MAGA has a new target in its sights after Maria Bartiromo was abruptly fired by Fox News.
Supporters of President Donald Trump are placing blame for her axing on former House Speaker Paul Ryan, a Republican on Fox’s Board of Directors who privately disagreed with the conspiracy-spewing Bartiromo in the aftermath of the 2020 election.
MAGA influencer “Gunther Engelman” threatened to abandon Fox News in a Monday morning post to his 1.7 million followers—calling out Ryan by name.
“A lot of us do not need a flowchart to see where this points,” he said. “Blame Paul Ryan. The boardroom donor-class Republicans have spent years sanding the edge off Fox, and viewers keep paying the price. If the network keeps sidelining voices who tell the truth about Trump, it should not act shocked when the audience walks.”
Engelman is not alone in feeling this way.
“Paul Ryan is our enemy!” read one reply from a Trump supporter.
The MAGA influencer Pamela Hensley has alleged that Ryan is attempting to silence Bartiromo through the 2028 presidential election.
“Fox didn’t fire Maria Bartiromo,” she said. “They pulled her off the air and will keep paying her through 2029, silencing her until after the 2028 election. Paul Ryan strikes again.”
Fox did not respond to a request for comment about MAGA criticism of Ryan, who has been on the company’s board since March 2019—two months after he left Congress.
Ryan, 56, and Bartiromo, 58, have been at odds in the past. CNN’s Reliable Sources reported in 2023, during Fox’s legal battle with Dominion Voting Systems, that Ryan “repeatedly warned” the network’s owners, the Murdoch family, to “stop allowing the spread of election lies.”
Rupert Murdoch admitted in a deposition that some of Fox’s top hosts, including Bartiromo, pushed election lies to his audience. He acknowledged the issues with his network’s coverage in an email response to Ryan, writing that even Sean Hannity had “been privately disgusted by Trump for weeks, but was scared to lose viewers.”
Ryan has been highly critical of Trump. He said in 2023 that “Trump’s not a conservative,” but rather “a populist, authoritarian narcissist.”
“So, historically speaking, all of his tendencies are basically where narcissism takes him, which is whatever makes him popular, make him feel good at any given moment,” Ryan said.
Bartiromo was among the president’s most loyal backers in the media through the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol and his subsequent comeback in 2024. Multiple reports claim that her loyalty ultimately cost her her job, with Fox’s final straw being her leaking internal network guidance to the White House.
Sources told Status that Bartiromo informed the White House about a directive from the network not to give credence to Trump’s baseless claims about the 2020 election in his July primetime speech. She reportedly even shared text messages from Fox executives, with White House senior trade adviser Peter Navarro bragging to Puck that Bartiromo sent him a screenshot of the edict.
Bartiromo has not spoken since her firing, but has threatened Fox with possible legal action through her attorney, Bryan Freedman, who maintains that she remains an employee of the network.
“The irresponsible reports that have been published stating that Maria Bartiromo was fired or is no longer an employee of Fox are absolutely and unequivocally false,” he told the Daily Beast in a statement. “Make no mistake, we have the receipts and witnesses, and they will come out whether through the courthouse or otherwise.”
As of Monday morning, those “receipts” are nowhere to be found.
