Research/Study
Donald Trump should be vulnerable to GOP challengers on countless issues, but Fox has made them all off-limits
Published
Before a single debate — much less the casting of a single vote — the 2024 Republican presidential primary may already be over. Former President Donald Trump has a commanding lead in the polls, with party bigwigs and funders lining up behind him. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who once appeared to be Trump’s most formidable challenger, has floundered in the leadup to this week’s official announcement of his campaign. Other candidates who have already launched their campaigns haven’t shown much support and seem to be making plays for future races or simple attention.
Trump’s Republican opponents have a lot of trouble explaining why, exactly, voters should prefer them instead. The former president would seem to have a wide array of vulnerabilities: He is a twice-impeached bigot recently found liable for sexual abuse whose actions are under scrutiny from multiple state and federal criminal probes and whose previous race ended in attempted election subversion and violent insurrection. But other GOP candidates are loath to mention any of those issues, instead relying on banal calls for a new generation of leadership and glancing suggestions that Trump is part of a “culture of losing.”
Their conundrum stems from the cult of personality that the GOP and its propaganda outlets became during Trump’s presidency.
Fox News and its ilk spent years buttressing the base’s support for Trump by finding reasons to let him off the hook, delegitimizing any person or organization seeking to hold him accountable, and suggesting that criticisms of Trump were really attacks on his voters. The network was particularly diligent in savaging Republicans who broke with the president like Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) (comparing him to notorious traitors Judas Iscariot and Benedict Arnold after he voted to convict at Trump’s first impeachment trial) and then-Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) (a “disaster for America” for her leadership of the January 6 select committee).
Fox has thus shaped the political environment in which the current primary takes place by effectively declaring a host of critiques of the former president out of bounds. Below are a sampling of the arguments that Trump’s Republican rivals can’t make without running afoul of the Fox counternarratives that the GOP base has been imbibing for years.