Trump vs. Fox News Would Be the Fight of the Century. And Also a First-Round Knockout.

Everyone assumes the champ still hits like 2016. The tape says otherwise, and the other guy owns the arena.

Friday afternoon’s Drudge Report read like a coroner’s report on a politically dead administration: TRUMP IN RUINS! BALLROOM BLOCKED. JOBS DISASTER. EVEN FOX RUNNING AWAY. Sitting under that banner, in italics, was a link to my Friday column arguing that Fox News is a more politically independent institution than its critics allow (thanks Matt!).

Drudge saw that piece as evidence of a network heading for the exits, and was hardly alone. The media newsletters have spent months tracking every skeptical Laura Ingraham question, and every Stuart Varney sigh about oil prices, or Brian Kilmeade hedge as building toward the same conclusion: Fox News and Donald Trump are drifting toward open conflict. Perhaps even a battle of titans?

It’s fun to consider! Any former 10-year-old comic book reader will tell you that this sort of theoretical battle presents an irresistible matchup. It’s a post-modern political version of Superman vs. Batman staged in a perfect pro wrestling kayfabe. Two dominant primordial beasts who’ve spent a decade on the same side while everyone in the arena wondered what would happen if one of them finally hit the other with a chair.

Let’s look at the tale of the tape: Fox News is the most powerful political media outlet in the country by wide measure, a machine so popular and so lucrative that it routinely beats the broadcast networks at their own game. Trump has been the main character of American politics for eleven years, including the four he spent out of office. He still commands a base of tens of millions that he doesn’t just exploit for monetary gain, but also weaponizes against any Republican member of Congress who crosses him, or merely declines to agree with him.

A real fight between them would reorder conservative politics overnight and change the course of American history. I’ll pop the popcorn!

Can you really call the rising tension between Trump and Fox News a cold war? It sounds over the top until you look at what has actually transpired just this year.

Trump told hosts of top-rated The Five that he hates Fox News polls and that Rupert Murdoch has promised him for years to fire the network’s pollster. By summer, he was posting that fraudulent polling should be virtually a criminal offense, specifically citing Fox News and the Wall Street Journal among the offenders. The Fox News polling desk did their job by publishing a Texas survey showing him nine points underwater in a state he carried by fourteen, with a Democrat leading the Senate race. The network’s most respected journalistic stalwarts Bret Baier and Brit Hume spent a segment walking viewers through numbers showing three-quarters of the country rates the economy as fair or poor just last month. Reasonable people would call that fact-based independence, whereas Trump and his minions might see that as insolence.

It wouldn’t be surprising at all if Trump goes nuclear and decides Fox News has betrayed him like other Republican figures before. Except this time the network decides to actually fight back rather than absorb the abuse and wait for the phone call. After all, it’s really tough to support an increasingly unpopular populist and still fill an endless number of Skyrizi ad buys.

Both Trump and Fox News are holding the biggest microphones in the narrative biz, which reminds me of something I learned while working at iHeartRadio after Funkmaster Flex publicly went after my boss. “Never get in a fight with the guy holding the microphone,” I learned when I asked why there was no response, which applies beautifully here. But who wins this embarrassingly phallic measuring contest?

The past decade has seen Trump end the careers of Republicans who tested him, so my first instinct is that he comes out on top. I’d also point to the one time he genuinely wounded Fox News. After the network correctly called Arizona in November 2020, viewers switched to Newsmax in numbers big enough to worry network executives. Fox News spent the next year successfully bringing its own audience back but at the cost of a $787 million settlement with Dominion. It sure felt like Trump owned the audience, and Fox News was just holding it for him.

Today Trump’s approval ratings are in a nosedive: Quinnipiac has the president at 32 percent approval, the lowest it has recorded for him in either term. And even members of his own party are bailing on him. Republican approval of his job performance has fallen from 84 percent in early 2025 to 69 percent today, according to Pew. And Republican support for the Iran war dropped ten points in just a month in a recent AP-NORC poll. The “unstoppable force meeting the immovable object” becomes much less interesting when the unstoppable force starts polling at 32 percent?

Every electoral honeymoon ends, and usually about this time. But the much bigger problem for Trump, and a Republican party just three months ahead of the midterms, is that the two promises he rode hardest at the end of the 2024 campaign were cheaper groceries and no new wars. Neither has held up well at all. The Iran War has been a foreign policy disaster and caused a spike in oil prices, as well as the price of every single consumer good that needs gas to move through a supply chain. And Federal Reserve Board economists found that Trump’s 2025 tariffs raised core goods prices 3.1 percent through February, accounting for all of the excess goods inflation heading into the midterms. In other words? Trump’s signature economic policy didn’t just fail to lower prices, but is the biggest reason they’ve gone up.

People inside Fox News know this, even if a cocksure and strident set of media reporters is determined not to. Trump has obviously been good for the media business. He creates endless conflict, outrage and culture wars that feel custom-created for Fox’s prime time rundowns. But the idea that Fox needs Trump to draw an audience has always been overstated.

Fox News became the most-watched cable news network in January 2002, just months after 9/11, and has stayed there through Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden and Trump again (apart from a brief wobble in early 2021.) When Trump came down the escalator in 2015, Fox had established itself as the top-rated cable news network for fourteen years. He became a huge part of the network’s success, and a very profitable one. But he didn’t create Fox’s dominance, and there’s no reason to think it disappears when he does.

A fight between Trump and Fox News would probably be short, and it would look nothing like the media world expects. Fox doesn’t need some grand Walter Cronkite-Vietnam moment. It can hurt Trump simply by deciding what to cover, what to ignore, and who gets blamed.

Trump has greatly benefited from this, as the network can put its thumb on the scale by choosing what not to cover. For example, it mostly ignored (or even dismissed) former Chief of Staff John Kelly’s on-the-record confirmation that Trump called American war dead “suckers” and “losers.” Its initial coverage of the Iran war mostly blamed Trump’s advisers, bad briefings and a useless Republican Senate while never really going straight at the president who ordered the strikes. Just last week, Larry Kudlow ripped the Senate on air while Tommy Tuberville nodded along. And news anchor John Roberts noted to viewers the administration’s back-and-forth Iran policy had put the country “back to square one.”

Neither man said anything especially harsh about Trump, but they perfectly illustrated just how Fox can hurt Trump’s political standing without directly turning on him. It will just stop covering for him.

And that’s the thing that Fox News can take from Trump that matters even more: attention. Trump can handle criticism. He’s spent over ten years turning attacks into content. What he has never had to deal with is the biggest audience on the right simply becoming less interested in him.

That audience belongs to Fox News and always has. Trump’s just spent the past decade acting like it's his. Sure, he’s greatly benefited from it, but he never owned it. Fox doesn’t need to beat him in a public fight when it can just give him less airtime, protection, and attention.

That’s why the network’s smarter move is to just wait for him to fade away. Or as crazy as it sounds, just wait for its viewers to grow tired of his schtick. It feels like that’s already happening. Even Rasputin ran out of comebacks.

So while it’s fun to imagine how this Battle of the Titans would actually unfold, the power disparity is why the fight of the century never happens, at least on air. Promoters only book a match when the outcome is in question, and everyone backstage already knows how this one ends.