President Donald Trump promised that his Thursday night speech on election security would reveal “really, really big news” of the utmost significance, arguing that “it doesn't get bigger because without free and fair elections, you don't have a country.” But his exhortations seemed to fall on deaf ears at Fox News, which largely ignored the event in the hours before and after the White House address — and did not mention it at all on Friday’s Fox & Friends.

The relative silence from Fox’s stable of MAGA stars, who typically amplify the president’s talking points on whatever subject he discusses, suggests an unwillingness to engage with Trumpian rants about a “rigged” 2020 election — perhaps out of fear of legal repercussions or because they share the concern of congressional Republicans that Trump’s fixation on the topic won’t help them avoid a calamitous showing in the midterm elections.

The president used the address to revive his Big Lie that the 2020 election had been stolen. Drawing upon declassified intelligence community and law enforcement records assembled by notorious right-wing scandalmonger John Solomon and Trump crony Bill Pulte, he declared that China had interfered with that campaign by obtaining voter data files that are largely publicly available, attacked the “deep state” for hiding such information from him, and exhorted Congress to pass voter-suppression legislation in response. 

As The New York Times pointed out, however, “grains of truth were blown out of proportion”:

But documents Mr. Trump released to support his claims — and previous assessments from the intelligence community — do not back up his most aggressive statements about election security. In fact, some of the documents reach the opposite conclusion.

They also do not contain significant new revelations about vulnerabilities in election systems. One of the documents posted on the White House website was blunt: “We assess that vote tabulation systems would be difficult to manipulate on a wide enough scale to compromise election results.”

Thursday night’s panel discussion previewing the speech on Special Report, Fox’s premiere “straight news” program, foregrounded Fox’s extreme reticence in promoting Trump’s address. Fox contributor and shameless hack Hugh Hewitt said that he hoped the “majority of his speech is focused” on his recent escalation of the Iran war, calling it “vital that the president keep that in mind that American servicemen and women are in harm's way when he is on the air.” 

Fellow panelist Olivia Beavers of The Wall Street Journal pointed to Republican anxieties over the speech, saying they “would like to be shifting their focus instead of going back to 2020 and talking about that."

Many at Fox appear to agree with Beavers — throughout the night, as MS NOW and CNN offered harsh coverage of Trump’s election denial, the right-wing network’s hosts were focused on other subjects.

In the two hours leading up to Trump’s speech, Laura Ingraham did not mention the address while Jesse Watters merely teased it at the end of his show. Instead, they dedicated their programs to discussing typical Fox culture war fare, denouncing “socialism” and “communists” while railing against “DEI.” Watters made time to air a segment in which one of his producers interviewed bikini-clad women in New York City’s Central Park, while Ingraham talked to Jimmy Failla about the pop star Kesha’s statement that she “collects fans’ teeth.”

Sean Hannity, the Fox host closest to the president and the right-wing media’s premiere booster of “deep state” conspiracy theories, carried Trump’s speech live at the top of his program. But after its conclusion, Hannity spent all of five minutes discussing the address with correspondent Aishah Hasnie, who stressed that while Trump had pointed to the purported vulnerability of voting machines, “Fox News has not seen that evidence yet, is not in a position to evaluate the accuracy of the president's statements and claims at this time.”

Hannity concluded that there are “a lot of questions tonight and a lot of studying needs to be done,” adding that “I hope the media — I know we will — will do a deep dive into all this documentation in the days ahead for sure.” And then he moved on to other topics for the remaining half of the night’s broadcast. After his show concluded, rather than preempting its regular programming to discuss the “really, really big news” Trump had touted, Fox aired a pretaped episode of its “comedy” show, Gutfeld!

The unkindest cut came the next morning from Fox & Friends, long Trump’s media home and favorite program, which did not discuss the speech at all — not even in a news brief. The show’s co-hosts apparently decided that it was more important to keep their viewers apprised of their latest gripes related to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and WNBA player Caitlin Clark.