Anti-Trump Fox News analyst Neil Cavuto, who often demonstrates the difference between being glib and being articulate, says he doesn’t work for Donald Trump.  Cavuto took umbrage at Trump’s reaction to an A.B. Stoddard interview with  Cavuto in which she falsely stated, in defending Michael Bloomberg’s Hindenburgesque Nevada debate performance, that Trump consistently lost his 2016 debates with “cringewortthy” and “disastrous” performances. None of what she said was accurate, Cavuto didn’t call her on it, later agreeing with her, and when Trump called both on it during his Colorado rally, Cavuto got righteously indignant in a statement what could have been an MSNBC audition tape, about Trump stating the truth and showing us the man behind the Fox Business curtain:

Fox News’s Neil Cavuto and a contributor to his show found themselves the subjects of a lengthy tirade by President Donald Trump at his rally in Colorado Thursday night. For roughly ten minutes, Trump went on about his performances in the 2016 debates, holding up papers with polls showing how well he did in the debates, and taking the occasional shot at Cavuto and the contributor, A.B. Stoddard of RealClearPolitics…

Earlier in the day while discussing Mike Bloomberg’s dreadful performance in the Democratic debate Wednesday night, Stoddard mentioned Trump’s poor showings in the 2016 debates.

“I think that Donald Trump had disastrous debate performances,” Stoddard said. “Many answers were so cringeworthy you just couldn’t even believe he was still standing on the stage, and he’s president.”

A short time later, Trump posted a tweet calling Stoddard a Trump-hater, and claiming to have won every debate in 2016 from beginning to end. Cavuto earned his spot in Trump’s diatribe by correcting the president at the end of his show.

“Just to point out, he did not,” Cavuto said. “When you look at polls that came out from Fox, NBC, CNN, Politico, YouGov and a host of others, the initial read was that he had failed to do well in those debates. He ultimately won, but he didn’t poll well in those debates.”

Cringeworthy? Disastrous? These are words we expect to hear from Rachel Maddow. Pundits are entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts, and they are certainly not the final arbiters of truth. When Cavuto agrees with Stoddard that Trump lost the 2016 debates, how does he determine that? The only way to determine that is at the polls the following November. He didn’t poll well in those debates? He didn’t poll well either in the Fox News election night polls that told us to expect a President Hillary Clinton.

Debates are a means to an end, not an end to themselves. They give talking head pundits who think they’re smarter than us a reason to exist, allowing to bloviate and provide analysis that in the end is full of sound and fury and means nothing.

How do you determine who “won” a debate?  Voters at the polls make that determination. Trump was center stage at each debate for a reason. And what exactly do you get when you “win” one?  A certificate of authenticity from Neil Cavuto and A.B. Stoddard? 

Trump never said that Cavuto or Fox New literally worked for him, Cavuto’s clever turn of phrase is the first of many inaccuracies in his response to Trump. The phrase “works for me,” Cavuto, means an action one agrees with, approves, or applauds. Trump clearly did not agree with Stoddard’s fictitious analysis or Cavuto’s letting it stand uncontested.

Trump has watched, as have we all, as Fox News veered slowly to the left with is addition of the likes of Richard Fowler, Marie “Jobs for ISIS” Harf, and Jessica Tarlov,  and certainly nothing says “fair and balanced,” a phrase Fox curiously dropped from its advertising, like former DNC Chair Donna Brazile. Trump watched as Judge Andrew Napolitano was paraded out repeatedly to agree with Rep. Adam Schiff that Trump’s Ukraine call was an impeachable offense and that Trump was guilty of at least four separate articles that could be filed.

Legal analyst and former U.S. Atty. Joe Digenova was effectively banished from Fox commentary for saying on Tucker Carlson’s show that Napolitano was foolish. For some reason, Fox never paired Napolitano with analysts and legal scholars that disagreed with him such as Digenova, Fox analyst Gregg Jarrett, or Harvard Law School professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz, one of Trump’s most eloquent impeachment defenders.

Against this backdrop of bias Trump reacted to what the overrated Stoddard, who most recently found work at Real Clear Politics, said on Cavuto’s show:

President Trump on Wednesday tweeted that Fox News has become too hospitable to Democrats and "isn't working for us anymore," arguing his supporters "have to start looking for a new News Outlet."

Trump lashed out in a trio of tweets after a spokeswoman for the Democratic National Committee (DNC) appeared on "America's Newsroom." The president cited her interview; the employment of former DNC Chairwoman Donna Brazile; Juan Williams, who is also a columnist for The Hill; and anchor Shepard Smith to claim the network is biased against him….

Trump blasted the network as "HOPELESS & CLUELESS" for hiring Brazile, Williams and Smith, each of whom have criticized the president at various times.

"They should go all the way LEFT and I will still find a way to Win -- That’s what I do, Win. Too Bad!" Trump continued. "I don’t want to Win for myself, I only want to Win for the people. The New

@FoxNews is letting millions of GREAT people down! We have to start looking for a new News Outlet. Fox isn’t working for us anymore!"

Cavuto, et al, make the mistake, as most liberals do, of taking Trump literally, which suggests the slogan -- “we distort, you decide.’ You do not literally work for Trump, but you don’t work for the DNC either, so stop acting like it. When you and your guest say that Trump was a lousy debater who lost the 2016 debates, you assume facts not in evidence and the empirical evidence that as the debates wore on Trump’s opponents got fewer and fewer as Trump’s rally crowds got bigger and bigger. Disastrous and cringewoworthy debates indeed.

One fondly remembers election night as Fox exit polls showed Hillary winning as the election map increasingly showed otherwise. Anchor Bret Baier kept pestering Bill Hemmer at the election map to find a way Hillary could still pull it out. An impatient Megyn Kelly had to go back to the decision desk to find out why a reluctant Fox wasn’t calling Pennsylvania for Trump. There were long, stunned faces at Fox News as well as at MSNBC that night.  

Trump works for us deplorables, who can see America’ rising, even when the media doesn’t always tell us it is. The talking heads are incessantly bothered that Trump talks over their heads to an America outside their coastal newsrooms and they can’t understand that the voters who attend Trump rallies would crawl over broken glass to vote for the billionaire who talks like them and listens to them. The talking heads can’t understand why, after they hype every false charge and accusation by the Deep State, we no longer listen to them.

Who won the 2016 debates? The American people did when they put Donald J. Trump in the White House.  

Daniel John Sobieski is a former editorial writer for Investor’s Business Daily and freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Human Events, Reason Magazine, and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.