Trumps Divorce From Fox News Is Getting Ugly

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Trumps Divorce From Fox News Is Getting Ugly

The right-wing network was gearing up to cast itself as the leader of the anti-Biden resistance. But a drawn-out election has put it in conflict with President Trump and his supporters.

Not all marriages of convenience end up in divorce court, but when they do, it’s easy pickings to find the forensic evidence that doom awaited the relationship.

And so, it is this week, as President Donald Trump and Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News Channel all but finalized their own conscious uncoupling, that we can see that the two weren’t really falling apart as they were never really together.

It’s true that Fox propped Trump up when other networks were treating him as a novelty, reliably televising his speeches and letting his proxies spin away his blatant untruths and off-the-cuff insults. And it’s true that Fox was proud to have the president as Viewer Number One, taking his calls and often seemingly broadcasting directly to his bedroom TV.

That all makes it easy to forget that Trump was never Murdoch and Fox’s first choice for president in 2016, or even their second. The network shined brighter for Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. “When is Donald Trump going to stop embarrassing his friends, let alone the whole country?” 

Murdoch famously tweeted in July 2015. Fox and Trump rumbled so frequently during the 2016 primary season—Trump even skipped the Fox primary debate—some observers called it a “feud.” Murdoch opposed Trump’s signature policies on immigrants, the Muslim ban and trade.

But being the Machiavellian that he is, Murdoch courted Trump once he emerged as the likely nominee, and Trump, never one to spurn an adoring TV audience, said yes.

Trump also demands loyalty for the pleasure of his intimacies, and Murdoch couldn’t abide. He has famously called Trump a “phony “and “idiot,” and as early as the summer of 2017 was not deterring his many journalistic outlets from sniping at Trump and his family. 

One of the biggest anti-Trump stories, about the president’s mistresses, was broken by Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal, and Fox’s Chris Wallace bedevilled the president during the re-election campaign with a slashing interview.

The final cause for separation, if you want to call it that, came on Election Night, when Fox became the first to call Arizona for Joe Biden, the New York Times reported, prompting Jared Kushner to contact Rupert Murdoch and a Trump aide to demand a retraction. 

For the Trump team, this had to be a bigger betrayal than finding Rupert in bed with Bernie Sanders. As liberals blinked hard in astonishment and began discovering a sudden, unfamiliar respect for Fox over its projection, there wasn’t much marriage left to save. Trump and Fox had only the details of the split to resolve.

It’s tempting to think of the Fox-Trump marriage as an ideological thing, wedding two passionately right-wing lovers in a perfect match. The combination worked for both parties for several years. 

Trump got a semi-reliable wing-man in Fox’s opinion programming and Murdoch got what he always seeks from politicians: Access. But Murdoch, who by virtue of having been married four times himself, has never viewed pairings as permanent. 

As Murdoch’s biographers—David Folkenflik, William Shawcross, Michael Wolff, Neil Chenoweth and the rest—have shown, his political unions have always been expedient, transactional, temporary things. 

He helped the Tories bury Labour in the U.K. in 1992— “It’s the Sun Wot Won It,” his Sun tabloid crowed—and then switched to Labour to help lift Tony Blair to victory in 1997. He so insinuated himself in the new government that one Blair spokesman called Murdoch “effectively a member of Blair’s cabinet.” Blair eventually became godfather to one of Murdoch’s daughters.

The truest thing you can say about politics and the entertainment business is that eventually, every political career grind to an ugly end and every show gets cancelled. For the longest time, it seemed, the Trump show on Fox was looking at a four-year renewal. 

But audiences and voters—like husbands and wives—can be a fickle bunch. They always want more of the same until the day comes that they don’t anymore, and the only resolution is cancellation or divorce. 

Such a day came for Trump on Tuesday. But don’t worry about him and Fox. He can always find a gig as a reverse mortgage salesman on cable TV. Meanwhile, Fox has a whole hot-house filled with Trump seedlings—Tom Cotton, Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, Mike Pompeo, to name a few—that it could cultivate in time for the 2024 season. politico