Fox News has been putting Donald Trump’s rallies back on the air for the past two weeks, including nearly 90 minutes of prime time on Wednesday night. The people who cover the network are almost certainly going to misread it.
Three weeks ago the story was that Fox News had cut Trump off. This morning’s version is that the Murdochs are planning for life after him.. But what’s actually happening is that a news network is covering a president who’s saying wild things six days before the midterm election, and right now every hour of his rally they air ends up hurting the man in approval rating death spiral, as well as many of the Republicans running with him.
Status reported Tuesday night that Fox News’s October ratings slide tracks along with Trump’s collapsing approval. If that story sounds familiar, it’s likely because I made the very same comparison on Oct. 1, nearly point for point. On Sept. 10, I called Trump’s convention speech a “ratings disaster” for Fox News after he had the network to himself for two hours and couldn’t beat a normal Wednesday’s programming. The case I made was accurate, and I’m flattered that others imitated what I wrote.
What’s wrong, however, is the conclusion that got attached to it. Three weeks ago Brian Stelter reported that Fox News had tuned Trump out. This morning he and Andrew Kirell went further, casting the rationed rally coverage as the Murdochs pivoting to a post-Trump era, with the opinion hosts as better Republican messengers than the president.
But the rallies returned. The top-rated cable news network has carried live portions of seven Trump rallies since mid-October, which adds up to more than six hours of airtime. Laura Ingraham and Jesse Watters provided nearly 90 consecutive minutes of prime time to Trump’s rally in Ohio just last night, which inspired this column. Viewers who wanted to see every single Trump rally could watch it streamed on Fox Nation and Fox News Digital.
CNN’s reporting runs the other way, with the network carrying only nine of Trump’s 24 fall speeches live after taking 12 of 14 earlier in the year. The cutback was real. The question is why.
I’m guessing that nobody at Fox News needed an edict from anyone to make that decision. Trump is finally featuring new rally material, though with questionably broad appeal. In Port Huron, he went full Islamophobe in calling Abdul El-Sayed a jihadist and said he’d have to pass through a metal detector to get into the Senate. In Youngstown, he told the crowd he’d taken a good look at Jon Husted’s ass. In Texas he mocked James Talarico by making what clearly looked like blow-job motion with his hand. He spent the first two days of this week defending his tacky gold-leafed reliefs he installed in the White House in response to Barack Obama’s Cheesecake Factory dig. A president talking like that in the final week of a midterm leads every newscast in the country. Fox News would’ve been the strange one for skipping it.
Airing a Trump rally in ‘16 or ‘20 effectively accomplished two things. It drove ratings and sold the candidate to viewers who already liked, or at least got a kick out of, him. Cut to ’26, and those two jobs are no longer symbiotic. The GOP midterm convention showed that Trump can no longer lift Fox News ratings. The network carries these rallies now because they’re happening, not because they rate. News network gonna news network.
With an approval rating that’s dangerously sinking to the high 20s, it’s entirely reasonable to conclude that live Trump rally coverage actually hurts him. The Fox News viewer who’s drifted away over gas prices and grocery bills isn’t coming back for the jihadist riff. Nor can they be impressed with his “let them eat cake” boast about $5,000 hamburgers at Mar-a-Lago. A suburban Republican watching the clip the next morning is more likely to be left shaking his or her head than sold on Trumpism. Why did most GOP strategists try to keep Trump away from their candidate’s campaign trail again?
When the next round of coverage claims Fox News is back on the Trump train, keep those ratings in mind. Fox News gets zero benefit by airing him, and Trump doesn’t seem to get anything out of it either, apart from his beloved airtime and attention. The network’s simply covering a president in an approval death spiral who won’t stop talking, for the same exact reason everyone else is. He’s the story.
Note: This post was updated to include CNN’s reporting, which I discovered only after I’d published the prior version.
Let him just keep talking it’ll hurt the Republicans which is 100 fine with me Minnesota mom