The Iran war marks the most consequential test yet of the Fox-Trump feedback loop, the process by which the president’s actions are shaped by the coverage he sees from his favorite Fox programs. As a massive U.S. military force converged around Iran in February, primetime host Sean Hannity led the network’s hawkish commentators in urging Trump to attack while his less-enthused colleagues preferred to avoid the topic. Hannity’s arguments reportedly helped convince the president, and the U.S. and Israel launched military strikes against Iran on February 28, beginning the ill-conceived war. 

The entire evening “opinion” lineup rallied to Trump once the war started, flooding their programs with glowing praise in its first few months. As the war ground on, however — becoming both a geostrategic debacle and an anvil on the GOP’s election hopes — all of them, including Hannity, largely stopped talking about it.

All five shows saw precipitous collapses of their “Iran” mentions over the summer. Watters’ program had the biggest “Iran” decline in raw numbers, dropping from 258 in June to just 46 in August, while Ingraham’s show had the largest decrease by percentage with a drop of 87%.  

March: 2,327 “Iran” mentions across Fox News evening “opinion” programming. Fox’s hosts cheered as the initial U.S. and Israeli strikes destroyed Iranian targets and assassinated its former supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. They quickly declared the mission accomplished, lavished Trump with praise, and savaged the war’s critics, drawing complaints from other right-wing figures for producing “blatant propaganda.” But the Iranian regime remained intact and in control of its nuclear stockpile — and quickly followed its well-known doctrine by closing the Strait of Hormuz, a vital channel for the global trades in energy and fertilizer. A split briefly emerged between hawks like Hannity, who called for tactics including seizing Iranian uranium, destroying its regime, and forcing open the Strait, and Ingraham, who warned that a prolonged conflict could damage the American economy while further escalations risked “cascading problems” that would hurt the GOP’s standing in the midterms. Ingraham quickly pivoted back, however, telling her viewers that “Trump is taking some big risks, but with big risks come great rewards,”and that she was “choosing not to panic” about the midterm elections. 

April: 1,680 “Iran” mentions across Fox News evening “opinion” programming. When Trump backed down from a threat to destroy Iran’s “whole civilization” and instead declared a ceasefire on April 7, he kicked off a monthslong cycle of fruitless diplomacy, tit-for-tat strikes, and bluffs at escalation. His Fox allies, though, quickly switched from offering support for Trump’s proposal for a massive war crimes campaign to praising him for supposedly forcing Iran to “cry uncle,” as Watters put it. And as the closure of the Strait of Hormuz began triggering rising gas prices for Americans, the hosts responded by celebrating the U.S. oil industry’s profits; attacking Democratic critics of the war as traitors; and calling for the resumption of the U.S. bombing campaign.

May: 763 “Iran” mentions across Fox News evening “opinion” programming. The president spent May toggling between saber-rattling and claims that a deal with Iran to end the war was at hand. All the while, Trump continued to count on Fox for fawning coverage of his administration and his war as his poll numbers fell amid the ongoing stalemate. The result was a doom loop in which Fox’s hosts, desperate to hold on to their MAGA audience, kept telling viewers that the war was on the verge of a historic victory that simply needed more time and troops — and apparently convinced Trump not to end the conflict, even as it became a global strategic debacle and a domestic economic and political disaster.

June: 801 “Iran” mentions across Fox News evening “opinion” programming. The fourth month of the war was the only one in which Fox’s evening “opinion” shows mentioned “Iran” more frequently than it had the month before. Trump praised Fox’s “great” coverage of the war during a June 11 interview, praising “fantastic” hosts Hannity, Watters, and Ingraham, and adding that “every single anchor has been great.” His signing that month of a “memorandum of understanding” with Iran triggered dismay from many on the right because it failed to achieve his objectives and left the U.S. in a weaker position and Iran in a stronger one than before the war began. But it drew praise from Fox hosts like Gutfeld, Watters, and Hannity, with the latter declaring it “history in the making,” even as retaliatory strikes continued despite the purported ceasefire.

July: 545 “Iran” mentions across Fox News evening “opinion” programming. Iranian forces struck commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz, the U.S. retaliated by resuming military strikes, Trump declared the ceasefire with Iran “over,” the war’s scope widened across the Arabian Gulf, and the president again threatened further escalations even as reports circulated that the U.S. military was running critically short of key interceptor missiles — but as others in MAGA media became increasingly despondent over the state of the conflict, coverage of the war from Fox’s evening “opinion” hosts dropped. 

August: 178 “Iran” mentions across Fox News evening “opinion” programming. Fox’s evening “opinion” hosts all but abandoned talking about the Iran war as Trump again threatened a massive attack before again backing down; transits through the Strait of Hormuz, a vital channel for global trade, remained limited; Iran and Oman closed in on a deal that would impose transit fees for passage through the strait; and reports circulated about poor living conditions on a U.S. aircraft carrier that were due in part to successful Iranian strikes on a U.S. base in Bahrain. Hannity did briefly address the war on August 19 — to declare that it had already been won. Trump, in turn, posted a “Mission Accomplished” image on social media the following week.

