Is the Trump-Fox News love affair over?

FBI’s raid of Mar-a-Lago leads to tough questions for Trump supporters, even on his previous favourite news channel, writes John Bowden

Sean Hannity interviewing Donald Trump in Las Vegas in September 2018 (Getty Images)

As Donald Trump deals with the fallout from the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago, one area of the media to which he usually turns for comfort has become another avenue for criticism.

Fox News, whose pro-Trump opinion hosts dominate the network’s primetime lineup, was not the first place many would expect to hear condemnations of Mr Trump’s actions, particularly while much of the GOP is involved in spinning the president’s defence.

But that’s exactly what happened in the immediate wake of the raid when Steve Scalise, the GOP House of Representatives whip, went on Fox & Friends probably expecting his baseless accusations about the FBI to go unchallenged.

“I’m just curious: whatever happened to the Republican Party backing the blue?” asked Fox’s Steve Doocy, setting Mr Scalise up for a brutal takedown of his nonsense claim that there were “rogue” elements in the FBI responsible for the raid. Mr Doocy has been one of the most vocal defenders of the FBI and federal law enforcement on Fox in the days since the raid.

“Frankly, we are very strong supporters of law enforcement, and it concerns everybody if you see some agents go rogue,” Mr Scalise responded.

That was enough for Mr Doocy, who shot back incredulously: “Who went rogue, Steve? Who went rogue? They were following a search warrant!”

The message, delivered on what is undoubtedly Donald Trump’s favourite daytime Fox programme, was clear: The conservative channels would not, at least in Mr Doocy’s case, be treating this story with kid gloves. But it raises the question: is this a permanent break-up between Mr Trump and the network that, for all his past criticism, clearly remains his top choice for news content more than six years after he exploded onto the political scene?

The question almost seems silly, given that it has been asked amid nearly every Trump scandal that has arisen since 2016. But there are signs pointing to at least some movement on the matter. The Independent reached out to Fox News for comment for this article.

Supporting that argument is the fact that Mr Doocy’s critical look at the defences offered by Mr Trump and his allies was far from rare. While there have been predictable brush-offs of the story from Trump’s fiercest loyalists at the network, such as Jesse Watters and Mark Levin, both the network’s news and opinion sides have taken turns picking apart the ex-president’s claims and charges of political weaponisation of the Department of Justice in recent days.

Shannon Bream did so on her programme, too, which happened to be the first news-side show on Fox to air after the story broke. She said: “This doesn’t just happen overnight. Any DoJ or FBI, any administration, is going to want to be exceptionally careful. The FBI has clearly made, and this attorney general has made, the calculation that they think they have enough [evidence] to move forward and risk the political optics of this.”

Jonathan Turley, a Fox legal analyst, offered another sobering take on 9 August, the morning after the raid.

“Obviously, if there’s classified material present at Mar-a-Lago, [the FBI] have every right to collect it. And the former president has no right to retain it,” he said plainly.

The former president and longtime Fox fan is clearly taking some notice, posting only select clips of criticism from his most ardent supporters on the network during his daily Truth Social diatribes. He has also attacked the channel’s coverage in at least one statement, accusing its hosts of inviting on “perverts” after an appearance by members of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project.

But his attacks have not risen to the level of the vitriol he hurled at the network earlier this summer when he was unhappy with coverage of his poll numbers — at the time he accused Fox & Friends, its flagship morning show, of going to the “dark side”.

Employees on the network’s news side have long insisted that their journalism doesn’t serve to boost or scapegoat Mr Trump or any politician (though the channel’s critics strongly dispute that). The nuanced coverage from its reporters, analysts and even some on the opinion side such as Mr Doocy, they argue, show a network that has more independence than it is given credit for having.

One current news-side producer at the network, who preferred to not use their name, put it like this: “On the news side we’ve always taken incoming [fire] from Trump [just] as we take incoming from the Biden White House.

