Photo Illustration by Erin O’Flynn/The Daily Beast/Getty Images
Credulous reporters spent the years after Donald Trump left the White House declaring that Fox News’ love affair with the former president had gone cold. Reading too deeply into reports of Rupert Murdoch’s personal dislike of Trump and his right-wing propaganda network’s often flattering coverage of his would-be successors, they confidently asserted that Fox was moving on.
But claims of an imminent Fox-Trump breakup have aged as poorly as the similarly confident predictions that Trump himself was on the verge of a pivot. Forget the network’s brief flirtations with Ron DeSantis, Glenn Youngkin, Vivek Ramaswamy, and now Nikki Haley. Fox never fully abandoned Trump, and its biggest stars spent 2023 furiously defending him from legal jeopardy. Its political and business models demand that as the GOP field clears and leaves him as the party’s nominee, Fox will inevitably backslide into being Trump TV.
Fox co-founders Murdoch and Roger Ailes launched the network with dual goals: Making lots of money, and helping Republicans win elections. The network built a huge audience and kept viewers coming back for more by employing right-wing demagogues skilled at stoking the grievances of the Republican base, while selling advertisers on the canard that its “news” division functioned like that of a normal news outlet. Meanwhile, the network put the hammer to Democratic politicians and progressive icons, gestated and disseminated right-wing talking points and pseudo-scandals, and generally served as the communications arm of the GOP—while reshaping that party in its own image.