Trump lists the many Fox News shows he enjoys despite repeatedly claiming he rarely watches TV

Donald Trump has listed all the FoxNews shows he enjoys watching despite having previously insisted that he barely watches TV due to his busy presidential schedule.

Mr Trump, speaking at a press conference on Thursday while discussing the outcome of the Durham report into conduct during the Russia probe, went on to list all the Fox presenters he tuned into the night before.

“I watch some of the shows,” he said. ”I watch Liz McDonald; she’s fantastic.  I watched Fox Business. I watched Lou Dobbs last night, Sean Hannity last night, Tucker last night, Laura. I watched “Fox and Friends” in the morning".

The comments come as stark contradiction to the president’s previous insistence on a number of occasions that he does not watch much television due to his presidential commitments. 

in 2017, the president insisted that he doesn’t “get to watch a lot of television. Primarily because of documents. I’m reading documents. A lot,” he told reporters.

“People that don’t know me, they like to say I watch television — people with fake sources. You know, fake reporters, fake sources,” he said.

A month later, the president also hit out at a feature by The New York Times that suggested he watched a minimum of four, and sometimes up to eight, hours of television a day.

“People close to him estimate that MrTrump spends at least four hours a day, and sometimes as much as twice that, in front of a television, sometimes with the volume muted, marinating in the no-holds-barred wars of cable news and eager to fire back,” the article claimed.

Mr Trump was quick to condemn the report for the suggestion that he watches so many hours of TV, stating that he “seldom” watches any at all.

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“Another false story, this time in the Failing @nytimes, that I watch 4-8 hours of television a day - Wrong!  Also, I seldom, if ever, watch CNN or MSNBC, both of which I consider Fake News," he tweeted at the time.

One of The Time’s article’s authors, Maggie Haberman, was quick to point out the disparity in the president’s most recent comments following the press briefing on Wednesday.  “Old enough to remember an extensive freakout in 2017 when I said in interview that he watches a lot of TV,” she tweeted.

Also quick to pick up on the president’s admission of his favorite shows was Democratic presindetial candidate Joe Biden and his election campaign, who lashed out at Mr Trump for apparently consuming so much television amidst the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. 

The Democrat estimated that if the president had watched all the shows he listed during the briefing in their entirety he would have consumed eight hours of TV over a 24 hour period.

“More than 1,000 people died from Covid yesterday. @realDonaldTrump watched eight hours of TV,” Mr Biden posted on Twitter.

“If I’m president, you might not always agree with me. But I promise you I will always show up and fight for you," he said.