Fox News cleans up another Trump mess
After the debate, the network worked to keep the MAGA faithful in a state of blissful ignorance.
The reviews were almost universally savage after Donald Trump’s debate debacle, in which the former president ranted about migrants eating pets while getting his clock cleaned by an opponent he had insisted was “stupid.” Even the Wall Street Journal’s right-wing editorialists thought that Vice President Kamala Harris “won the debate because she came in with a strategy to taunt and goad Mr. Trump into diving down rabbit holes of personal grievance and vanity,” while Karl Rove added in a column that the night “was a train wreck for him, far worse than anything Team Trump could have imagined.”
And then, in a universe all its own, was Fox News.
“All the memorable lines were from Donald Trump,” host Jesse Watters proclaimed after the debate ended. (He specifically cited Trump’s “eating the pets” line.) “He just had some great knockouts,” Watters added. “And so this race just got tighter.”
“That’s probably true,” anchor Bret Baier agreed.
An ebullient Harris campaign immediately called for another debate. (Trump, who once called for debates “ANYTIME, ANYWHERE, ANYPLACE,” eventually refused the challenge after much hemming and hawing.) But Harris’s gesture of confidence prompted Fox News’s Laura Ingraham to argue: “They don’t think she won. They don’t think she’s in a position to win this race.”
Sean Hannity interviewed Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who claimed Trump notched “a big win.”
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said Trump had “the best closing in presidential debate history.”
Trump himself joined Hannity in the spin room. “I think it was my best debate ever,” he said.
And that was just within the first 75 minutes after the debate. The next morning, Trump was back, on “Fox & Friends.” “I won the debate by a lot,” he said, and “every single poll last night had me winning like 90-10.” The hosts did not contradict him. At the same time, Trump argued that ABC News should lose its broadcasting license, because “they had a rigged show with somebody that maybe even had the answers.”
On Wednesday afternoon, Watters returned to the airwaves. “I found [Harris] evasive, found her unlikable, preachy and, instinctually, I don’t know that’s going to play with men,” he said. “The signature moments that you see on the internet after this, she didn’t have any. … Trump had them all.”
On Thursday afternoon, conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt announced on Fox that Trump “is in the process of winning the debate” because “a debate isn’t over in a day” and “upon further review, the American public has decided that debate was rigged.”
It was a case study in how the dominant “news” organ of the right cleans up Trump’s messes. When President Joe Biden had his disastrous debate, liberal outlets and commentators panned the performance and ultimately helped to force him out of the race. But when Trump had what was, objectively, a bad night, Fox News led a movement to claim it didn’t happen.
Sixty-seven million viewers saw an out-of-control Trump claim he won the 2020 election, complain that those who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, were “treated so badly,” argue about his crowd size, assert that he had read that Harris “was not Black” and that Biden “hates her,” admit that he still only has “concepts of a plan” on health care, make odd statements such as “I got involved with the Taliban” and “she wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison,” and utter this ludicrous slander about Haitian migrants: “They’re eating the dogs, the people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating — they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”
Fox News then told its viewers (14 million people watched the simulcast on the network) that they had not seen what they just saw. Unless I missed it, viewers also weren’t told the other news of the night, that Taylor Swift had endorsed Harris after the debate.
Often, after my weekly cataloguing of Trump’s madness and mayhem, readers ask why his followers don’t see that he is off his rocker. This is why. Fox News sane-washes him — and it sets the tone for the entire MAGA social media ecosystem.
The main disagreement on the network seemed to be between those who believed the debate had been a triumph for Trump and those who believed the two ABC News moderators denied the GOP nominee his rightful triumph.
“Tonight’s debate was three on one,” proposed Hannity.
“Yes, it was a three-on-one debate,” chorused Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
“Three against one,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (S.C.).
“It was three on one,” said Lara Trump.
“We had three against one,” said Trump himself.
During a commercial break came, in at least certain markets, an ad from right-wing billionaire Richard Uihlein’s super-PAC blaming Harris for “murders, rapes, attacks on children” and for being “a complete failure.” It was difficult to distinguish the news coverage from the attack ad.
