President Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump is hosting a “real news” show on his Facebook page. “Watch here for REAL news!” read a post on the president’s page on Sunday.
Lara Trump — who is married to the president’s son Eric and has at times seemed to be a more fervent cheerleader of the president than his own children — anchored the show while seated in front of a backdrop of Trump campaign posters.
“I bet you haven’t heard about all the accomplishments the president had this week because there’s so much fake news out there,” she said.
She then related stories such as the president donating his salary, a new Foxconn manufacturing plant in Wisconsin and economic growth.
BuzzFeed pointed out that mainstream media outlets did cover all those stories. Lara Trump did not mention events such as the week’s White House staffing turmoil, including the departure of chief of staff Reince Priebus and new communications director Anthony Scaramucci; the failure of the Republican plan to repeal and replace Obamacare; and the president’s tweets announcing he would ban transgender people from serving in the military, which were sent without an implementation plan or a looping-in of military leaders.
“Thanks for joining us, everybody. I’m Lara Trump, and that is the real news,” she signed off in her debut.
The show, which may meet the definition of state-sponsored propaganda in that it appears on the president’s official Facebook page, has been promoted on his Twitter feed and contains only stories favorable to him. It is slated to become a weekly series, Lara Trump said.
Merriam-Webster defines propaganda as “Ideas, facts, or allegations spread deliberately to further one’s cause or to damage an opposing cause; also: a public action having such an effect.”
Trump has continued to excoriate the media as “fake” and to use the term “fake news,” tweeting Monday that social media was the “only way for me to get the truth out.”
Only the Fake News Media and Trump enemies want me to stop using Social Media (110 million people). Only way for me to get the truth out!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 1, 2017
The launch comes as some once-reliable boosters of the White House have begun to view the president with increasing skepticism, including Fox News’s Chris Wallace, Bret Baier and Shepard Smith. The latter’s on-air condemnation of the Trump administration for “all the lies” went viral last month.
The White House has not commented on the show.
