Fox News Colludes with MAGA to Undermine Next AWOL-Trump Republican Debate
Team DeSantis and his supporters need to draw some lines in the sand.
Purely in terms of self-interest, few major organizations have played the Trump era worse than Fox News Channel. Its Beltway-friendly stable of daytime hard-news personalities and firing of Tucker Carlson have convinced MAGA and its sympathizers that Fox is out to get them (bolstered in no small part by Donald Trump’s recurring tirades about Paul Ryan supposedly pulling the network’s strings); meanwhile its primetime commentary lineup is overwhelmingly comprised of Trump sycophants and populist panderers that turn off not just swamp types but serious conservatives desperate for sane, independent voices. It’s almost impressive how Fox found a formula that delivers the worst of both worlds and satisfies nobody but the mushy middle of the conservative coalition.
Or rather, was impressive. On Tuesday, Fox made a big lurch toward the Trumpier side of its audience by announcing that on January 10, Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum will co-host a live town hall event with Trump in Des Moines. What the press release left out is that the event will be occurring at the same time as the next Republican presidential primary debate that Trump is chickening out of, and that Fox is helping him get away with his wanton disregard for one of the most basic obligations of a candidate for public office, and with a brazen attempt to pull viewers away from the candidates he’s not man enough to share a stage with.
More than a few people have registered their displeasure with Fox on Twitter, and Baier felt the need to answer several of them, including on suspicions that the Trump campaign rigged the questioning:
“Questions will be from Martha and me and from various Iowa voters in the crowd. And we will fact check real time like we do in interviews. Thanks”
“The former President will not have the questions in advance or any knowledge of the questions from me, Martha or from citizens in the crowd - who will be a mix of Iowa voters. And I can confirm that I approached the Trump campaign about doing a town hall in Iowa. They had turned down the debate (and all debates) and wanted to do it then.”
“No and no - they are not choosing topics nor are they choosing the audience. Thanks for watching.”
That sounds good, but the quality of the questioning remains to be seen (which we’ll return to below). For now, let’s note that according to Baier, it was the Trump campaign that wanted the event to conflict with the debate—and Baier apparently saw no problem with that. If he objected at all (which is doubtful), he doesn’t say. Nor does he even attempt to justify agreeing to the date. The closest he comes is this reply to the comment that Fox “definitely should not be enabling Trump to skip debates”:
“If he said definitively he wouldn’t do the debates (ours included) - should he not then answer tough questions from us - and Iowa voters?”
Note that the best Baier can do is justify holding the event, while completely ignoring the timing.
He also responded to doubts about the strength of his questioning, to which he cited his hour-long interview with the 45th president in June (part 1, part 2). As I covered for LifeSiteNews at the time, Baier did confront Trump with a few questions he never has to worry about getting from grifters like Tucker Carlson or Glenn Beck. But he ultimately let Trump off the hook in the name of moving on to different subjects, which has long been the dominant style of “serious” Fox interviews. Trump later whined about how “nasty it was,” but the man whines about anything less than outright slobbering—and according to Baier himself Trump initially admitted it was “tough but fair.”
Of course, it’s one thing to complain about unfairness—that’s a significant percentage of the conservative infotainment complex’s output, after all—and quite another to offer solutions for what to do about it.
If I was advising Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign (not that they listen to me), I would strongly urge him to call on CNN to reschedule the debate for another night, and declare that he won’t be there if they stick with January 10. CNN would likely be receptive to not having it on a night where its biggest competitor would be pulling likely viewers away, and DeSantis’s overall solid performances in the debates so far have had no discernible impact on the race, meaning he would have far more to gain by taking an attention-grabbing stand against Fox’s apparent collusion with MAGA (which should also include an ultimatum that the campaign will consider Fox a hostile network if it goes through with the event).
It's been objected that Nikki Haley may not agree since she may still be angling to rejoin Trump, but that’s no real problem—throwing down a gauntlet would force Haley to decide whether or not to react like someone who’s actually trying to defeat Trump. She and DeSantis are the only two candidates besides Trump who have qualified, so there is no debate without Ron, and the only people who might possibly care whether or not DeSantis pulls out would be the people who’ve been paying attention to the previous debates, know he showed up for all of them, and know what his issue with this one is.
Whatever Team DeSantis decides, the rest of us (who haven’t done so already) can do our part quickly and easily: turn off Fox, cancel whatever associated subscriptions we might have, and let them know why.