Fox and Friends couchman Lawrence Jones on Thursday sounded pretty butthurt over how convicted felon President Trump’s speech was received by MS Now’s Nicole Wallace, CNN’s John Berman and Van Jones, and soon-to-be-exiting CBS’s Stephen Colbert, asserting their criticisms of the speech were tantamount to “rooting against the country” and questioning why they can’t give Trump any of the “credibility” Jones says that Trump had “earned” throughout his political career.

Yeah. You could write a book about this segment. First off, wow holy shit these people are doing what they’re paid to do? They’re making anodyne takes and obvious jokes about a demented old physical wreck who was unfit for the presidency a decade ago? Damn, next you’re going to tell us that Lawrence isn’t simply a passionate hobbyist who wakes up at 4:00 AM to be in the studio by 5:30 to use the show’s A-block to complain about the clip reel for free either. Then there’s the “credibility” thing in which apparently it’s less than completely reasonable to question the honesty of a president who has repeatedly asserted his New York City-born father was born in Germany, to name just one of the many, many easily falsified statements Dirty Don has made over the years.

Up to you whether the preceding paragraph was even worth the time and space it occupies to repeat the same old chestnuts about Fox News most of us outside its info-bubble internalized years ago. Maybe (somewhat) more novel however is this: This is some bad, really fucking bad, cope. It’d be one thing to poke holes in their criticisms, explain to the audience that these talking heads were full of shit because X, Y, and Z, plus a contrast with this or that time they were selective in their facts about Joe Biden back in 2023. That’s all good and fair. But when it’s inside of 10 minutes into the three hour show and he’s already spending airtime running the other team’s clips and then just whining like a little bitch says way, way more about how things are going inside the MAGA Reich and state media than Jones and his propaganda overlords ever intended. The only thing that could’ve made it worse was if he instead ran CNBC and Bloomberg clips about how markets and investors reacted – they sure as shit are “rooting against the country” a lot harder than friggin John Berman.