Donald Trump’s favorite TV show has precisely zero appetite to discuss his bombshell claims this week that the nation’s electoral system is under attack.
The president, 80, dropped his “very big” news on Thursday night, flanked at the White House podium by his intelligence chiefs and top law enforcement goons. He declared that “great damage has been done to our country” by nefarious foreign actors and that U.S. elections have been “left vulnerable to being rigged and stolen.”
His administration has since released a trove of declassified intelligence documents to back up his warnings. Much of the data dump appears to cover threats already known to the public. It has so far failed to substantiate many of his more serious claims.
Fox & Friends, Trump’s most cherished program on the nation’s most prominent pro-Trump network, did not mention those revelations on Friday morning.
Not once.
It’s regular couch—Brian Kilmeade, 62, Ainsley Earhardt, 49, and Lawrence Jones, 33—instead spent the show’s three-hour runtime talking about the war in Iran, air quality across the United States, Texas floods, the FIFA World Cup, and a speech made this week by Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
They then handed over to Dana Perino, host of America’s Newsroom, who similarly failed to mention the president’s bombshell announcement only the evening before.
In fact, the only member of the network to have addressed the president’s claims so far appears to have been its chief political anchor, Bret Baier.
“You just heard him make those claims that electronic voting machines are vulnerable and easily compromised,” Baier, 55, told viewers of Trump’s announcement after the network had aired all 26 minutes of it on Thursday night. “Fox News has not seen that evidence directly yet and is not in a position to evaluate the accuracy of the president’s statements at this time.”
The network’s reluctance to provide Trump with any airtime on this particular issue may have something to do with the fact that they’ve been burned before.
Fox News was forced in 2023 to enter into an astonishing $787.5 million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems, the company that had supplied election equipment across the country for the 2020 election.
The network had aired accusations almost nightly that Dominion rigged Trump’s defeat. A Delaware judge ruled those claims untrue as a matter of law, leaving the jury only to weigh what Fox knew and what it owed.
Discovery from those proceedings revealed that the Fox personalities and staff who put the claims on air didn’t believe them either. Texts and emails showed hosts, producers, and fact-checkers privately deriding Trump’s fraud allegations. Owner Rupert Murdoch, 95, said much the same in his own testimony.
Much of the rest of mainstream U.S. broadcasting has spent the hours since Trump’s Thursday night speech fact-checking the credibility out of his claims. The president has responded by urging that ABC and NBC’s licenses be revoked for refusing to air his speech.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment on this story.
