Donald Trump Flew Into Rage When Melania Watched CNN On Air Force One, All TVs Must Show Fox News, NYT Reports
When Air Force One took off to transport Donald Trump and his wife Melania to the Great Britain on the start of their recent official trip abroad, Trump erupted into a rage when he saw his wife’s on-board television screen tuned to the cable news station CNN, according to a report by the New York Times on Tuesday.
The Times reported that it had “obtained” an internal White House email that detailed Trump’s angry outburst, which “caused a bit of a stir” aboard the official presidential plane, according to the report by Katie Rogers and Maggie Haberman published online late Tuesday. Their report said that Trump demands that all TV screens on board the aircraft should be tuned exclusively to Fox News, Trump’s favorite network, at the start of each flight.
Rogers and Haberman also revealed in their report that Donald and Melania Trump occupy separate hotel rooms when they travel together, and that the White House staff recently ordered two new television sets that would support the streaming platform Beam, “to make sure (Trump) and (Melania) could both watch TV in their separate hotel rooms when they travel.” The Beam platform, produced by Microsoft, is actually now branded with the name Mixer, according to the technology site TechCrunch.
The bizarre report of Trump’s fixation on Fox News comes on the same day that Trump escalated his ongoing verbal attack on the news media to a new level — making a claim about the media straight out of the classic George Orwell novel 1984, while speaking to a Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Kansas City, Missouri, on Tuesday, Time reports.
While Trump is known for condemning the news media, CNN in particular, as “fake news,” and “an enemy of the people” as ABC News reported, on Tuesday he appeared to tell the VFW that absolutely everything they see in the media is a lie.
“Don’t believe the crap you see from these people, the fake news,” Trump told the crowd, according to the Huffington Post. “Just remember, what you are seeing and what you are reading is not what’s happening.”
As the news site Think Progress alarmingly pointed out, Trump’s admonition bore eerie echoes of a passage from 1984, Orwell’s novel about a dystopian future in which the government is run by an all-powerful dictator known only as “Big Brother,” and whose political party controls every aspect of life in the novel’s fictional future society, right down to the meanings of words that its citizens are permitted to speak.
In 1984, Big Brother’s “final, most essential command” to his subjects is “to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.”
