The Fox News/Trump Ororboros

by | Sep 9, 2024 | CNN, Fox News, Outside The Beltway, The New York Times, Washington Post

Yesterday, James reviewed some of the reporting about how former President Trump and Vice President Harris are preparing for this week’s debate . Part of the New York Times reporting James cited has been bouncing around in my brain since then:

“While he respected Ms. Clinton as “smart” and a hard worker, Mr. Trump plainly believes that Ms. Harris is unintelligent, advisers and allies say.”

I don’t think many of our readers will be surprised that Trump thinks poorly of Harris. I suspect that most of those folks will chalk this up to Trump’s long record of racial bigotry and misogyny (in fact, I expect to get a lot of that in comments responding to this post). While I am sure that those characteristics play a role in his assessment, I think there is another significant influence on the former President. After all, if the answer was as simple as misogyny, then why would Trump hold some respect for Hillary Clinton?

One possible explanation for Trump’s view of Clinton is that they had several past in-person interactions before the 2016 Presidential race. Given Trump’s emphasis on forming opinions through direct interaction, it wouldn’t surprise me if those meetings, however limited, shaped his perception of Clinton. The fact that their interactions started in the nineties, when Trump leaned more towards the Democratic party may also influence his assessment.

The debate will be the first time Trump and Harris will be together in a small room . To date, they have never spoken to one another. The closest physical proximity they have previously been in was when Harris attended Trump’s State of the Union address as a Senator. Unlike with Clinton, Trump has no direct interactions to use in building his opinion of Harris. So he is working from second-hand assessments. The question then becomes whose secondhand assessments?

Given Trump’s famous lack of interest in reading , I think it makes sense to assume he’s using other sources of information. Using Occam’s Razor, one of the most likely shapers of his opinion (beyond his advisors) is Fox News. It’s been well established that during his time in office, Trump often watched Fox News. For example, back in 2017, the Washington Post’s Phillip Bump did an analysis of the Former President’s tweeting habits and found :

He has tweeted about the Fox News show 88 times as president, including retweets of its account. Often, though, it’s clear that he’s watching the show because he tweets about what he saw shortly afterward. Both CNN and Matthew Gertz of the liberal group Media Matters have mastered the art of tying Trump’s early-morning tweets to the things he has seen on television. [source ]

During that same period, Bloomberg news also reported that Trump was watching a lot of Fox News :

Long a voracious consumer of cable news, Trump has cut back how much he watches CNN and MSNBC in recent weeks, having sworn off the latter network’s Morning Joe after criticism from its hosts, according to a senior White House aide privy to the president’s viewing habits.Instead, the president now spends hours some mornings watching Fox News, switching occasionally to CNBC for business headlines, along with a daily diet of newspapers and press clippings, said the official, who asked not to be identified discussing private information. On the evenings when he doesn’t have a dinner or briefing, Trump will spend most of his TV-viewing time watching Fox News shows hosted by Bill O’Reilly or Sean Hannity, the aide said. [Bloomberg via The Week ]

PBS also reported in 2019 about the connection between Fox News and the Trump White House . In that report, Jane Meyer was asked to respond to a critical question: Is Trump driving Fox, or is Fox driving Trump?

So, that was one of the things I was hoping to find out, as a reporter, because I couldn’t tell. Who’s driving this train?

And on any given day, it’s very hard to tell. What you will often see is something that’s on Fox then echoed by a tweet from the president. Then Fox is encouraged to do more of it.

It’s kind of — someone said to me, it’s — you could call it either a vicious circle or cycle or a virtuous circle or cycle. It’s a loop. It’s a feedback loop. And somewhere in there, in some ways, among the most important dynamics is the audience, because Fox is trying to capture the audience and make it constantly watch Fox.

And the president is trying to capture the same audience and make them vote for him. This is a segment of the American population. And the way they do it is the same. They try to make that segment of the American population angry.

So, they’re both playing really towards the audience. [source ]

Now that Trump has been out of office for four years, it feels helpful to revisit this question. On the one hand, for a brief period post-Dominion settlement and 2022 elections, Fox News seemed like it was going to distance itself from Trump . For a bit, it seemed like the Murdoch media empire was throwing its weight behind DeSantis. But then DeSantis failed to launch. And, perhaps even worse, Trump demonstrated that Fox News needed him far more than he needed Fox News (even skipping and counterprogramming against the Republican Primary Debate they hosted ).

In the end, like old lovers falling back into past habits, they reconciled and worked through all the drama. Today, the symbiotic relationship is back on, for better or worse. Trump has become a regular fixture on Fox News, regularly calling into Fox and Friends to vent and being interviewed by Fox Hosts, including Sean Hannity and Mark Levin (in an interview in which Trump proclaimed he has every right to interfere in Presidential Elections… cool… cool). Without a doubt, Donald Trump is influencing the direction of Fox News. But regarding that PBS question, what about the reverse?

Call me a Soros-Funded-Anti-Free-Speech-Radical-Leftist-Writer, but it seems to me that Trump’s views on Harris are strongly shaped by Fox News opinion. It’s striking how the view that the Vice President is “not smart” (despite her noted accomplishments and ability to speak coherently on her policies) echoes what our conservative commenters write. More importantly, it tells how much those viewpoints echo the Fox News party line. For example, Fox News programming and guests have recently attacked Harris for having “nothing beyond ‘joy’,” for being “a big fake” , and, of course, being an avowed Bernie Sanders Marxist (except when she is trying to be more MAGA than Trump) .

I think it’s clear to regular readers (or even readers of this post) that I’m not a Trump supporter. I find myself wondering, given his advanced age (he is the oldest candidate to be still running for President), what it means to elect a President so profoundly influenced by right-wing media. Some commenters will ask how this would differ from 2016 to 2020. It seems to this writer that the Former President’s susceptibility to media influence has only grown during the intervening years.