giving sounding boards to the country’s ideological whack jobs. The network shamelessly acted as a Trump promo shop in the 2016 campaign. On the morality front, given the sexual-abuse allegations that hit Fox, there’s been Trump symmetry as well.

But with Mr. Trump’s presidency, Fox’s influence has reached even greater heights. To say it is the power behind the throne is no exaggeration. For Mr. Trump, it is a major source of policy, of prejudice, of personnel, of power. Likely never before has a media outlet been so integral to a President’s thinking and designs.

While a justifiable hullabaloo has gone up over Facebook’s delinquencies in the media sphere, the great danger to American democracy is Fox. The veteran news anchor Tom Brokaw went so far as to say Fox is on a “jihad” to protect Mr. Trump and undermine American institutions.

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The President occasionally watches other networks for fodder with which to lambaste them. There is often due cause. While there is often a Trump loyalist on every CNN panel, they are always outnumbered – and the network certainly doesn’t cheerlead for the White House. For liberal bias, how about the irritating drivel of some of the blowhards at MSNBC? But while bias in journalism always was and always will be a problem, it takes on a graver significance when an advocacy network becomes a President’s briefing book.

Presidents have a limitless base of expertise on which to draw: the giant bureaucracy, expert reports and studies, think tanks and universities. This President doesn’t need them. The Fox bloviators are good enough. Some of its talking heads graduate to major White House jobs, the latest two being national security adviser John Bolton and chief economic adviser Larry Kudlow.

With White House officials and Congressional lawmakers, the Trudeau government has waged a strong lobbying effort, particularly on the trade issue. If it wants to be more effective it should focus on where the real power lies – at TTN, the Trump Television Network.