Once again, former President Donald Trump was criminally indicted, this time for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election he lost to Joe Biden.
And once again, Fox News hosts absolutely lost their collective minds.
With the twice-impeached ex-president again facing possible prison time, the network’s stars performatively screeched to their conservative viewers that the latest charges were a direct attack on them.
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But mere ranting wasn’t enough: In this instance, some of the right-wing network’s biggest stars came up with some more disturbing terms to whip their audience into a frenzy.
“This is political germ warfare!” Jesse Watters raged on The Five, Fox’s most-watched show, just before the charges were made public on Tuesday.
In the indictment handed up by a grand jury and signed off by Special Counsel Jack Smith, Trump stands accused of attempting to obstruct Congress from certifying votes, conspiring to violate civil rights, and defrauding the country by swaying the 2020 election with fake electors.
“The defendant lost the 2020 presidential election,” the indictment reads. “Despite having lost, the defendant was determined to remain in power. So for more than two months following election day on November 3, 2020, the defendant spread lies that there had been outcome-determinative fraud in the election and that he had actually won.”
Adding that the “claims were false, and the defendant knew that they were false,” the documents also accuse Trump of trying to “create an intense national atmosphere of mistrust and anger, and erode public faith in the administration of the election.”
Watters and his conservative co-hosts on The Five, meanwhile, seemed determined to also “create an intense national atmosphere of mistrust and anger” over Trump’s indictment.
After resident liberal panelist Jessica Tarlov said that the charges center around Trump “nullifying people’s constitutional right to be able to vote,” Watters exclaimed that the intelligence community had already done that by supposedly censoring coverage about Hunter Biden’s laptop.
“So engulf the FBI! The FBI deprived people of rights when they covered up the laptop! Or the CIA who finagled the laptop! You know what I’m talking about. That’s corruption before the election and that denies people their rights,” he shouted.
“Having a New York Post story taken down for 24 hours and what happened on Jan. 6 are so utterly incomparable, I'm actually shocked at you!” Tarlov shot back.“You’re not shocked at me,” Watters retorted. “It would have changed the election.”
It would only go downhill from there.
Besides doodling on a sketchpad throughout the hour, Greg Gutfeld also downplayed the Capitol riots and shrugged off baseless election conspiracies, all while complaining that conservatives never seem to catch any breaks.
“They’re feelings masquerading as facts,” he grumbled about the indictment. “It’s criminalizing thoughts and it’s criminalizing speech. You have every right to think an election might be rigged or fixed.”
Katie Pavlich, another conservative co-host, described the charges against Trump as “election interference”—a talking point Gutfeld and Watters giddily ran with later in the broadcast.
“I just see again, it’s war, it’s lawfare,” Gutfeld seethed. “We’re not supposed to understand this. This is supposed to be out of our hands, out of our control. Donald Trump is probably one of the most consequential leaders of our lifetime. He was outside the box. He didn't play well with others—others being insiders. This is the payback.”Watters piggybacked on his colleague’s tirade and added his own twist.
“This is like lawfare, they call it. Legal warfare. If this was political, this would be a political war crime. This is overkill,” he raged. “This is political germ warfare. These are political war crimes. It's an atrocity. It's, like, not just dropping one atomic bomb, you drop 15 dozen!”
At the same time, Watters also claimed that the GOP’s investigation into the Biden family business dealings was more “titillating” since it involves “sex and cash bribes,” seemingly forgetting that Trump has also been indicted for a hush-money scheme to silence a pornstar about an extramarital affair.
Perhaps more disturbing, especially for a network that recently dished out nearly $800 million for peddling lies that the 2020 election was “rigged,” the primetime Fox host—who recently took over fired star Tucker Carlson’s old time slot—wondered whether they’d have to go down that road once more.
“If this goes to trial, are we going to now have to go back and find fraud in the 2020 election?” Watters yelled. “Is this what we are now going to go relitigate? Does this open up the entire 2020 election in a court setting to Donald Trump going back and proving that there was indeed fraud and presenting evidence of fraud and having that challenged in the court? Is this really what we are going to do? And now they are saying that it was a conspiracy to fraudulently claim there was no fraud.”
