For over ten years, Donald Trump and Fox News enjoyed the most lucrative symbiotic relationship in modern American politics. They sold each other, and both got rich and more powerful doing it. Now the president is gunpopular, the network’s ratings are sliding with him, and he has decided to blame his nosedive on the network, and that fix is a simple programming decision, unaware that it no longer works
For the second time in a week, Trump went after Fox News on Truth Social on Sunday. Earlier in the week, he was focused on criticizing airtime, or more to the point, who gets more of it, with Schumer, Jeffries, and Jessica Tarlov named and the verdict that “MAGA, and REAL Patriots, will never like Fox!” Sunday, it was rallies. It was “sad to see” that Fox & Friends wasn’t covering Ohio, Alabama, Texas, and Oklahoma. “Fox spends more time talking to Communists, Socialists, and Dumocrats.” “We don’t like stupid Jessica Tarlov.” Viewers “will very quickly stop watching (like I am doing right now!),” and the network “almost went out of business” the last time it tried this, “always right before an election.” Then, in case anyone missed it, “That can happen again!”
An hour after Trump posted the latest attack, Fox News aired Sunday Morning Futures, which was formerly anchored by recently ousted Maria Bartiromo and is now, at least for the moment, hosted by Trump’s former aide Larry Kudlow. He opened on “the greatest story untold, an economic boom in America. I don’t know why folks don’t want to talk about it.” He ran the household survey’s 406,000 September jobs and called them “gigantic numbers.”
White House Economic Advisor Kevin Hassett was Kudlow’s guest and, shockingly, completely agreed they were gigantic numbers and said Trump “really has created the golden age.” A less-than-impressive payroll figure, 29,000, did not come up in the hour, but Trump’s negative polls came up long enough for Kudlow to say most of them “aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on.” This is the same Kudlow who told Tommy Tuberville in August that “the polls are lousy” and Republicans were doing nothing about it. It was as slick a segment as it was shameless.
That hour was scheduled before Trump posted his latest Truth Social salvo. Nobody at Fox News built it to answer him, and that’s the point. On many hours, the network still seems to be very much selling, or at least supporting the presidency. But the larger problem for both Trump and Fox News is that the audience isn’t buying it like they used to.
Trump has been clear on what he thinks the problem is. When he was asked by TIME last week about his polling numbers, he said: “We’re doing an extremely poor job of promotion… we’re not doing a good job of public relations.” Hassett joined CNN’s Jake Tapper just an hour before he sat down with Kudlow, said “the pollsters are wrong,” and called a University of Michigan survey “a bad poll,” and waved off the 29,000 payroll figure with “Oh, come on, that’s just last month.”
The pro-Trump defense playbook never changes: the best defense is a good offense. If the Fox News viewers aren’t happy, then it must be the network’s fault, not Trump’s.
Senator John Kennedy doesn’t buy it, and he said as much on NBC’s Meet the Press the same morning. He dismissed Trump, telling voters, “Not to believe their own lying checkbooks is not going to work.” Fox News’ own Brit Hume answered the same theory a month ago after Trump banned CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House. “If he thinks this will lead to more favorable coverage, I think he’s dreaming.”
Trump does have some evidence to support this sort of attack on the network, as he’s the only president who ever really hurt Fox News. In November 2020, after the network called Arizona, he effectively told his people where else to tune in, and enough of them went to Newsmax that Fox News spent a stretch of early 2021 in third place. “Almost went out of business” is a stretch, but the network remembers, and so does he. Bartiromo is part of the same memory. She was let go in August after sending the White House an internal memo she didn’t like, which I wrote about at the time.
But what 2020 proved should not be conflated with some sort of larger power dynamic Trump holds sway over. Sure he can point his base at the network, but the number he’s trying to fix now is Fox News’ viewers’ opinion of him, and nothing in 2020 says a current programming slate or rundown can move that.
In 2020, when Trump told his people to punish Fox News, they just changed the channel to a network willing to promote his baseless election denialism. Newsmax got a bump in ratings, and Fox News got a short-term scare (they returned to first place by spring).
This fall looks different as the network’s third-quarter ratings were down double digits in the demo against a year ago. Fox News gave Trump two hours of primetime for his midterm convention speech a few weeks ago, and he drew less than Hannity and Gutfeld! pull on an ordinary Wednesday. Why doesn’t Fox News air Trump’s rallies? Because he no longer rates.
Trump fatigue is real, and it’s even hit Fox News viewers who are behaving exactly like sports fans who turn off the TV when their team is four touchdowns in the third quarter.
Trump’s seems to think this is all due to poor programming choices. More rallies, less Tarlov, and his spiraling polling numbers will take care of themselves. But he has it backward. Fox News needs an audience, and for a decade Trump delivered one. Now the thing he’s selling is exactly the thing that's making the viewers turn the channel. And every executive in the building can read a Nielsen report.
So no, Trump isn’t getting screwed by Fox News. If anything, it’s the other way around. He has a 31 percent approval rating, and the network, though still dominant, is losing viewers because of it. A Truth Social account telling that network it isn’t trying hard enough doesn’t change anyone’s minds and only makes him look increasingly delusional.
Trump is not the victim of Fox News programming. Like any abusive partner, he’s blaming the victim of his shitty approval rating, instead of admitting he’s the problem to start.