“A lot of the other networks went so far against [Trump] that any favourable reporting by Fox looks like we are cozying up to him,” they argued.

Matthew Gertz of Media Matters for America, a left-leaning media watchdog organisation, disagreed with the idea that any sudden change in tone of Fox’s coverage represented anything more than a temporary break from the network’s favourite political figure.

He pointed to an example this week on the network, where Fox’s chyrons (the electronically generated captions) – even on the news side – denounced president Biden’s decision to cancel up to $10,000 in student loan debt for most borrowers (and more for Pell Grant recipients) as a “handout”.

“That’s not something you would see, say, when president Trump was providing money to farmers who were hurt by his various trade actions, or anything like that. There’s a very, deliberate, obvious thumb on the scale,” he said.

Mr Gertz suggested that the reaction to the Mar-a-Lago raid mirrored the shock that overtook much of the DC media sphere, but would give way to more of the network’s friendlier coverage as that feeling dissipated.

“They always tend to fall back in line after a little bit,” he said. “They always come home to Trump, or they have thus far.”

The question that some are beginning to ask instead, now, is whether Donald Trump is beginning to accept a new reality that has developed within the DC media sphere: that he cannot rely on being treated like an “outsider” or anomaly by any part of the mainstream media any more, Fox included.

That’s something that critics and supporters of the network’s coverage agree on, even if they clash over the quality of Fox’s coverage overall.

“For Fox and for all the networks, for everybody, he’s a different candidate now,” former Fox political editor Chris Stirewalt, who has become a critic of his former network since his dismissal, told The Independent of the presumed Trump 2024 campaign.

“In 2016, Donald Trump was a ratings machine,” he continued, adding that audiences had “seen” everything that Mr Trump has to offer, neutralising the shock value that worked to his advantage in 2016.

This might be the reasonable end of the media’s long-ridiculed search for signs of fractures in the Trump-Fox relationship. Instead of a flashy, permanent “break-up” between Donald Trump and Fox News, the end of what some have derided as a love affair might evolve into something much more boring: a slow, meandering switch to treating Mr Trump just like any other politician, instead of the outlier he has been throughout his political career up to this point.

Mr Trump seems to be slowly losing his own past good feelings for the network as well. He rarely compliments the network’s hosts and ratings, as he used to do frequently, and still clearly blames the channel for backing away from its coverage of the 2020 election and his claims of fraud, even though the network’s favourable play of those claims was enough to earn the ire of Dominion Voting System’s attorneys. Fox continues to battle a lawsuit from Dominion and another company stemming from the aftermath of the 2020 election and statements made on the network, and has called the demand for damages outrageous.

“We are confident we will prevail as freedom of the press is foundational to our democracy and must be protected, in addition to the damages claims being outrageous, unsupported and not rooted in sound financial analysis, serving as nothing more than a flagrant attempt to deter our journalists from doing their jobs,” Fox News Media said in a statement.

But the hesitation to platform concpiracists like Mike Lindell have left the ex-president feeling betrayed.

“Fox News is no longer Fox News,” Mr Trump complained in May of this year, after activist and conspiracist Dinesh D’Souza denounced the network for refusing to book him to discuss his election-fraud “documentary”.

But even if Donald Trump runs in 2024, that’s a long way away. And his team clearly does not have the ability to pressure the network, or even attempt to do so, as it did in 2020 when he was an active candidate for office and had a full campaign team including nationally recognised surrogates at his back.

Mr Trump being out of power certainly puts the network’s journalists in an easier position, because they can enjoy a much more traditional adversarial relationship with the Biden White House and its comms team.

The unnamed Fox producer who spoke to The Independent indicated as much in their interview.

Joe Biden “loves us when we report on vaccines, and tosses in an ‘even Fox News’ line [here and there], but hates us when we report on his bad poll numbers”, said the producer. “That’s the place we want to be: where no one is happy.”