Dear Commons Community,

Fox News’ Shepard Smith was interviewing A.B. Stoddard, an associate editor at Real Clear Politics and a regular on the network yesterday about the anonymous op-ed published this week in The New York Times that claimed there were people in the White House actively working against Trump. Her reply was not in keeping with Fox News’s coverage of Trump which is 99 percent favorable.

“I think this writer believes that they’re trying to calm down the country and assure everybody who’s nervous about President Trump’s temperament that all’s well,” Stoddard told Smith.

“What this author has done, though, is sort of encouraged probably more paranoia and more rage on the part of the president,” she added. “He’s going to do something to change the topic, so he’s going to do something probably dramatic to get our focus onto something else. He’s likely to purge the people around him… he tends to like to change news cycles with dramatic actions.”

Stoddard also disputed the op-ed’s claim that “the root of the problem is the president’s amorality.”

“It’s not his amorality, it’s his temperament. He’s impulsive and erratic. He changes his mind quickly. He lies frequently. He’s not judicious. And he’s not measured. And he doesn’t have the temperament for the hardest job on the planet.”

Stoddard said that’s the main concern of those around the president.

“It’s not that he’s amoral,” she continued. “It’s that the way that he conducts himself as commander-in-chief makes everyone scared and that’s why they’re thwarting his agenda.”

Thank you Fox News for being “fair and balanced.”

Tony