President Donald Trump isn’t shy about his love for Fox News and its hosts, who are almost always supportive of whatever dumb talking point he comes up with. He often even takes cues from them; just take this early morning Trump tweet from Wednesday, parroting wall-related figures broadcast on a Lou Dobbs Tonight segment the night before.
Matthew Gertz, a senior fellow for Media Matters, shared the similarity between Dobbs’ show and Trump’s tweet 30 minutes after the president’s post.
A review of Dobbs’ show, posted to YouTube several times over by brazen Fox patriots, shows the anti-immigrant conspiracy theorist had referenced another Trump tweet regarding “a big new Caravan” leaving Honduras for the U.S., in which Trump urged Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Chuck Schumer to compromise on his demands for $5.7 billion for a border wall.
According to NPR, hundreds of Honduran migrants began a journey to the U.S. on Monday night and reached Guatemala on Tuesday. Reporter Maria Martin told NPR, however, that the group seems to consist of “disparate” groups of migrants, instead of one large group such as the caravan that began its trip in October.
Dobbs, after referencing Trump’s tweet, urged viewers to “make no mistake: walls do work.” He then referenced the figures of walls used internationally, ending his spiel by saying, without any further proof aside from the low number of walls he had just evoked, “In other words, walls work.”
Dobbs isn’t the first to report on the 77 walls worldwide and 800 miles of “barriers” in Europe. In May, USA Today reported that since the end of World War II, 70 more walls have been erected from the seven that existed back then. That same month, the publication also reported that 800 miles of fences had been erected in Europe since the beginning of country’s “migrant crisis” in 2015.
So perhaps Trump wasn’t watching Fox Business on Tuesday night, nor took note of Dobbs’ pointless “walls exist and therefore work” rhetoric to tweet on Wednesday morning, but just happened to cite the same information that Dobbs just happened to find from the same USA Today articles. Perhaps—but knowing what we know about Trump, also greatly unlikely.