Fox host Chris Wallace joins Fake News 'dogpile on the president'

During an 11/18 interview with President Trump, Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace repeated a falsehood popular in the anti-Trump press: 

"No president liked his coverage," Wallace said. "Nobody called it the enemy of the American people."

Wallace surely knew President Trump has always taken pains to employ the crucial modifier "fake' in his news media criticisms. I noted that in my 2017 That a Man Can Again Stand Up: American Spirit vs, sedition during the incipient Trump Revolution.

"Despite Trump's specifying 'fake' reporting, commentators typically mischaracterized his remarks as referencing the entire journalistic enterprise.

"That only underscored his point. By refusing to acknowledge the pivotal distinction, journalists essentially threw arms about Fake News's shoulders, claimed it as a legitimate component of a free press, and declared that to call out the improper former is to necessarily threaten the proper latter.

"There was, too, a fundamental flaw in arguments that by castigating shoddy journalism, Trump evinced hostility to the public interest. Who, after all, is truly an enemy of the public: a mainstream press that dissembles, or the man who points that out?"

Wallace also showed he had evidently learned a bad lesson from Sen. Kamala Harris. Are you aware, he asked the president, that you are viewed as a "beacon of repression" around the world?

In a hearing convened just days previous, Harris had challenged acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement director Ronald Vitiello whether he understood the "perception of many" that ICE is comparable to the Ku Klux Klan.

Both she and Wallace waved supposed, unsubstantiated popular perceptions like rhetorical banners deserving of serious attention simply because they might exist, somewhere, to some degree. 

Neither claimed to share the cited perceptions, much less allege them to be with merit. They just threw them out in the hopes that their mention would cause injury.