Newsweek
Fox News Was Attacking Barack Obama for Using Dijon Mustard at This Point in His Presidency
Chris Riotta, Newsweek June 9, 2017
Donald Trump isn’t the only president to have faced harsh criticisms just months into office. At this point in former President Barack Obama’s tenure as the leader of the free world, right-wing news outlets were condemning his use of Dijon mustard as a condiment. Yes, really.
In news from eight years ago that appears to be from some alternate reality, Obama left the White House and went out for a local bite to eat with vice president and BFF Joe Biden in May. The two politicians ordered hamburgers, MSNBC journalist Andrea Mitchell reported at the time, with the sitting president requesting mustard on his red meat.
The story was featured on Sean Hannity’s show, Hannity’s America, as a screen showed a photoshopped image of Obama surrounded by bottles of mustard with the words “PRESIDENT POUPON” plastered on a red and white banner.
Let that soak in for a minute. Trump tweeted his support for Fox News Friday, commending them for the network’s morning show Fox And Friends’ “great reporting” job on ex-FBI Director James Comey’s Thursday testimony. The network’s rejection of Obama’s taste palette compared to its incredible support of the embattled Trump White House was seen by Twitter users as shocking at best, and propagandistic at worst.
Reporters Dominic Holden and Sahil Kapur from BuzzFeed and Bloomberg both shared similar tweets reflecting on Fox News’ coverage of Obama’s presidency just months after his first inauguration following the highly anticipated hearing. Comey’s testimony provided details on his nine conversations with Trump before the president fired him in an effort he says was to ease pressure off of the administration from the ongoing federal investigation into Russia’s meddling in last year’s election.
Trump reportedly described his former FBI director as a “nut job” in a conversation with Russia’s top diplomats in the Oval Office, explaining his reasoning for firing Comey before allegedly revealing top secret intelligence to Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.
Fox News has spent the last five months strongly supporting Trump’s conservative agenda, defending the president against ongoing controversies enveloping his White House and accusations of collusion with the Russian Kremlin. The network has also continued to push fake news about former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s health, following a televised commencement speech critical of Trump.
Compare Fox’s defense of the Trump/Russia investigation to the mustard scandal its conservative TV personalities were decrying Obama’s presidency over just eight years ago. Then remind yourself that, yes, this is the new normal.
Obama criticized Fox News and Sean Hannity at the time in an interview with Fox News’ former anchor Bill O’Reilly, noting the extremism and hate he was facing from the right during his short time in the Oval Office.