The cycle of lies that drove the January 6 insurrection is beginning again.
Trump and his Fox allies spent the lead-up to the 2020 election warning Republicans that Democrats would employ widespread voter fraud to change the results. Trump lost and falsely claimed he had been the victim of a stolen election, a lie rejected by U.S. courts and government agencies, including his own attorney general. Fearing a loss of market share to other right-wing outlets, Fox promoted the lie even though its own hosts and executives didn’t actually believe it. After months of vitriol, a Trumpist mob summoned to Washington, D.C., by the president stormed the U.S. Capitol, disrupting the congressional certification of the election.
Years later, Fox’s on-air promotion of Trumpist conspiracy theories about the purported election theft resulted in the network paying a $787.5 million defamation settlement to Dominion Voting Systems; it still faces a $2.7 billion suit from Smartmatic.
Ingraham was one of those Fox stars who deceived her audience. On her program, she sowed doubts about the election results and gave a platform to notorious Trumpist kook Sidney Powell, but Ingraham’s private texts revealed that she believed Powell was “a bit nuts” and that her fraud claims were not credible.
Fox’s massive payout has not curbed Ingraham’s willingness to promote baseless claims of election fraud. Instead, she is signaling that her show will carry water for any future efforts by Trump to delegitimize and subvert the results of the next election. And such efforts seem certain to escalate in the months to come.
“Donald Trump has portrayed every campaign of his short political career in one of two ways: He either won, or the election was stolen,” The Wall Street Journal reported last September, in a review of his comments since 2016. “Now, he is framing the next election, for which he is the front-runner among Republicans, the same way.”
The incentives that drove Fox stars to promote election fraud lies have only strengthened since 2020. Right-wing media competition is increasing and pushing Fox closer to Trump, as members of the Fox diaspora and other influencers seek to carve off some of its market share by hammering it as insufficiently supportive of the former president. And Fox’s employees saw following the 2020 election that they are more likely to pay an internal price for debunking Trump’s fraud claims than for supporting them.
Fox remains a loaded gun pointed at American democracy. And Ingraham’s fearmongering shows that she and her colleagues are willing to pull the trigger again.
