Rupert reads the polls
Trump has been improving in the polls in the last few weeks so guess what?
Donald Trump’s reported “soft ban” from Fox News is at an end, and he’s getting the band back together for the 2024 Republican presidential primary.
Trump will appear on prime-time host Sean Hannity’s show next Monday, the network announced on Wednesday. The interview will mark Trump’s first Fox appearance since September 2022, according to the Media Matters database. Fox weekend host Mark Levin let slip on his radio show the day before that he will also interview Trump the following Sunday.
Trump’s return to the network that served as his personal propaganda organ during his presidency follows a stormy month that led some observers to question whether the Fox-Trump relationship had suffered an irrevocable rupture.
Filings in Dominion Voting System’s $1.6 billion lawsuit against Fox revealed in late February that Rupert Murdoch, Fox’s co-founder and the head of its parent company, had said in a deposition that he never believed Trump’s claims that the 2020 election had been stolen from him and privately bashed the then-president as “increasingly mad.”
Trump responded to those revelations with a series of posts on his Truth Social platform in which he described Fox as a “RINO network” and Murdoch as a “MAGA Hating Globalist RINO,” and called on Murdoch to “apologize to his viewers and readers for his ridiculous defense of the 2020 Presidential Election.”
Meanwhile, members of Trump’s orbit complained to Semafor that he had been hit with a “soft ban” from Fox, and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a potential Republican candidate for president and network favorite, received more weekly mentions than Trump for the first time this year as Fox personalities touted his new book and his nascent campaign.
It’s been obvious for a while that Fox was making a bit of a bet on DeSantis. But the latest polls show that may not be the ticket with the Fox audience. And we know what that means.