This is worthy of one of those Vince McMahon reaction memes:

News anchor calls for assault weapons ban…

…while taking a shot at the NRA…

…and she works for Fox…

…and she wants it done by executive order.

.@realDonaldTrump has a major opportunity: he can BAN assault weapons and envoke strict gun laws and backgrnd checks in one executive order. To heck w/ lobbyists at NRA – the majority of Americans and common sense supports this! It’s time to do what is right for our country.

— Trish Regan (@trish_regan) August 7, 2019

We need to ban assault weapons — except at shooting ranges.. There is no place for them in today’s society. Period. If it’s a sport — go practice at the range. No need to keep them around the house.

— Trish Regan (@trish_regan) August 7, 2019

This year’s far-left Democratic presidential field is momentarily locked in a competition to see who can be most aggressive in regulating guns but I don’t know that even they claim the power to be able to ban assault weapons by executive fiat. Instinctively I would guess that Harris does since she’s forever tweeting ultimatums involving executive orders (“if Congress doesn’t do what I want in my first hundred days, I’ll do it myself”), but that doesn’t appear to be true. Harris’s campaign website claims she’d have statutory authority to ban the *importation* of AR-15s. But in terms of shutting down domestic manufacturing, seems like even Democrats believe you need Congress.

To find someone further left than that, evidently we need to turn to [checks notes] Fox’s news division.

Dana Loesch politely challenged Regan on her claim that a majority of Americans supports this and got this surprisingly snide response for her trouble:

She has to disagree bc she’s paid to disagree. I don’t envy her position.

Nonetheless – majority of Americans believe we need better background checks for prospective gun owners. No one w/common sense believes we should hand an assault rifle to a mentally ill person. https://t.co/Lx7d3uH6K1

— Trish Regan (@trish_regan) August 7, 2019

It’s true that proposals for universal background checks poll exceptionally well but not nearly as true that bans on assault weapons do. Last fall Gallup found 57 percent opposed to that idea, although no doubt opposition has softened after the El Paso and Dayton massacres. Banning assault weapons by executive order is a separate question entirely, though. How many people who would support handing Donald Trump the power to make such decisions as a matter of royal prerogative?

“Well,” you might say, “a Fox anchor would.” Right, that’s the interesting thing about Regan’s tweets — the substance of her idea will be greeted coolly by most Fox viewers (at least until Trump endorses it) but the method is right in their wheelhouse. More power for Trump to govern by decree? That’s something even the Fox News primetime line-up could support.

Oh, by the way. Are Trump and Fox News … still friends? He tweeted this a few hours ago.

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1159191398177890304

That reference to OANN has been a long time coming. Every time he’s griped about Fox over the past year for insufficient loyalty, I’ve wondered when he’d go nuclear and punish them by aggressively promoting their fledgling competitor on the right. Well, here we are. The next step, I assume, is to start giving OANN exclusives in hopes of driving his fans to that network and away from Fox. At least during daytime hours.

It’ll make Regan happy to know that he is, in fact, in favor of doing something on background checks — for the moment. He said the same thing after the Parkland massacre last year, but then the NRA and other righties began leaning on him behind closed doors and he backed off. If he comes out strong for universal background checks this time, that might shake loose enough Republican votes to pass a bill. The Republican strategy, though, may be to offer the “red-flag” bill in lieu of a background-checks bill, in hopes that Democrats will join with the GOP on the former and then back off on the latter. That’s not going to happen, said Chuck Schumer today. He wants a more robust “red-flag” bill than the one Lindsey Graham has drafted and a vote on universal background checks. If McConnell refuses and offers him an up-or-down vote only on the red-flag proposal, will Democrats actually … block it? Stay tuned.