Bill O’Reilly, the former diva of Fox News, and Donald Trump, the former paramour of Fox News, have a lot in common.
Both are relatively big man men and in their 70s. They’re bullies, narcissists, fabulists, bullshitters, and congenital liars who have been accused of sexual assault by multiple women – Trump was convicted.
They’re also friends of one another. They used to get together and drink vanilla milkshakes together with a single straw – and friends don’t get any closer than that.
(I cannot confirm that they used a single straw.)
Both men are willing to help the other — if it helps them more.
Erik Wemple of the Washington Post referred to O’Reilly as Trump’s “enabler-in-chief” for constantly promoting and defending the candidate on his program The O’Reilly Factor during the 2016 Presidential Campaign.
O’Reilly bragged that he had asked the then-candidate tough questions.
If he did this, he did so over milkshakes.
When Trump was criticized for refusing to criticize the Ku Klux Klan after the racist organization had endorsed him, Reilly responded: “I’ve spoken with Trump hundreds of times, and I’ve never heard him run down anyone because of race.”
Donald Trump has been a racist almost as long as he has been Donald Trump.
For instance, he called Mexicans “criminals” and “rapists” in his announcement that he was running for president. Trump was repeatedly sued for racial discrimination as a businessman. Trump accused Black teens of raping a white woman in Central Park and called for the death penalty. They did not commit the crime.
Trump questioned – without evidence – whether Barack Obama, the country’s first Black president was born in the United States.
And so it goes.
Wemple then included this question among the really tough questions Reilly asked Trump.
“Do you think your birther position has hurt you among African Americans?”
After a question like that, it would have served O’Reilly right if Trump never would have had another vanilla milkshake with O’Reilly.
O’Reilly once said he had known Trump for thirty years and said, “I think he’s an honest man.”
What else was in those vanilla milkshakes?
The Washington Post reported that Trump told more 30 thousand lies or misleading claims during the four years he was president. It included all of them on a database.
Trump made an estimated $3-$4 million dollars on a speaking tour with O’Reilly in early 2022, a year after Trump left the White House, giving the former president the chance to spread his lies about the 2020 Presidential Election.
“I said loud and clear,” Trump told one crowd. “We won the first time, and the second time we won by even more.”
Trump has made a lot of money from peddling what he calls “fake news,” his adviser Kellyanne Conway calls “alternative history,” and the poets call, “bullshit.”
So too has O’Reilly.
Reilly, who, to his credit is well educated, has made millions of dollars from a series of history books he has written, regardless of whether what he passes off as history is actually history.
The Washington Post had this headline for a piece by conservative columnist George Will’s about O’Reilly’s books: “Bill O’Reilly makes a mess of history.”
Will’s piece began:
“Were the lungs the seat of wisdom, Fox News host Bill O’Reilly would be wise, but they are not and he is not. So it is not astonishing that he is doubling down on his wager that the truth cannot catch up with him,” Will wrote. “It has, however, already done so.”
For instance, Will said, O’Reilly wrote that President Ronald Reagan was killed by a would-be assassin’s bullet even though Reagan lived another 23 years. O’Reilly said the trauma of the bullet left Reagan mentally incompetent. O’Reilly, Will said, based this on his opinion and not on the opinion of anyone who worked for Reagan.
O’Reilly made it clear that in writing a book of nonfiction about Reagan he was not interested in interviewing people who knew Reagan.
This is an “an interesting approach to writing history,” Will said. “Never talk to anyone with firsthand knowledge of your subject.”
O’Reilly and Trump share a state of mind – a psychosis perhaps – that they can’t tell the difference between what is real and what is not, particularly when their own behavior is concerned.
Neither believe they are guilty of sexual misconduct, regardless of whether they are found guilty of sexual misconduct or whether they are fired for committing sexual misconduct.
Trump has been creditably accused with sexual misconduct by at least two dozen women, including author E. Jean Carroll. A New York jury found that Trump had sexually abused Carroll in May 2023.
Fox News fired O’Reilly in response to accusations from several women that he had sexually harassed them. The women were paid a $45 million settlement.
https://www.vogue.com/article/bill-oreilly-sexual-harassment-settlement-news
The O’Reilly investigation began after investigations of sexual misconduct against Fox News’s former chairman Roger Ailes.
Ailes was responsible for Fox News going all-Trump, all-the-time in its coverage of the 2016 Presidential Election.
Trump, in an interview with the New York Times, defended O’Reilly against charges of sexual misconduct.
“Personally, I think he shouldn’t have settled,” Trump said “Because you should have taken it all the way; I don’t think Bill did anything wrong.”
“I think he’s a person I know well,” Trump said. “He is a good person.”
Good people do not commit sexual assault.
But what would Trump know about good people?
After all, Trump talked about grabbing women by the “pussy” and justified it by calling it “locker room talk.”
Fox News replaced O’Reilly with Tucker Carlson, who was then fired in April 2023 following the network’s loss of $787 million in a defamation lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems.
Dominion Voting Systems charged that Fox News promoted Trump’s bogus claims that he had really won the 2020 Presidential Election and that the company had participated in a fraud that gave the election to the Democratic candidate Joe Biden.
One of Carlson’s producers filed a lawsuit accusing “Carlson and Fox of sexism and harassment, alleging that his show’s workplace was replete with examples of misogyny,” NPR reported.
https://www.npr.org/2023/04/24/1171641969/fox-news-fires-tucker-carlson-in-stunning-move-a-week-after-787-million-settleme
In conclusion’s let’s return to vanilla milkshakes.
After moderator Megyn Kelly dared to ask Trump a question about women who had accused him of sexual assault during one of the 2016 GOP presidential debates, the petulant Trump said he would boycott the next debate that would air on Fox News.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/history-donald-trump-megyn-kelly-feud/story?id=36526503
O’Reilly then begged Trump to reconsider during an interview.
“Would you do me a favor?” an exasperated O’Reilly said. “You owe me,” O’Reilly reminded Trump, “because I bought you so many, so many vanilla milkshakes. I bought you so many vanilla milkshakes, you owe me.”
Trump acknowledged that O’Reilly had bought him a lot of milkshakes but did not back down.
Trump eventually changed his mind.
