When Pandering Becomes Policy
How Fox and the GOP went from catering to crazy to becoming crazy.
Over the past few weeks, we have been given an incredible inside view of one of the defining stories of our era. It is common knowledge now that former President Donald Trump and his sympathizers in the MAGA media universe were pushing the false, conspiratorial narrative that Trump had actually won the 2020 election. We all know about Rudy Giuliani’s comedy-inducing press conference right after the networks (including Fox) had called the election for now President Joe Biden that was held outside Four Seasons Total Landscaping near a sex shop and a crematorium. We all know by now the unfounded lawsuits that the Trump campaign had pushed to overturn the election. We know the conspiracy theories that have been debunked by such liberal, woke luminaries ranging from Trump’s Attorney General Bill Barr to his campaign manager Bill Stepien. We know about Trump’s personal vendetta to overturn the election from key members of his staff ranging from his Chief of Staff’s aide Cassidy Hutchinson to his deputy press secretary Sarah Matthews. And we know, most importantly, what these efforts to distort the truth and promote disinformation at all costs led to. The January 6th insurrection did not happen in a vacuum - it was the culmination of lies fed by the former President.
But those lies in my estimation could not have been as powerful to such a large number of Americans without their amplification from America’s most popular news network. And in the last several weeks, we have seen that the Fox News Channel operation knew what they were putting out to their millions of viewers was false. We know that much so far and I’ll explore and lay out those lies in this piece.
But this piece is more than that. I speak as a former Fox viewer back when yes it was insane but not nearly as insane as it is today. I speak as someone who used to believe that Fox was truly “fair and balanced” while the rest of the media establishment was too biased toward the Left and was unfair to the conservative values I held dear. As a former Fox News-watching loyal Republican, I’d argue that Fox’s evolution from the conservative alternative to the liberal mainstream media to an unabashed propaganda arm of the Republican Party that was willing to sacrifice truth at the altar of one deeply flawed man and take a blowtorch to our democracy is reflective of the Republican Party’s devolution from merely pandering to crazy to being consumed by crazy.
After not watching Fox for a while, a few years ago in the middle of the Trump Presidency, I turned on Sean Hannity’s primetime show and watched for about 15 minutes before I could no longer stomach the sophomoric and simplistic views Hannity was putting out there. But then I thought to myself, “You know, if I watched this all day, every day, I’d be buying into what Hannity is selling.” For whatever faults one can find with Fox, their production is top notch and they are skilled assassins in the art of political manipulation. They have convinced a wide swath of mostly white, older, middle class and working class Americans that their America is under assault. The threat may change but the message is the same: others, mostly elites (many of whom are not actual elites), are out to get you. This is of course, told by some of the most elite folks in our society. But the message resonates.
It captured me for years before Donald Trump came along, who, by the way, Fox folks did not like at all at first. Remember when Trump made his mark in the first debate in 2015 by pushing back against former Fox star Megyn Kelly and when he skipped the Fox debate right before the Iowa Caucus? Donald Trump’s acceptance in the party showed me at first that conservative values and ideas were no longer valued. Trump is not a conservative policy mind and any conservative policy he did as President was done as an “own” to liberals and to keep the GOP elites in his camp. What conservatism became about was fear and grievance, not hope and uplift. It was no longer about a sensible and positive platform to address the nation’s actual problems. It was about “owning the libs” and inducing “liberal tears.” It was about stoking cultural grievance and phony outrages that cannot actually be resolved in a free society by political actors.
I’ll critique myself here: I proudly engaged in the “liberal tears” rhetoric before Trump came along. And I regret that. Right after Trump emerged on the scene, I had convinced myself that the Right and the GOP had just then become crazy and devoid of substantive policy solutions. But really the crazy talk had been peddled by the talk radio crowd and Fox for years and had radicalized the party. I was just too blinded to see it. I always thought that the crazies in the party who were all about fear, bigotry, and conspiracy theories were a distinct minority within the GOP. And Fox hosts surely believed it too. They would cater to them to get them to support the GOP for other reasons - for the tax cuts, for the hawkish foreign policy, and for defeating the Left and the Democrats. I did the same in my campaign volunteering and social media posts about politics at that time.
