It was a slow news week in Washington, at least if you watched Fox News. On Tuesday night, apropos of nothing in particular, two of the network’s marquee prime-time hosts, Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity, retreated to their safe space, devoting long opening segments to bashing President Biden. Hannity banged on about Biden’s friendship, decades ago, with the long-dead Democratic Senator Robert Byrd, who had been a racist Klan member as a young man before renouncing the group. Carlson opted for a more straightforward hit, arguing that Biden’s age makes him unfit for office. For Fox, these monologues are what you talk about when you don’t have anything else to talk about, like when a comedian runs out of material and starts making jokes about the weather.
Biden is so old, Carlson insisted, that he is literally “losing his ability to speak.” He’s so old, Carlson added, that not even “Botox and hair plugs and face-lifts” can fix it. In fact, his age is such a problem, Carlson concluded, that it’s a sign of America succumbing to “the trans agenda and climate theology.” Huh? According to Fox’s most watched prime-time host, the U.S. is violating the laws of nature by having such an ancient President, and once a country starts violating the laws of nature, well, then anything can happen.
The rest of the week, the two hosts continued to expose the dangerous perfidy of America’s élites. On Wednesday night, Hannity offered a long rant about Hillary Clinton and her e-mails and the “abject failure” of the F.B.I. director, Christopher Wray. Carlson delivered riffs on the “Democratic donors” who created the opioid crisis, on all the money that is going to citizens of Ukraine instead of to citizens of Ohio, on Chicago’s “historically disastrous” Democratic mayor, and on the Wall Street Journal’s report that the Department of Energy now thinks, with low confidence, that COVID-19 may in fact have originated in a Chinese lab. This last item, according to Carlson, was both major news and complete vindication—for him. Anyone who did not believe in this theory, Carlson said, was “complicit in the greatest crime in history.”
Just as notable was what the Fox hosts did not mention. Donald Trump, for years the hero of their nightly shows and even now the front-runner for the 2024 Republican nomination, was barely acknowledged. Nor was the week’s biggest news concerning Fox itself: the revelations in two extraordinary recent legal filings by Dominion Voting Systems about the cynical lengths to which Carlson, Hannity, and others at Fox went to promote Trump’s false claims that he had won the 2020 election—despite knowing that he had lost. They did so, according to evidence obtained by Dominion during discovery in its $1.6-billion defamation lawsuit against Fox, because Fox’s Trump-loving viewers refused to abandon their defeated President, preferring to go along with his “rigged election” delusions rather than admit his defeat.
Fox has publicly denied the charges and complained in statements that Dominion’s attorneys “cherry-picked” quotes to make their case. But neither those claims nor the fact that Carlson and Hannity did not mention these revelations make them any less revelatory. There comes a point in many a contentious divorce proceeding where the sordid private details of the relationship are aired in public. It appears that we have now reached that point, courtesy of Dominion, in the long, unhappy breakup of the marriage of convenience between Trump and the network that both enabled and shaped his dysfunctional Presidency.
The astonishing disclosures in Dominion’s legal briefs are almost too numerous to mention, and are all the more remarkable because they are based on internal e-mails, sworn testimony, and text messages of the Fox brass themselves, including even Rupert Murdoch’s correspondence with his son. Monday’s nearly two-hundred-page filing is a better Washington read than most political thrillers. Read it for yourself.
What I found most notable about the lawsuit’s disclosures is what they said about Fox executives’ fear of their own audience—and unabashed willingness to lie to that audience if that is what it took to keep their loyalty. The Dominion filing confirmed that in the aftermath of the 2020 election, Murdoch had finally decided to abandon Trump. “We want to make Trump a non person,” the tycoon e-mailed a former Fox executive, two days after the January 6, 2021, insurrection. But Murdoch could not quite execute the pivot he wanted. “We need to be careful about pissing off the viewers,” Fox News’ C.E.O., Suzanne Scott, had warned Murdoch, on January 5th. “We have to lead our viewers which is not as easy as it might seem,” Murdoch told his son Lachlan, in another e-mail. Asked why he allowed the network to air ads from the election-conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell, Murdoch said in a deposition that the reason was “not red or blue. It is green.” Money talks..
Trump’s predictably hysterical response to the Dominion revelations suggest that he has not given up on Murdoch yet. He’s just really, really angry at him. Like a rejected spouse, he wants to share his grievances—in ALL CAPS—with the world. Perhaps, in typically Trumpian fashion, he still thinks he might be able to bully his way back into the relationship. “If Rupert Murdoch honestly believes that the Presidential Election of 2020, despite MASSIVE amounts of proof to the contrary, was not Rigged & Stollen, then he & his group of MAGA Hating Globalist RINOS should get out of the News Business as soon as possible, because they are aiding & abetting the DESTRUCTION OF AMERICA with FAKE NEWS,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform after Monday’s filing.
The silence of his longtime defenders on Fox seemed especially to hurt Trump. He, too, it seemed, has been listening night after night as the network’s anchors bashed away at Joe Biden—and never even mentioned Donald Trump. The former President blamed Murdoch. “Certain BRAVE & PATRIOTIC FoxNews Hosts, who he scorns and ridicules, got it right,” Trump wrote. “He got it wrong. THEY SHOULD BE ADMIRED & PRAISED, NOT REBUKED & FORSAKEN!!!”
The Dominion lawsuit against Fox News is not merely a historical exercise in accountability. (Though, it should be noted that, more than two years after Trump’s campaign to overturn the 2020 election, Fox News has a real chance of facing more sanctions for its role in that tragedy than Trump himself.) That’s because Trump remains the Republican front-runner for 2024. What will happen if he runs and wins the Republican nomination without Fox’s imprimatur? Will the network once again fall in line, as it did in 2016, cheerleading for a G.O.P. victory even after it nominated a candidate Murdoch did not want? Or will the divorce proceed? The internal machinations revealed in the Dominion case hardly suggest a network willing to stand its ground.
On Sunday, Fox released a new poll of Republicans that, consistent with other recent national surveys, found Trump leading the Republican field over Fox’s new favorite, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Fox, though, did not heavily promote its findings. Trump was plenty upset about that, too. Murdoch’s network, while enforcing what appears to be a de-facto ban on Trump these days, has made a remarkable effort to puff up his would-be rival, putting DeSantis on air hundreds of times since Trump left office and touting him as “the future of the party,” as one Fox producer breathlessly pitched DeSantis’s spokesperson in a 2021 e-mail obtained by the Tampa Bay Tribune. DeSantis’s new, campaign-style book is also getting robust promotion this week across the Murdoch media empire. “FoxNews is promoting Ron DeSanctus so hard and so much that there’s not much time left for Real News,” Trump lamented on Sunday after the poll’s release failed to produce the coverage he hoped.
Trump’s whining aside, however, it’s notable how Trump continues to dominate the Republican Presidential field—even without extensive coverage by the country’s dominant conservative news source. The crisis that Fox faced in the disastrous aftermath of the 2020 election is the same one that the national Republican Party faces today. Read the Fox e-mails and texts. They show a calculating, morally bereft Republican establishment desperate to escape Trump, fully aware that he is a charlatan and liar and probably crazy, but not sure that it can win without him. Pretending he doesn’t exist is the current strategy. Does anyone really think that will work? ♦