Trump is expected to announce a third run for the presidency on Tuesday, while DeSantis this week handed Republicans one of the most sweeping statewide victories in Florida in recent memory.
During his time in the White House, Trump could count on Fox and its top hosts for near-constant coverage and partisan endorsement.
But there have been signs of a shift away from Trump at Fox for months, and the network’s praise for DeSantis leading up to and following his landslide re-election victory has raised questions about who he might throw his weight behind in 2024.
“When Rupert Murdoch speaks, people listen. So what happens on Fox matters a lot, especially for the politics of the Republican Party,” said Darrell West, vice president for governance studies at the Brookings Institution. “They have a direct pipeline to the grassroots, so how they feel about Trump, how they feel about the other candidates will matter a lot.”
DeSantis’ landslide victory in Florida got heavy coverage on Fox this week, with hosts and guests citing it as a bright spot and cause for optimism for Republicans moving forward.
Separately, several Trump-backed candidates lost key races, raising questions about whether it’s time for the Republican party to move away from Trump.
Trump’s attacks on DeSandis and Virginia Gov. Glen Youngin have not gone down well with many Republicans. Both DeSantis and Youngkin are considered potential Trump opponents in a 2024 contest.
“Trump may be ready to play dirty to win the GOP nomination in 2024. If he does, he will not only reinforce the disdain with which many in his own party view him today, but will once again burnish Republican chances to defeat the Democrats,” he wrote. Columnist Liz Peek in an article published on FoxNews.com this week. “Hopefully, the millions of Americans who supported Trump in 2016 and again in 2020 will begin to see that his time has passed. If they like his policies, they should put their faith in Ron DeSantis, who has never lost a campaign and emerged as the big winner in this midterm election.”
Most of Fox’s hosts have so far sidestepped the “Trump or DeSantis” question buzzing in Republican circles.
“There are 72 million people in this country who make up this movement. It’s a conservative movement and it’s not tied to any one person,” Kayleigh McEnany, Trump’s former White House press secretary and now a regular Fox pundit, said Thursday. “This time, these 72 million people, they will decide where their home is, they will decide. No expert is going to say it’s Trump, it’s De Sandys.”
Fox’s influential prime-time hosts, each of whom draws an audience of millions nightly, did not specifically blame Trump for the GOP’s losses in the 2022 midterms, but spent time applauding DeSantis’ resounding victory in Florida.
Tucker Carlson, the network’s weekly anchor, on Wednesday night repeated a quote from an interview he had months ago with DeSandis, saying he “thought it was relevant” to his victory this week.
“Many others say Donald Trump is the reason the Republicans didn’t do as well as they thought. This is a more complicated question. The truth is, we can’t see the whole picture this early,” Carlson said during his show. “The truth is that Trump has always been a mixed blessing politically. The downsides are interspersed with the upsides, but in this case it’s certainly not the sole cause of anything.”
In a recent interview with The Hill conducted before this week’s election, Laura Ingraham, a well-known pro-Trump commentator on Fox, deflected a question about Trump vs. DeSantis, saying the future of the GOP will be about populism in general.
She echoed that sentiment on her first post-election show this week, but also offered a subtle jab at the former president.
“The populist movement is about ideas. It’s not about one person. If voters conclude that you’re putting your ego or your grudge above what’s good for the country, they’re going to look elsewhere, period,” Ingraham said Wednesday.
Criticism of Trump and embrace of DeSantis was less subtle in some Rupert Murdoch-owned media entities.
“What will the Democrats do when Donald Trump is not around to lose the election? We have to ask ourselves why on Tuesday Democrats again succeeded in making the former president the centerpiece of the campaign, and Mr. Trump helped them do it,” the Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote in an op-ed this week that called Trump “ the biggest loser » of the interim terms of 2022.
The morning after his Florida victory, the New York Post, another right-wing Murdoch-owned tabloid, ran a photo of DeSantis on its cover with the screaming headline “DEFUTURE.”
Trump’s relationship with the Murdochs became famously frosty toward the end of his presidency, with the former president exploding on Fox News on election night 2020 over Arizona’s relatively early race for President Biden.
The former president directly attacked Murdoch’s media empire and Fox News again this week, protesting its coverage of DeSantis.
“This is just like 2015 and 2016, an onslaught on the media (Synergy!), when Fox News fought me to the hilt until I won, and then they couldn’t have been nicer or more supportive,” wrote Trump on the Truth Social on Thursday. .
A spokesman for News Corp. declined to comment.
Political experts say a war between Trump and De Sandys isn’t all bad for Fox News, even if such a showdown could be dangerous for the Republican Party still fighting for control of Congress.
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“Two conservative candidates fighting over their airwaves is good for ratings, we know that conflict is popular,” said Jennifer Lawless, a politics professor at the University of Virginia. “There’s a chance that Donald Trump could finally remind people what they like — and what they hate — about him as a candidate, and that could affect what happens in the Georgia runoff. … The Republican Party should push this fight at least until January.”
New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, who is known for having a wide range of reliable sources inside Trump’s circle, recently noted that Trump can’t “count on Fox the same way” in 2022.
“I think that, you know, Rupert Murdoch, and I read about it, he was very sick of Trump after November 3, 2020, and he said to a confidant, ‘We’ve got to throw this guy out.’ So I don’t think he can rely on Fox in the same way, and Fox is clearly curious about DeSantis, right?” Haberman said during comments on a recent podcast. “You see enough of it if that primal exists.”
