The Trump family is making the ridiculous claim that right-wing propaganda machine Fox News is not friendly to conservatives, with Donald Trump Jr. appearing on Newsmax’s “The Chris Salcedo Show” Monday to make his case.
“They allow [Democrats] to spew their narrative,” Trump Jr. said, accusing the network of chasing “clickbait” instead of promoting the conservative message. “I don’t watch it anymore because it is so ridiculous. They try so hard to be unbiased that they’re actually biased towards conservatives at this point.”
On Sunday his father made a similar complaint.
“Why is FoxNews and Peter Doocy putting on Democrat Senator Mark Kelly to talk about, totally unabated or challenged, Healthcare? The FAKE SPIN is so bad for Republicans that it is hard to believe that we WIN,” President Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social.
He demanded that Fox “should either get on board, or get off board” and said that the network spins news “in the Democrats’ direction” while suppressing polls that “show me at 65% in popularity.”
There are no reputable polls showing that level of support for Trump.
President Donald Trump speaks during a Fox News Town Hall in Iowa on Jan. 10, 2024.
Their complaints about Fox are part of a trend that has gone on for years. Trump is addicted to watching Fox, from which he has appointed multiple talking heads to his administration and taken major policy cues.
For its part, Newsmax is more than happy to amplify the Trump family’s complaints about the rival right-wing network, especially since Newsmax recently sued Fox.
But the whining about Fox doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Fox effectively turned Trump from a tabloid TV personality into a political figure, propping him up for more than a decade now. Fox turns massive Trump failures into successes, insisting that widely ridiculed Trump moments—like his recent speech to the United Nations—were a big win.
Fox and Trump are joined at the hip, regardless of the family’s complaints.
But Trump demands complete subservience from the press, with his administration using its power to attack the First Amendment rights of dissenters like Jimmy Kimmel. Now he’s bristling at the loyalists at Fox for deviating from worshipful coverage for a second.
The notion that Fox is hostile toward conservatives is absurd, as a cursory glance at more than 29 years of propaganda programming will show. But Trump needs his ego to be stroked every second of every day—and even Fox gets an earful when that doesn’t happen.
