“A Pathetic Surrender”: Why Fox News Just Can’t Quit Donald Trump

Wednesday’s Iowa town hall rankled staffers who see the network—like most of the GOP—falling in line behind the 2024 front-runner. As one correspondent acknowledged afterward, “Trump is the monster we created.”

With less than a week until the first votes are cast in the 2024 Republican primary, front-runner Donald Trump blew up Fox News’ prime time schedule on Wednesday. The former president and de facto programming executive booted his longtime ally Sean Hannity out of his 9 p.m. time slot and held a town hall with Iowa voters to compete with CNN’s debate between Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley.

Baier had been wooing Tump for quite a while, and Trump suddenly agreed to participate after the CNN debate details were locked. “They would only do it if it was at that time,” he said. “We offered a number of different times. That was their stipulation.”

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The history between Trump and Fox is so fraught, and the relationship is so convoluted, that writers typically spend several paragraphs explaining the complexities. But it is also, at a gut level, quite simple. The Fox brand and the Trump brand are both about defeating Democrats and exploiting the levers of power.

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...Rupert Murdoch really did try to make him a “non person,” as Murdoch’s own emails (also obtained by Dominion) revealed. “Fox News very busy pivoting” away from Trump, Murdoch remarked to a former Fox executive in the immediate aftermath of the January 6 insurrection. At the time, Murdoch and almost everyone else thought that Trump’s political life was over. But Fox—and then host Tucker Carlson in particular—also helped revive Trump by recasting January 6 as a government plot to entrap poor Trump voters. As the base warmed back up to Trump, so did Fox. And Lachlan Murdoch didn’t stand in the way.