Surely, I bought into some of the beliefs about many Democrats - that they had an agenda against my faith, that they were against our Constitution, that they were for handouts not hand-ups. More importantly, I believed that Republicans were the true defenders of moral character and our Constitution and the ones who wanted to limit the size and scope of government. Of course, the Trump era reduced this perception to a lie. I went from a believer to a skeptic. It is the Trumpian Republican Party that has shed any devotion to the Constitution and limited government in order to adopt an authoritarian impulse devoted to rewarding its devotees and punishing its enemies.
Fox, like the Republican Party that I devoted countless hours to promoting, catered to the crazies - the ones who believed that former President Barack Obama was out to take guns away from responsible gun owners, the ones who believed that Obama wasn’t really a citizen, the ones who believed Obama was a racist - against white people, the ones who believed that the Affordable Care Act was more than maybe a misguided liberal policy experiment but was really a way to sit Granny before a death panel. These went beyond good and honest policy critiques to a politics of resentment and a tale told to millions of gullible folks that others (the first black president, big cities, the educated elites) were out to destroy your (white, middle class) culture.
And Fox News in 2015 and 2016 shouldn’t have been shocked that the person they brought in for interview after interview for years became the nominee of the party they helped shape. And to be honest, I shouldn’t have been surprised either. The rise of Trumpism was not a mere accident or aberration. It was the culmination of a culture that had been built by Fox and aided by GOP politicians who went on that network and either didn’t push back against the crazy or catered to it for votes.
It took me a while to come to the truth that Trump’s rise was the ultimate outcome of a party and a movement that had slowly become a 21st century version of the Know Nothing Party of the pre-Civil war era. That party abhorred intellectualism, hated immigrants, and was willing to cut America off from the rest of the world. This nativism has never worked but it always was a part of the American political culture. And it had taken over the Party of Lincoln.
The party elites had seemingly been able to contain it while still catering to its impulses. But by 2015-16, a candidate had emerged that most appealed to the party’s id, the true heart of the base that was uninterested in constructive policy except to go after the enemies Fox and talk radio told them to hate. That man was Donald Trump.
Fox, long before the 2020 election and even before Trump rode down the escalator in June 2015 to begin his presidential campaign, had juiced up its viewers with an unhealthy stew of grievance, fear, and outright lies. Fox had been a huge part of building the base of voters who would propel Trump to the Republican nomination and then to the White House.
Many within Fox weren’t fans of Trump, but their viewers, having been primed by the same phony outrages and simplistic solutions to complex policy problems, were all in. And so, Fox, like the GOP, having fed the monster, were consumed by it. Trump’s base had a stranglehold over Fox and the GOP. It was Trump’s network and Trump’s party. Catering to them no matter the cost became Fox’s overarching business model.
When that goal is your only goal and you have adopted the Trumpian tactic of lying to those he said he loved - the “poorly educated”, then you will see an “ends justify the means” strategy as an acceptable ethic by which you run your business. It’s the same morally dubious path the GOP took after Trump had been elected President. I personally know many folks who hated Trump and hoped he lose in November 2016 but as soon as he was elected signed up to be his biggest defenders. I’m not here to debate that choice they made but to make it clear that these choices were made.
Paul Ryan, then the Speaker of the House, who personally despised Trump’s antics and some of his policies, went along with Trump and refused to stand up to him while in office. He did it as a Faustian bargain - to get the tax cuts and deregulatory policies he wanted. Trump gave him that and gave Mitch McConnell his judges. But all along they empowered Trump and strengthened his hold on the party. Ryan is no longer in elected office. McConnell is still there, but is much less popular with the GOP base than Trump is.
That brings us to Fox’s actions from November 2020 through January 2021, that fraught period between Election Night and the January 6th attack on the Capitol. As the AP notes, “To millions of viewers, Fox News hosts gave allies of former President Donald Trump a platform to champion false claims that he lost the 2020 election because of voter fraud. To one another, they expressed doubts about the claims and mocked the people making them.” The Dominion filings in their lawsuit against Fox News reveal that after the network had called the state of Arizona for Joe Biden, the Trump team was furious with Fox (they knew what it meant for the election’s ultimate outcome); we know that the senior executives within the network knew their viewers were livid with them. Even Tucker Carlson said that the viewers were being irrational and said this about Trump: “What Trump's good at is destroying things. He's the undisputed world champion of that. He could easily destroy us if we play it wrong.”
