The latest
edition of “Sunday Night with Megyn Kelly,” which aired last night, opens with a
shot of a bulky man hunched over a desk, fiddling with a yellow
highlighter, casting a sideways glance at the camera. “Pizzagate, as
it’s called, is a rabbit hole that is horrifying to go down,” he says,
referring to the unmoored claim that officials from Hillary Clinton’s
campaign and other Democrats had been running a child-sex-trafficking
ring out of a pizza parlor in Washington, D.C. In a voice-over, Kelly
identifies the man as “Alex Jones, the radical conspiracy theorist”;
then there is a quick cut to Jones, sitting at another desk, saying, “I
agree with Trump. He agrees with me,” before Kelly continues, “with a
new and surprising degree of influence, thanks, in part, to President
Trump.” The President is then seen in his Trump Tower office, telling
Jones, via a split-screen video, that he, Trump, will not let him down:
“You will be very, very impressed, I hope.” Jones nods rapidly, his
eyebrows drawn together in an expression of abject gratitude.

The segment that follows recapitulates this formula. There is Jones,
again and again, with a sad expression of poorly suppressed panic—like
that of a train conductor about to explain to passengers that they won’t
be arriving at Grand Central on time, because the terminal has been
squashed by giant lizards. And there is Kelly, telling him that some of
his theories sound like “B.S.,” especially the one about the Sandy Hook
Elementary School shooting, in which a gunman killed twenty children and
six adults, and which Jones claims was a hoax. Kelly calls that a
“notorious lie,” and has some success at drawing out the shamefulness of
Jones’s disparagement of the Sandy Hook parents. But, beyond expressing
wonder at the President’s endorsement of Jones, she fails to make much
sense of Trump’s role in all this, or that of Trump’s party, or, for
that matter, of her former employer, Fox News.

Calling Jones to account on Sandy Hook is an easy enough task that Kelly
somehow, in the days leading up to the broadcast, made look hard. This
was partly because Jones, in a preëmptive move, had released recordings
in which Kelly had told him that he would be happy with the segment, and
that she wasn’t in the
“gotcha” business. There were also reports, in the Times and elsewhere, that
the segment was re-cut in an attempt to keep Kelly’s, and NBC News’s,
credibility intact. (Tom Brokaw was brought on for a postscript, in
which, citing Jones, he offered thoughts on the ugly side of the
Internet, where Jones and his Infowars site and video and audio feeds
live.) She did interview Sandy Hook families, and her exchange, in the
final segment, with Neil Heslin, who lost his six-year-old son, Jesse,
is particularly effective, and a strong contrast with Jones, who tells
Kelly that, although he may at times have been playing “devil’s advocate” in
his ranting about Sandy Hook, there had still been “some coverup and
some manipulation.”

At that, Kelly says, “But, Alex, the parents, one after the other,
devastated, the dead bodies that the coroner autopsied.” Jones
interrupts her, saying, “And they blocked all that, and they won’t release any
of it. That’s unprecedented.” Later, he says, “I came to believe that
children probably did die there, but, when you look at all the evidence
on the other side, I could see how other people believe that nobody died
there.” It is notable that, in this, the closest Kelly brought him to
conceding error, Jones says “children,” not “the children,” leaving open
the possibility that a few died—just not the twenty that “the media”
claimed.

Where Kelly went very wrong on Sandy Hook, though, was in avoiding the
topic of Jones’s claims about the motive of the shooting’s stagers. This
is also where the story returns to Trump, or should have. In Jones’s
world, the purpose of Sandy Hook was to allow liberal-aligned forces
within and outside the government to push through gun-control
legislation. Sandy Hook did demonstrate the need for sensible gun laws.
For a small number of the people who don’t accept that need, there is an
impulse to deny the facts of the case. Jones, whose Sandy Hook
conspiracy theory is a species of gun-rights wish fulfillment,
represents an extreme version of that impulse. Trump has not taken this
approach, although Kelly noted that he has not responded to requests
from Sandy Hook parents that he disavow Jones’s lies about their
children. He tends, instead, to talk, after mass shootings, about how
much better it would have been if everyone in the room had had a gun,
and he spent a good part of the campaign warning “Second Amendment
people” that there were nefarious plans afoot to ravage the Constitution
and take away their guns.

“He’s following Alex on coal, he’s following Alex on guns, he’s
following Alex on borders,” Jones says about Trump in one clip. Kelly
doesn’t decipher the shorthand, there or in other clips in which Trump
vouches for Jones, saying that he has an “amazing” reputation. Nor does
she closely examine Jones’s other claims, such as when he says that he
has private investigators looking into what the employees of
Chobani,
the yogurt company, were up to in Idaho. The account of this episode
might leave a viewer thinking that Jones just has some inexplicable
antipathy toward yogurt, rather than toward the refugees whom Chobani
hires, and who, Jones falsely claims, brought with them a wave of sex
crimes and disease to Idaho. The story is another version of the
President’s intimations about Mexican rapists coming across the border.
But, on Kelly’s show, the President is mostly presented as a sign of
seriousness, as if placing the weight of the White House alongside
Jones’s thrown-together stories amounts to some sort of paradox. Trump’s
affection for Jones isn’t some puzzling quirk about either of them,
though. It is what the President, and, increasingly, some elements of
his party, are all about.

Kelly says at one point that Trump and Jones first connected over their
shared efforts to push the false story that President Obama was not born
in the United States. A prime forum for that conspiracy theory, though,
was Kelly’s former employer, Fox News. She was not among those at the
network who entertained birtherism, and at times she distanced herself
from it, but she spent a lot of time at the network chasing Clintonian
non-scandals: e-mails, alleged debate-fixing, corruption. And, while she
confronted Jones about
his Pizzagate conspiracy-pushing,
which led to one of his listeners showing up at the restaurant with a
gun, she didn’t place that story where it belonged: in the context of
the hysteria about the hacked e-mails of John Podesta, Clinton’s
campaign chairman, which Pizzagaters claimed were full of sordid code
words. She grilled Trump, in the first Republican-primary debate, on his
misogyny and feuded with him for a time, and then, as he closed in on
the nomination, made her peace with him in an
interview that was conducted largely on his terms. That was before she moved from
Fox to NBC, but one reason that there were doubts about her Jones segment was
because of how her first story for her new show, an interview with
Vladimir Putin, had gone. He shrugged off her question about whether he interfered
with the Presidential election and what amounted to scattered
observations about his power, while openly condescending to her.
Speaking of her efforts, and those of other journalists, to look at the
Trump campaign’s connections to Russians, he said, “Your lives must be
boring.” In her new role, Kelly seems to be snatching at names
associated with the President and the stories around him. But that alone
isn’t the same as making news.