The Trump administration’s once-cozy relationship with Fox News has taken a sharp turn of late. While the president was known to call into various Fox shows such as Fox & Friends and Hannity while subjecting himself to interviews on other network shows only rarely, he has since soured on Fox News.
Anchor Chris Wallace drew the president’s ire during the first presidential debate, as Trump slammed the moderator , saying, “I guess I’m debating you, not him, but that’s okay, I’m not surprised,” after being repeatedly reminded of the rules of the debate.
President Trump’s suddenly-rocky relationship took another dive after the election, when Fox News’ decision desk projected former VP Joe Biden would win the state of Arizona, not Trump, resulting in a flurry of calls between Trump administration figures and their contacts at Fox News to get the call changed, according to The Guardian . The decision desk stood by its call.
In the days since the election, the gap between Fox News’ coverage of the Trump administration and its messaging has only grown.
The latest example came Monday, when President Trump’s press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, acting in her “personal capacity,” took the podium to speak at a Trump campaign event at the Republican National Committee headquarters.
At the event, McEnany repeated baseless claims — made by the Trump campaign since all the major news networks announced that Joe Biden would be the next president on Saturday — that Democrats were somehow “stealing” the election.
However, McEnany offered up no new evidence to back up her claims, prompting Fox News anchor Neil Cavuto to cut off the network’s coverage of the event.
As McEnany made her assertions of election fraud, Cavuto interrupted, saying, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, — I just think we have to be very clear. She’s charging the other side as welcoming fraud and welcoming illegal voting. Unless she has more details to back that up, I can’t in good countenance continue to show this.”
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Cavuto did pledge to the Fox News audience that the coverage would resume should McEnany produce any evidence to back up her claims.
“I want to make sure that maybe they do have something to back that up, but that’s an explosive charge to make, that the other side is effectively rigging and cheating,” Cavuto continued. “If she does bring proof of that, of course we’ll take you back. So far she has started saying, right at the outset – ‘welcoming fraud, welcoming illegal voting’. Not so fast.”
According to The Washington Post , Cavuto made the decision to cut away himself. Fox News did not get back to the event.
It’s not the first time Cavuto has interrupted a Trump spokesperson, either.
In May, Cavuto pushed back on the president’s endorsement of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19, telling his viewers not to take the drug on Trump’s recommendation. “I cannot stress that enough,” he said. “This. Will. Kill. You.”
Cavuto also fact-checked the president’s claims about China paying for tariffs in 2019, informing viewers, “China isn’t paying these tariffs, you are. You know, indirectly and sometimes directly…Not the Chinese government or China in particular.”
In response, Trump has repeatedly tweeted about Cavuto having bad ratings and suggested Fox News fire him, The Daily Beast reported .
Despite the lack of evidence of widespread election fraud, the Trump campaign has filed several lawsuits.
Among others, the Trump campaign filed suit in federal court in Pennsylvania alleging that the state’s mail-in voting system did not have enough oversight and sought an emergency injunction to prevent the state from certifying its results.
Trump campaign lawsuits have already been considered and rejected in both Georgia and Michigan.
President Trump’s allies in Congress have backed up his right to pursue legal challenges to the election results.
Notably, Georgia’s two senators, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, urged the state’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to resign over Georgia’s election, again without citing any specific evidence of wrongdoing. In a statement , Raffensperger denied the call for his resignation, saying, “the voters of Georgia hired me, and the voters will be the one to fire me.”
Georgia’s Lt. Governor, Geoff Duncan, told CNN that neither Raffensperger nor the state’s attorney general have reported any credible incidents of fraud or disenfranchisement.