Fox wanted to go down the right path. They called the election for Biden on the morning of November 7th. But they were losing viewers and losing them fast. Their audience had been warped so much that even Fox wasn’t good enough for them. Fox wasn’t pushing the conspiracy theories they craved and they had betrayed their cause by calling the election for Biden.
Then the tide within Fox turned toward bringing on the conspiracy theorists. They know it was all lies but they needed the viewers. They made their own Faustian bargain. They were afraid of losing viewers to MAGA Land’s favorite new channel, Newsmax. When one of Fox’s reporters issued a tweet correcting disinformation from Trump and promoted by Sean Hannity about the Dominion voting machines, Hannity began reaching out to Fox leadership to target this reporter. This was despite Hannity knowing Biden had legitimately won the election. Carlson texted Hannity saying that he wanted her fired because of his lament that “the stock price is down.” This was because as Fox’s SVP of Primetime Programming and Analytics Ron Mitchell noted in an internal memo regarding Newsmax’s programming: “This type of conspiratorial reporting might be exactly what the disgruntled FNC viewer is looking for.”
We now know what Carlson really thought of the woman he brought on his show to spew her conspiracy theories about the election. He told Laura Ingraham that Sidney Powell is “a nut, you said at the outset. It totally wrecked my weekend. Wow I had to try to make the WH disavow her, which they obviously should have done long before." And we know that Suzanne Scott, the Fox CEO, knew that Biden had been legitimately elected President on November 7th, before she encouraged Fox hosts to bring on folks who questioned the election’s legitimacy over false narratives and never correct them.
Here’s what is even more galling: the folks like Hannity, Carlson, and Ingraham who engaged in this duplicitous behavior are still at Fox, but the man who made the correct calls on the Election, Chris Stirewalt, was fired just months later for telling the truth.
The number of statements about what Fox did according to the Dominion lawsuit filings could fill a novel. But I think we get the point: Fox lied to its viewers for profit; they risked the downfall of our democracy to not lose viewers to Newsmax.
This is mirrored in what the GOP politicians and the GOP base did after the 2020 election. Yes, there were definitely some Republican members of the House and Senate that put out statements declaring Joe Biden to be the legitimately elected President. But a majority of the House GOP caucus signed on to a frivolous lawsuit aimed at overturning election results in key swing states that delivered the Presidency to Biden. They winked and nodded to the conspiracy theorists even though they surely didn’t believe them. Years of practice of catering to their base and lying to the public in the process hadn’t been erased. It was done on overdrive - all the way to the deadly hours of January 6th, 2021 and beyond.
Even after the attacks of January 6th by the Trump-led mob that nearly cost some of them their lives, an overwhelming majority of House Republicans voted to overturn the election results in key swing states. They couldn’t anger the folks they had lied to. Kevin McCarthy, in his quest to become the House Speaker, jetted down to Mar-a-Lago to kiss Trump’s ring. Weeks earlier, he had condemned Trump as responsible for the 1/6 attack. And now to this day, most Republican voters still believe that Joe Biden is not the legitimately elected President. And in 2022 primaries, they by and large chose election deniers and other kooks as candidates. Most of them lost in the 2022 general election. But the base still favors them.
There’s a lesson here- when you cater to crazy and forget about any principle but power, you will go to the lowest of lows. Now the disappointing election for the GOP in 2022 should have been a lesson that this bargain has a consequence.
But McCarthy in his new role as Speaker has given key positions on important committees to the kooks - to Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz and Jim Jordan. As part of the many compromises he made with the MAGA members in order to become Speaker, he agreed to give over footage of the 1/6 attacks exclusively to Tucker Carlson. Carlson is still spreading conspiracy theories about the attack even though he described Trump privately as a “demonic force” on that day.
Fox’s turn and the GOP’s turn aren’t all that different. They are mirror images of the other. When most of your base trusts only Fox to tell them the truth about political and cultural news and Fox has yet to hold themselves accountable for lying to them, you as the GOP have laid a trap for yourself. You made it much more difficult to tell the truth to your base. You gave control of your own destiny as a party, a movement, and a media arm over to the crazy. And they control you as a result.
When you cater to crazy, you lead yourself slowly but surely down the path of being consumed by the crazy.