Last night, Fox was doing their best to completely ignore the Democratic wave in Virginia, New Jersey and elsewhere. This morning, Trump's biggest cheerleaders on Fox & Friends embraced his talking points on twitter last night, and pretended that Ed Gillespie didn't fully embrace Trump during his bigoted hateful campaign for Governor of Virginia.
Over in Fox-land, Trump can never fail, he can only be failed. The problem with Gillespie isn't that he tried to run on the Trump playbook and failed, it's that he didn't embrace Trump tightly enough.
Here they are first thing this morning trying to explain the losses to their brainwashed viewers:
DOOCY: Griff, The New York Times, the headline is “Democrats Score Two Big Victories in Trump Rebuke.”
GRIFFIN: Well, good morning, guys. They're certainly celebrating today. These are the first really major victories in the era of President Donald Trump. In Virginia, Democrat Ralph Northam easily defeating Republican Ed Gillespie by nine points. The numbers there 54 to 45. Northam ran on a clear message, tying Gillespie to President Trump. He continued that message in his victory speech last night. […]
Gillespie did not campaign with or embrace President Trump, distancing himself publicly while accepting his endorsement, and taking criticism from the president last night over twitter, who faulted him for not doing so. But, nonetheless, Gillespie conceded with class, wishing Northam well. […]
All of this, starting to feel a lot of talk out of Dems guys on the 2018 playbook. Was this a referendum on President Trump, or will these results possibly be over-read as campaigns across the nation start to gear up for the next set of elections.
DOOCY: That's the big question. Griff, thank you very much. Going back to the New York Times headline, Democrats Score Two Big Victories in Trump Rebuke. But was it really? Because neither of the candidates for governors in both states, which were won by Hillary Clinton, neither one of them really brought Donald Trump on board.
Keep in mind, the guy who won last night in the Commonwealth of Virginia, he brought in Barack Obama. He brought in Joe Biden. What happened in Virginia with the president of the United States? They had him do a last-minute robo call yesterday because they knew they were going to probably lose. They had no idea they were going to lose though by 8 or 9 points.
EARHARDT: People in that state saw it as a last attempt to try to win, and he knew his numbers weren't good. He was bringing in the president to try to help him, and some people thought it was a little too late.
KILMEADE: Well, he said a couple things the president agreed with about the statues. That was pretty strong. He also agreed with sanctuary cities. And in fact he was so strong on sanctuary cities that Northam switched his position on it he did lose that state by 5 points to Hillary Clinton.
So the president tweeted this out after the results were apparent, and it was right away and not close.
EARHARDT: He's talking about the special elections. He's talking about those four House seats.
DOOCY: You know, it's wake-up call for establishment Republicans. If you don't embrace the leader of your party, why do you want to win and why do you think you can? Here is Laura Ingraham.
INGRAHAM: There is no middle ground with conservative populism. That is the wave of the future. There is no constituency for open borders, open markets, and endless military interventionism. There is no constituency. So, maybe Gillespie wouldn't have won if president trump campaigned with him, but trying to be half in and half out with Donald trump was never going to work. If you dip your toe just in a little bit, you are going to turn out like ed Gillespie did. Political road kill.
KILMEADE: So, it's going to be... you going to have to make a choice... President Bush 43 or Donald Trump. A book's coming out now about how 43 and 41 don't like Donald Trump, and really think they might be the last Republican presidents.
When Virginia people were asked who did you vote for and what matters the most, twenty eight percent said the economy. You would think they would be leaning more towards Donald Trump because we are growing at three percent.
Number two is healthcare and number three is education. Energy, confederate monuments and immigrations round out the bottom three.
Gillespie found out that voters don't like it very much when you threaten to take away their health care and raise their insurance premiums and raise their taxes. They don't like the race baiting, and they don't like Trump.
If Fox wants to keep pushing Republicans into Trump's arms, we'll see how well that works out for them in the midterms next year.
