A year into President Donald Trump’s second turn in the Oval Office, it has become virtually impossible to tell where his administration ends and Fox News begins.
Trump arrived for the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Wednesday morning amid alarm from U.S. allies over his manic, unhinged, and unnerving demands for NATO member Denmark to hand over Greenland. At a Davos speech the day before, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney warned of a “rupture” in the world order, in which international rules are being replaced by the mantra that “the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.”
Here’s how Fox & Friends co-host Rachel Campos-Duffy put it as a helicopter bearing the president touched down in Davos: “It feels like even though this meeting has been going on for a couple days and speeches have been made and interviews have been done, it feels like nothing starts until President Trump arrives — until daddy's home, as so many people say.”
“Just think about the anticipation, the stakes that are going to be made here, just with the presence of President Trump,” she glowed, adding: “Here you have this global conference where President Trump is about to blow it up in terms of his negotiations and stands, and yet nothing starts until he arrives.”
“It is a new day,” she concluded. “America is the center of everything. President Trump is the leader that everything hinges on.”
Campos-Duffy isn’t just a typically sycophantic Fox host with a penchant for conspiracy theories. Her husband, former Fox contributor and Fox Business host Sean Duffy, is one of 24 former network employees who went through the revolving door between the network and the second Trump administration, and he is now the secretary of transportation (Fox & Friends’ former weekend co-host Pete Hegseth is Duffy’s Cabinet colleague as secretary of defense).
At a normal news outlet, employing the wife of a Cabinet secretary for a role which allowed her to shower the president with praise would be an unheard-of ethical disaster. But at Fox, it may not have even been the biggest such calamity of the day.
Less than 15 minutes before Campos-Duffy proclaimed Trump the world’s “daddy,” Fox & Friends brought on the president’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump. The network hired Lara Trump as a commentator after the president took office last year in an absurdly corrupt deal which put a lantern on Fox’s reemergence as a Trump propaganda outlet.
Lara Trump, who Fox employs as the host of a weekly program which she uses to give top Trump officials like Campos-Duffy’s husband soft-focus interviews about the great jobs they are doing for the American people, was there to take issue with the tenor of The View’s Tuesday sitdown with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
“Lara, listen, obviously they’re going to like Zohran Mamdani, that’s The View,” said Fox & Friends guest co-host Johnny “Joey” Jones. “But when you see them just gushing over him like that — I mean, he’s been in office for a couple of days, but still.”
“Yeah, well, this is surprising to absolutely nobody,” Lara Trump replied, mocking the “hard-hitting hosts there” for being “obsessed with people like” Mamdani. Because if there’s one thing they won’t stand for on Fox & Friends, it’s shoddy journalism and hosts gushing over their favorite politicians.
All of this happened on the program where Donald Trump built his political following with regular appearances, then watched obsessively throughout his first term for tips on how to govern the country while posting hundreds of times on social media about what he saw on the show.
Is it state-run media, or a media-run state? Yes.
