Fox News is tuning out Trump’s rallies. Here’s what that means
By Brian Stelter, CNN
(CNN) — President Donald Trump keeps holding midterm election rallies, and Fox News keeps choosing not to air the rallies live.
This programming decision has huge political and cultural significance. Fox News, America’s most-watched cable channel, has been one of Trump’s top ways to reach voters for more than a decade.
Trump is perturbed about it. But Fox evidently doesn’t think his speeches are worth showing in full right now, which speaks volumes about this political moment.
The implication: Fox agrees with the Republican candidates and strategists who are privately fretting about Trump hurting their chances in the midterms.
Fox’s response is to basically turn him off. Perhaps Fox patriarch Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan believe the network’s opinion hosts are better messengers for the GOP than the president himself, especially now, as Trump’s approval ratings are hitting record lows.
“We talk so much about how Trump is the ‘executive producer in chief’ but often forget that even the most popular shows tend to run out of steam after one season too many,” veteran Republican strategist Doug Heye said.
“That’s exactly where we are and why — whether you’re in Lake of the Ozarks or Emmetsburg, Iowa, fewer Trump flags are being flown every day,” Heye added.
Fox isn’t publicly commenting on the matter. But current and former hosts at the network say it’s a freighted calculation.
“This is coming from the top down,” a current Fox host said on condition of anonymity. The host said they didn’t officially know the reasons why, but said the conventional wisdom at the network right now is that “Trump doesn’t rate anymore.”
Fox executives and hosts are famously attuned to the day-by-day television ratings. The audience’s interest in Trump helped wed the candidate and the network back in 2016.
As recently as 2024, in the closing weeks of Trump’s reelection campaign, Trump was a reliable ratings draw for Fox. When Trump held a giant rally at Madison Square Garden, Fox showed the spectacle live, and its audience tripled in that time slot.
But the ratings dynamic is quite different now. When the GOP held a midterm convention show in Dallas, Texas, last month, the ratings needle barely moved when Fox carried Trump’s speeches live.
Trump, always sensitive to perceptions about popularity, has since resorted to misleading people about how well those speeches performed.
A strain in the alliance?
The treatment of Trump’s rallies is a sensitive subject for Fox. A person familiar with the network’s inner workings said “there is no top-down order” to avoid Trump’s rallies, and described the chatter as “uninformed speculation.”
Last month Fox faced controversy for removing longtime anchor and Trump ally Maria Bartiromo, who had shared internal network guidance with Trump aide Peter Navarro, who then passed it along to the White House.
The directive told Fox Business shows to avoid covering a prime-time Trump speech full of unverified claims about election vulnerabilities. According to Navarro, the note said, “Hi – We don’t want to promote it or push to the speech at all. We don’t want to do 2020 election segments at all Thurs or Friday.”
The flagship Fox News channel did air the prime-time speech in July, but barely followed up on it afterward.
Now the rally coverage, or lack thereof, is coming under close examination. Last weekend Trump noticed that his midterm rallies weren’t getting the attention he craves from the network he covets.
“Sad to see that Fox & Friends (Sunday) is not covering our packed house and incredibly enthusiastic (beyond!) Rally that took place in Ohio last night, or the ones in Alabama, Texas, or Oklahoma over the past two days,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
Refuting news reports of empty seats at some events, Trump insisted “they were all sold out,” and blamed an “old undercurrent” at Fox for ignoring him.
“Our people want to see our Rallies, and reports on our Rallies, on FoxNews, or they will very quickly stop watching (like I am doing right now!),” he wrote.
Who needs who more?
Trump has made similar threats before, but without much success. Fox largely tuned out Trump in 2021 and 2022, but the network’s audience stayed loyal.
Trump “needs Fox way more than Fox needs him,” Mediaite co-managing editor Tom Durante, who formerly worked at Fox News and its sister property, the New York Post, wrote earlier this week.
Durante pointed out that despite Trump’s frustration about the lack of rally coverage, he has continued to watch Fox, as evidenced by his recent posts and comments complaining about Democrats appearing on the network.
“Fox tried this act once before, and almost went out of business,” Trump wrote in one of the posts.
Fox’s business remains so strong that it makes other media operators envious. Trump has tried to prop up other outlets catering to conservative viewers, like Newsmax and One America News, but those channels have relatively small audiences.
Charles Herring, the president of One America News, said his channel is carrying all of Trump’s midterm rallies — “generally commercial-free, typical of our live coverage of events,” he noted.
Fox, on the other hand, has kept the commercials and commentary flowing, but without the rallies that helped brand Trump’s political movement.
On Wednesday evening, Laura Ingraham began her show with a live report from a correspondent at Trump’s rally in San Antonio, Texas. But once Trump took the stage, there was no further mention of it. Later hours of programming didn’t mention the rally at all.
The correspondent, Brooke Taylor, noted that Trump is on the defensive in Texas: “This is a state he won by nearly 14 points just two years ago, and now he’s finding himself back here in Texas defending this state and keeping it red. I mean, hard to believe those words are even coming out of my mouth, right?”
Then Ingraham moved on to an interview with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.
Fox did live-stream the rally online, but for the president, not getting attention on the flagship channel is undoubtedly a slight.
On Thursday morning, the San Antonio rally only merited a couple of brief mentions on “Fox & Friends.”
An innocent explanation might involve editorial judgment: A stemwinder Trump rally, full of repetitive and predictable lines, is not inherently newsworthy. Fox has lots of other material to broadcast, including a rare sit-down interview with Jeff Bezos on Wednesday.
A more cynical explanation might involve the political calculations that Fox has made for decades.
As Durante put it, Fox was around long before Trump “became a political candidate. And they’ll be there long after he’s out of office.”
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