Trump seethes at Fox News for “sidelining” him — but the network is doing him a favor
Not to burst anyone’s bubble, but Fox News is still deeply in the tank for Donald Trump. Trump, who believes he’s never being worshipped as thoroughly as he deserves, disagrees, according to the Daily Beast’s Zachary Petrizzo. Petrizzo, a Salon alum, reports that “Trump’s inner circle has become convinced that Fox News is essentially sidelining the former president by restricting live appearances on the network.”
To be clear, the network is still devoted to licking Trump’s boots. The grievance is over whether Trump is being glorified in the manner he prefers. Fox News still devotes huge amounts of time to Trump rallies, Trump interviews, Trump clips, and Trump imagery. What they don’t give Trump, however, is live, unedited opportunities to ramble on without interruption. Instead, the network has focused on taped and edited interviews. This is perceived, by Trump, as a deprivation of his basic human rights.
“See, I love live television, because they can’t cut you off,” Trump whined at a rally in Iowa last week. Petrizzo also quotes anonymous Trump staffers griping that “they are able to edit his words” and “they love a controlled environment” at Fox News. Donald Trump Jr. is also complaining he’s not been invited on-air in months. Matt Gertz of Media Matters suggests this is likely a reaction to Fox News’s multitude of legal woes. Not only did the network lose a defamation lawsuit to Dominion Voting Systems earlier this year, but they face more such lawsuits in the future. The company simply can’t afford to give Trump carte blanche to lie and defame live on-air.
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Funny to imagine Trump seething over this, but I do have to push back on the assumption that this hurts Trump. On the contrary, I’d argue that Fox News is doing Trump a favor. Trump’s big mouth may have initially been an asset, in that it got him the attention he needed to win the GOP nomination and then the presidency in 2016. But ever since then, Trump’s lack of impulse control has done him more harm than good, both legally and with the voters.
Not that I expect a man who poops in gold toilets to understand the concept “less is more.” But Fox News, I suspect, understands that dialing it back a little helps Trump a lot. Sadly, by cutting off his microphone access, Fox News is doing what they can to save Trump’s skin and his electoral chances.
The hoary old myth that there’s no such thing as bad publicity has hardened into a truism in some liberal circles. No doubt due to their own understandable desire to be exposed to less of Trump’s voice, many folks on the left have come to reflexively assume that “platforming” Trump automatically improves his political standing. Especially on Twitter, there’s been a steady drumbeat of pressure on the press to cover Trump less, on the “ignore him and he goes away” theory.
This is backward, according to Barack Obama’s former White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer. As he pointed out in a recent newsletter, the press has barely covered Trump’s increasingly unhinged and violent rhetoric. The result is that many Americans have simply forgotten how bad Trump is. As long as Trump himself is not talking, GOP propagandists — mainly through outlets like Fox News — can push the narrative that he’s not so bad and that it’s just liberals being “hysterical” to claim otherwise. Especially for swing voters under significant pressure from Trump-loving relatives and neighbors, pushing Trump’s grossness down the memory hole long enough to vote for him is quite alluring.
Trump has crept up in the polls in recent months, to the alarming point where he is outperforming Biden in many of them. That’s likely because he’s been out of office for two and a half years. Most Americans can go days, weeks — even months — without hearing his self-pity-drenched ranting. Without regular reminders that Trump sucks super bad, the rose-colored glasses start to slide up some noses.
A large percentage of Fox News viewers are MAGA weirdoes who can’t get enough of listening to Trump’s rambling lies, but those people were always going to vote for Trump. But those aren’t the only people exposed to Fox’s propaganda. A lot of maybe-Trump voters absorb Fox talking points without deliberately watching the network, as well. It’s on in waiting areas at the doctor’s or airport. Fox clips get shared on social media. They hear people in their lives talking about it as if it were the news. What happens on Fox gets into people’s heads, even if they don’t mean for it to.
I suspect Fox executives know those people will be more easily convinced to vote for Trump if they can be bamboozled into remembering him as merely eccentric, instead of the sociopathic dissembler he actually is. This means running a lot of interference so that voters, especially those who are only half paying attention, don’t hear or see much of Trump being himself. With enough heavy editing, he can sound coherent and almost like a regular politician, which is what a small but crucial number of voters need to believe in order to take their chances voting Trump again.
And, of course, by tightly controlling Trump’s public image, Fox News is doing its level best to protect him legally. These days, Trump can’t open his mouth without undermining his legal defense in the 4 separate criminal trials he’s facing. Just this week, for instance, he claimed Sidney Powell, the lawyer most closely identified with Trump’s attack on the 2020 election, “WAS NOT MY ATTORNEY, AND NEVER WAS” after she took an eleventh-hour plea deal with prosecutors in Georgia. Within minutes, this claim was immediately debunked by journalists posting clips of Trump claiming otherwise in 2020.
Funny for us, but delicious for prosecutors, who can use that as one of many, many pieces of evidence that Trump lies easily and knowingly about everything. It also helps gut his supposed “advice of counsel” defense strategy. If Trump tries to argue his attempted coup was just him following his lawyer’s advice, then it’s a bad look, claiming she wasn’t actually his lawyer.
Trump himself occasionally shows glimmers of understanding that it’s easier for swing voters to feel warmly towards him if he’s not talking. Initially, he tried to hijack his civil fraud trial in New York City that started earlier this month. He showed up even though he didn’t have to, and raced towards the cameras so he could bellyache at length about the proceedings. But the spectacle did him no favors, instead serving as a reminder he’s as annoying as he is dishonest. He has mostly stayed away since then. Same story with the GOP primary debates. Trump’s team knows he’ll only make news by saying gross stuff that reminds fence-sitting voters what they don’t like about him, so he’s stayed away.
It’s not just swing voters in play, either. There’s the people who will never vote for Trump. If he can convince a large enough percentage of his detractors to stay at home, he can win. The best way to do that is get those voters lulled into complacency. If Trump gave open-ended, live interviews on Fox News, there’s a high risk he says something incredibly offensive and/or stupid that gets covered outside of Fox. That, in turn, would remind those voters why it’s so important to keep him out of the White House. It may cut against every fiber of his narcissistic being, but Trump’s best bet is that this is a boring, low turnout election. Because as much as his devout followers love his big mouth, most people hate it. When he’s talking, he’s reminding people who hate him to vote.
With any potential Republican primary rivals flaming out, Fox News knows their only path to the GOP regaining the White House goes through Trump. Even if some at Fox management hate Trump for pushing them to to say false things on-air that got them sued, they know the score: It’s him or Biden. So we can safely assume that whatever they’re doing for Trump is about helping Trump over the finish line. People like Trump more the less they hear from him, and Fox News knows it. They may be cutting back on how much he can blather on-air, but in the end, that’s mainly to his benefit.