Something had to fill the void as Fox hosts reduced their coverage of Iran over the summer, and they ended up settling on a new red scare focused on Democratic candidates who were members of, supported by, or somehow associated with the Democratic Socialists of America or the concept of democratic socialism.

Fox quickly found its narrative as such candidates competed for and sometimes won the Democratic nomination for public office: Portray their primary victories as a national phenomenon that showed that the Democratic Party was now in hock to socialism and that Democratic victories in the midterm elections would put communism on the table — along with mass suffering and death.

On the Fox evening “opinion” shows we reviewed, beginning in late June there were more collective mentions of “socialism” than “Iran” during 9 of 10 weeks.

Each individual program had more “socialism” mentions than “Iran” mentions in August. Ingraham’s show had the most “socialism” references that month, with 203 against just 25 “Iran” references. Hannity, Jesse Watters Primetime, and The Five each had more than 100 “socialism” mentions and 50 or fewer “Iran” ones. On Gutfeld!, “socialism” was referenced 9 times more frequently than “Iran.”

They’re all speaking from the same hymnal, as a sampling from their voluminous commentary shows.

Watters warned in June that victories by two democratic socialists in Democratic congressional primaries in New York City were “dangerous,” saying of them: “You're coming for us. You're coming for our money, you're coming for our people, you're coming for our way of life. It's not socialism, guys. This is communism. You can't reason with these guys. You have to crush them. And we will.”

“We're not going to let our civilization get destroyed,” he added. “These people are going to steal from us. These people want to hurt us.”

Hannity said in July that the “extreme positions” of Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong, a self-described democratic socialist, were “the perfect illustration, representation of the socialist base, the radical communist base now, that is the Democratic Party.” 

(Hong subsequently lost the primary to Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, a “moderate Democrat.”)

Discussing Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Michigan and a self-described capitalist, Gutfeld claimed in August that “America is not going to become a socialist country, but the Democrat Party could become a socialist party,” adding: “I resent having to debate over ideologies that have not only failed, but killed millions.”

“Every Democrat should be condemning this language and this movement, but they're not, because above all, they want to win and they're afraid of losing,” Ingraham added later that month. “So, for all you job creators, all you entrepreneurs out there, sorry, because if the DSA-ers tolerated by the Democrat Party have their way, it's confiscation time.”

Trump’s symbiotic relationship with the network’s coverage has been on full display. 

Trump “has seized on ‘communism’ as his new favored line of attack against Democrats, having invoked the word more than 100 times since late June as he tries to rouse voters and preserve a narrow Republican congressional majority in the upcoming midterm elections,” NBC News reported on August 21. 

Speaking at Mount Rushmore on July 3, the president warned of “a resurgence of the communist menace in our land” and promised to “vanquish communists quickly” and “send them into exile.”

As the summer wore on, familiar culture war fixations joined fearmongering about socialism as major topics on Fox’s evening “opinion” shows.

The WNBA suddenly became a regular topic of discussion across the network beginning in late June and continuing through the summer (with no end in sight). 

Much of the debate revolved around criticizing the league over issues pertaining to race and trans inclusion, with the network’s stars devoting significant airtime first to whether Indiana Fever guard Caitlin Clark received hard fouls because she is white, and eventually to a monthslong firestorm over the possibility of trans athletes in the WNBA, kicked up by comments made by the Fever’s Sophie Cunningham and subsequently accelerated by former NBA player Enes Kanter Freedom’s antics (even though, as Wired noted, “no transgender women have ever played in the league”). 

The deluge of coverage led Watters to comment during a segment on The Five: “I don’t want to cover women’s basketball. … We have to do this again, really?”

Meanwhile, the Fox hosts devoted significant time to relitigating the response to the COVID-19 pandemic after Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) released over 1,000 pages of entries from former public health official Anthony Fauci’s diary written from 2019 to 2022, and Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment rather than giving testimony at a subsequent hearing before Paul’s committee. 

Hannity’s show, which played a key role in encouraging Trump to attack, mentioned “WNBA” nearly twice as frequently as it did “Iran” in August (93 to 50). Gutfeld! and The Ingraham Angle also had more “WNBA” mentions than “Iran” mentions. Gutfeld!, Jesse Watters Primetime, and The Ingraham Angle had more “Fauci” references than “Iran” mentions. 

The choice of topics is reminiscent of 2021, when Fox responded to Trump leaving office in disgrace by churning up culture war fights around “critical race theory,” trans athletes, and the COVID-19 vaccines. 

Media Matters searched transcripts in the Kinetiq video database for all original programming on Fox News Channel for any of the terms “Iran,” “Iranian,” or “Iranians”; either of the terms “WNBA” or “women's basketball”; the term “Fauci”; or any of the terms “socialist,” “socialism,” “communist,” or “communism” from March 2, 2026, through August 31, 2026, a full six months of weekday news programming since the Iran war began.

We considered each instance of each term as a single mention. For approximate coverage of Iran, we summed results for “Iran,” “Iranian,” and “Iranians”; for approximate coverage of the WNBA, we summed results for “WNBA” and “women's basketball”; for approximate coverage of former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony Fauci, we used results for “Fauci”; and for approximate coverage of panic about socialism and communism, we summed results for “socialist,” “socialism,” “communist,” and “communism.”