Fox News Finds a Way to Make Trump the Real Winner of the Super Bowl

Welcome to WHAT NOW, a morning round-up of the news/fresh horrors that await you today.

Even though his favorite team was humiliated at the Super Bowl, the geniuses at Fox & Friends found a way to paint Donald Trump as a winner on Monday by crediting him with staving off any protests during the national anthem at the game.

“Everyone stood, and that is the headline this morning,” co-host Ainsley Earhardt said, a thing that is flatly untrue. “So glad to see that.”

Steve Doocy also fell all over himself to praise the president for discouraging protests, saying, he “sent out a tweet, and the message was clear.”

The Fox News hosts were referring to an emotionally coercive statement Trump released before the game, which said: “Though many of our Nation’s service members are unable to be home with family and friends to enjoy this evening’s American tradition, they are always in our thoughts and prayers. We owe these heroes the greatest respect for defending our liberty and our American way of life. Their sacrifice is stitched into each star and every stripe of our Star-Spangled Banner. We hold them in our hearts and thank them for our freedom as we proudly stand for the National Anthem.”

The spectacle was enough for the third Fox & Friends co-host, Brian Kilmeade, to wax on about how the lack of protests—which have their roots in an anti-police brutality action started by Colin Kaepernick, who’s become persona non grata in the NFL—was “a brief respite from the political process.”

“In fact, most of the ads I thought were more humorous. Last year they were a little bit more political,” he said.

Kilmeade must not have seen the event’s worst ad of the night, which used a portion of one of Martin Luther King Jr.’s anti-capitalist sermons in an effort to hawk Dodge pickup trucks.

WHAT ELSE?

A vote is expected today on whether to release the Democrats’ rebuttal to Republican Congressman Devin Nunes’ damn memo.
Republican-controlled statehouses in Mississippi, Missouri, and Ohio have either passed or taken up a wave of anti-abortion legislation in recent weeks.
The government runs out of funding again on Thursday. It’s looking increasingly likely that Congress will punt on the issue of DACA altogether, extending recipients’ legal protections, perhaps for a year, in combination with some border wall funding—a scenario Senator Lindsey Graham told Politico is “probably where we’re headed, OK?”