President Trump on Monday again praised Fox News Channel’s “Fox & Friends” by thanking the morning program “for exposing the truth” and praising its ratings success against “untruthful competition.”
“Thank you to @foxandfriends for exposing the truth. Perhaps that’s why your ratings are soooo much better than your untruthful competition!” Trump wrote to his 47.4 million followers.
{mosads}Trump has often taken to Twitter to laud the show, which celebrated its 20th anniversary on the air on Feb. 1.
“Fox & Friends” has been dominant in the morning-show ratings race for 15 years, easily beating MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” and CNN’s “New Day.” The program had its most-watched year ever in 2017, averaging nearly 1.6 million total viewers, a 25-percent bump from the election year 2016, according to Nielsen Media Research.
On Monday morning the program largely focused on the controversial Republican memo released on Friday, post-Super Bowl reactions to all players standing for the national anthem and a Democratic push for universal health care.
Trump also tweeted about that health-care push after “Fox & Friends” interviewed Nigel Farage, a former United Kingdom (U.K.) Independence Party leader and Fox News contributor.
“The Democrats are pushing for Universal HealthCare while thousands of people are marching in the UK because their U system is going broke and not working. Dems want to greatly raise taxes for really bad and non-personal medical care. No thanks!” he said on Twitter shortly after Farage made a similar argument on the morning show.
“The big problem we’ve got is a population crisis caused by government policy on immigration,” Farage told co-host Steve Doocy.
“We have a population of 65 million but it’s increasing by half a million people a year. We just haven’t got enough hospitals, we haven’t got enough doctors, we haven’t got enough facilities,” he continued.
“The National Health Service has turned into the International Health Service and we’re providing a lot of health care for people coming into Britain from all over the world. We do need some absolutely fundamental reforms. This system we have was set up in 1948. Surprisingly for a state-run thing, for most of the first 50 years the public had great faith in it. Right now it’s pretty much at breaking point.”
Farage, a leading proponent of Brexit in the U.K., was a staunch advocate of Trump’s candidacy in the 2016 campaign. He signed with Fox as a contributor in 2017.