Donald Trump’s team was fed questions prior to Fox News town hall in 2024, according to a new book
Former president also reportedly considered Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo to be his running mate
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Your support makes all the difference.The Trump campaign team was handed questions in advance of a Fox News town hall in Iowa in January last year, according to a new book.
Politico’s Alex Isenstadt writes in Revenge: The Inside Story of Trump’s Return to Power that many of the president-elect’s advisers did not want him to show up to the event moderated by Brett Baier and Matha MacCallum. They were “still peeved at Fox, whose coverage they continued to find antagonistic, and did not want the former president to do the prime time event,” according to exerpts shared by CNN.
“But Trump had a good relationship with Baier—they were golf buddies—and wanted to do a sit-down,” Isentadt added.
Both Baier and MacCallum were known to press the former president harder than other Fox hosts. Trump aides told the former president that they would push him to distance himself from political violence and ask about any potential plans for retribution.
The former president wasn’t “taking prep for the telecast seriously. He’d basically be winging it,” but was then allegedly given a huge helping hand.
“About thirty minutes before the town hall was due to start, a senior aide started getting text messages from a person on the inside at Fox. Holy s***, the team thought,” Isenstadt writes. “They were images of all the questions Trump would be asked and the planned follow-ups, down to the exact wording. Jackpot. This was like a student getting a peek at the test before the exam started.”
The Fox News hosts “planned to ask Trump if he would divest from his businesses if he won, and whether the party was taking a risk nominating him given his indictments.”
They would also ask if he would “disavow political violence” and if his administration “would be focused on retribution.”
“Trump was pissed,” according to Isenstadt. The former president thought the questions were “like attacks designed to put him on the defensive.” The Trump team began working on possible answers.
Isenstadt told CNN that the reporting was based on “multiple people with direct knowledge” of what took place.
Meanwhile, a Fox spokesperson told The Independent that “While we do not have any evidence of this occurring, and Alex Isenstadt has conveniently refused to release the images for fact checking, we take these matters very seriously and plan to investigate should there prove to be a breach within the network.”
The spokesperson also said that it would be inaccurate to call Baier and Trump “golf buddies” as they have only played together a small number of times during the last decade. Beyond that, Isenstadt noted to Fox News that the alleged source of the leaked questions to the Trump team was not one of the anchors. A source familiar with the inner workings of the network also told The Independent that “if there was a breach, it was not from Bret or Martha or the top editorial levels of the network and there is a sophisticated and extensive digital footprint of all editorial material.”
If the Trump team did indeed obtain the questions ahead of time, though, it would contrast starkly with the president-elect’s criticism of this issue in the past. During the 2016 campaign, for instance, Trump repeatedly took aim at former Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Donna Brazile giving Hillary Clinton a heads-up on a question at a CNN primary debate. Brazile, who was a CNN commentator at the time, resigned from the network over the revelation. Trump, meanwhile, insisted he would have been given“the electric chair” if he had received debate questions ahead of time.
Additionally, in the lead-up to last September’s ABC News debate with Kamala Harris, Trump cited Brazile’s past ABC employment to suggest that the network would be feeding Harris the questions beforehand. “Do you think ABC will give Kamala every question beforehand? We already know her liberal media cronies would do ANYTHING to keep her from getting embarrassed the same way Biden was!” Trump blared in a fundraising email.
Steven Cheung, the incoming White House communications director, told the network that “President Trump was the most accessible and transparent candidate in American history, and it’s a big reason why he won in historic fashion.”
In another part of the book, Isenstadt writes that Trump considered choosing Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo to be his running mate before he was talked out of the idea by aides.
Bartiromo, a favorite of Trump’s, was a staunch defender of the former president and had taken part in “numerous softball interviews with him over the years, including his first on-air sit-down following the 2020 election, for which she had given his team a heads-up on her questions ahead of time,” Isenstadt writes.
He adds that Trump “was dead serious about Bartiromo and was making the case for her during the flight to Butler (Pennsylvania). She was great with the big-donor Wall Street types and she knew how to do TV, Trump told his team.”
But they had no time to vet Bartiromo as they had done with other candidates, and incoming White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles ended the discussion.
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