Donald Trump — who concluded his presidency by trying to subvert American democracy and has pledged an authoritarian vision if he returns to office — won all but one of the Super Tuesday primaries. His last remaining primary opponent for the nomination, former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, is ending her campaign. And Fox News’ Tuesday coverage demonstrates that the right-wing propaganda network that served as his mouthpiece during his administration has fully returned to that servile role.
Fox reportedly once had a “soft ban” on Trump appearances, and for a while after that eschewed airing live interviews with the former president. But Trump was back in his favorite role on Tuesday morning, fielding softball questions (and spewing lies) over the phone with the hosts of Fox & Friends.
Fox host Neil Cavuto, one of the few people left at the network who even occasionally criticizes Trump, dumped out of a Trump speech to fact check his falsehoods just two weeks ago. But on Tuesday, anchor Bill Hemmer implicitly threw Cavuto under the bus, saying that if CNN or MSNBC refused to carry Trump’s speeches live in their totality, “take ‘news’ out of your name.”
Fox News preempted its evening lineup for live election coverage with anchors Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum — but the network’s right-wing talkers nonetheless had opportunities to reassert their fealty to Trump as the votes rolled in. Laura Ingraham, who texted during the January 6 insurrection that Trump’s response was “destroying his legacy,” said the election shows that the Republican Party “is Donald Trump’s party.”
“Donald Trump defies all conventional political gravity,” glowed Sean Hannity, who spent the final days of Trump’s presidency strategizing over how to successfully “land the plane” without further disaster. “The more they attack him, the more he seems to galvanize support around the country.”
Former Fox Chairman Rupert Murdoch privately responded to the carnage of January 6 by saying that Fox would “make Trump a non person,” and instructed Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott that the network should not “mention his name unless essential and certainly don’t support him.” But a public break with Trump would threaten the network’s bottom line, and so Fox made little effort to loosen his grip on the GOP.
Instead, Fox spent the last three years purging the former president’s critics from the network and the party, hiring his former employees, promoting Fox’s Trump sycophants to more prominent roles, and demolishing avenues his primary challengers could have used to forestall his return to office. All this played out even as Fox paid a record defamation settlement for trying to support Trump’s 2020 election subversion plot by airing election fraud conspiracy theories.
Trump is unsatisfied by anything less than the uninterrupted adoration usually only found on a dictator’s state-owned TV channel, so he’s still badgering the network for even more support. In an unhinged Tuesday rant, he lashed out at Fox for hosting contributors Marc Thiessen and Karl Rove after Thiessen pointed out that Trump is less popular than President Joe Biden.
But make no mistake, Fox’s inevitable repositioning as a Trump propaganda network is here. Its primetime hosts, “straight news” anchors, contributors and correspondents will spend the next eight months diligently working to return him to office. And if Trump falls short of a win in November and attempts to subvert the election again, they’ll be right by his side, eagerly supporting his bid for power.