Fox News host Sean Hannity in the spin room before the presidential debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris on Tuesday in Philadelphia. (Matt Rourke/AP)
If Fox News viewers were listening carefully, they could have heard snippets of reality. Brit Hume acknowledged that “Trump had a bad night” and that Harris was “a different person from the absolute dunderhead so many of us thought she was during her conduct as vice president.” And a token Democrat, former congressman Harold Ford, politely disagreed with the general tenor of things: “I just think she won.”
But after 15 minutes of this post-debate “analysis,” Hannity took over the anchor chair and ended all dissent. He said Harris had presented nothing but “pre-rehearsed, memorized platitudes” and “lots of kind of weird faces and expressions.” He then went after the “left-wing moderators. The biggest loser of the night, ABC, Disney, Bob Iger’s network. It was a disgrace.” Hannity was upset that the moderators had not brought up the vice president’s position on “banning plastic straws,” among other things.
“It’s an embarrassment to journalism,” said Rubio.
“The ABC moderators were complicit in her running a completely fact free debate performance,” submitted Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.).
Trump running mate JD Vance, also joining Hannity, agreed that the moderators “did a terrible job” while “President Trump did a good job.”
Hannity was upset that Harris “wasn’t fact-checked.” (Maybe this was because Harris hadn’t claimed migrants were eating people’s pets.)
Hannity decided to “dip in” to post-debate remarks by Harris to supporters but cut that off after 31 seconds, just as she was about to give her assessment of the debate. Then he tried to broadcast an unannounced appearance by Trump in the spin room. But this didn’t go well, either, because, while it was difficult to hear Trump, reporters’ questions were loud and clear:
Why didn’t you look at her?
Did she get under your skin?
Why not let the performance speak for itself?
Why not have a second debate?
Trump made his way over to Hannity for some gentler treatment. The former president informed his interviewer that he had “won the debate” and “we’re getting great reviews.” As evidence, he cited viewer surveys from right-wing sites. “We looked at one poll, it was 92 to 7,” he said. “We looked at another, 86 to 3.”
“Wow,” Hannity replied.
At one point, Trump started to veer into repeating his claims that migrants are eating pets — and Hannity cut him off.
“Your people are calling for you to roll,” he said.
The next morning on Fox News, Trump was still maintaining that “every single poll had us winning by a lot, despite the fact that it was an unfair debate obviously.”
And the Fox coverage continued to support that view. “It was a disaster for her last night. … Donald Trump did far better. … Who the hell do they think they are fact-checking?” House Speaker Mike Johnson (La.), on Fox Business Network, cited the same “polls” that Trump did, saying, “he clearly prevailed.”
Vance, in another interview with Fox, said voters “are not going to be influenced by a billionaire celebrity who I think is fundamentally disconnected from the interests and the problems of most Americans.” (He was talking not about his boss but about Taylor Swift.)
In one lonely corner of Fox, host Neil Cavuto tried to preserve an island of sanity: “He says … he won the debate and all the polls show that he won the debate. I haven’t seen a single one show that,” he remarked to Trump surrogate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
“They’re polls that you see on the internet and a lot of them probably have statistical problems with them,” Kennedy acknowledged. “I would suspect that the polling over the next week is going to show probably a slight drop in his support, particularly among independents.”
Trump responded as though Cavuto had just eaten his pet. “Neil Cavuto, Fox’s Lowest Rated Anchor, is one of the WORST on Television,” he posted on social media.
Of course, Trump doesn’t have a real pet. Fox News is his pet. And if he’s to keep the MAGA faithful in a state of blissful ignorance, he’s going to need Fox to roll over — again and again.
Opinion by Dana Milbank
Dana Milbank is an opinion columnist for The Washington Post. He sketches the foolish, the fallacious and the felonious in politics. His latest book, "Fools on the Hill: The Hooligans, Saboteurs, Conspiracy Theories and Dunces who Burned Down the House" (Little, Brown) is out September 24.
