He should just come clean and admit that he does these segments periodically because he gets a huge kick — and some easy content — out of the barrage of “When will you die, fatty?” hate mail in the aftermath.

He’s done a variation of this same riff on POTUS’s mendacity before. “What good is it to fatten your wallet,” he says at one point, lamenting Trump’s endless gaslighting, “if you’ve lost your soul?” Hundreds of thousands of people with 401k’s watching this show were sitting there thinking, “I don’t understand the question.”

Interesting news elsewhere today about Fox and its relationship to Trump: Longtime FNC reporter Adam Housley is out, the second correspondent to leave this month. Allegedly both he and Conor Powell flew the coop because they dislike the network’s drift towards opinion, particularly nonstop (well, almost nonstop, per Cavuto) pro-Trump opinion.

Housley believed that as the network’s focus on Trump has grown — and the number of talking-head panels during news shows proliferated — it had become difficult to get hard reporting on air, according to one of those former employees…

“Conor was growing increasingly embarrassed by the channel, by the positions, by the relentless blind defense of Trump,” the friend said. “If you’re overseas and doing important work like Conor was, you can certainly focus on the work and tell yourself, ‘Hey I’m doing important things and I’m just going to focus on this and ignore all the rest.’ But it just became impossible to ignore.”…

“Many Fox News employees I talked to would jump at an opportunity to leave if there was one, just out of frustration,” the former employee said. “There is a frustration with being tied to the Trump administration. At the end of the day, journalists want to report facts.”

Oddly, that reminds me of this tweet from an AP reporter last night, after Peckergate broke:

National Enquirer reporters (and there were some good ones) HATED catch-and-kill. They lost huge career-making stories into a locked safe. In exchange, celebrities often gave AMI soft-focus "exclusives." In other instances, reporters would never be told why stories were killed. https://t.co/vWB9olLllc

— Jeff Horwitz (@JeffHorwitz) August 23, 2018

The Enquirer burying dirt to help Trump out isn’t the same as (most) Fox talking heads touting his greatness at every opportunity but in both cases real news is crowded out because doing so serves the president’s interests. That said, it’s hard to fault Fox programmers for focusing relentlessly on the colossus who bestrides the news world, particularly during an unusually dramatic chapter of an already dramatic reality-show presidency. You think Rachel Maddow has a hard time at night justifying to herself the fact that she spends 90 percent of her airtime talking about you-know-who? Give the people what they want — usually. Occasionally, you can give them what you want. That’s what makes these mini-eruptions by Cavuto interesting.

Update: Here’s Housley’s full statement via Fox: “After nearly two decades at Fox News, I have decided to leave the network and take some time in northern California to raise our two young children closer to my family, which includes running the family winery and even coaching their sports teams,” Housley said in a statement. “I could not be more proud of the journalism I did at the network, from war zones, to tsunamis, to watching miners pulled from the ground in Chile, I am grateful for the extraordinary opportunities to have a front seat to history and cover news all over the world. A huge hank you to the many Fox employees, especially behind the scenes, who have supported me every step of the way. We are friends for life.”