When Donald Trump tapped a Fox News host this week to run the mighty US defense department, even Pete Hegseth’s colleagues at the rightwing media outlet were taken aback.
“What the heck – can you believe it?” wondered Jesse Watters on his primetime show on Tuesday.
“Taken right from this very couch!” exclaimed Hegseth’s fellow Fox & Friends talker Brian Kilmeade on Wednesday.
This bemused enthusiasm was for public, on-air consumption.
But in private, some had a dimmer view, according to Brian Stelter, author of two books about the Murdoch-controlled network.
“You’re telling me Pete is going to oversee 2 million employees?” clucked one Fox host to Stelter; as the CNN media analyst noted, it’s actually almost three.
In Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth, Stelter reported that Hegseth – a decorated veteran who served with the Minnesota national guard in Iraq and Afghanistan – consistently played to a singularly important viewer, checking his phone during commercial breaks in case Trump had commented on the show.
And while Hegseth has directed a non-profit veterans’ advocacy group, nothing suggests he’s ready to run the world’s largest military. More alarmingly, he has encouraged Trump to pardon military personnel accused of war crimes, argued against women serving in the armed forces, and expressed the merit in a “preemptive strike” against North Korea.
Although extreme, this development isn’t exactly breaking new ground.
The Fox-to-Trump revolving door has been spinning for years. During his first term, Trump hired at least 20 officials who had previously worked at or contributed to Fox, making some of them cabinet secretaries and high-ranking White House aides.
Remember, for instance, Richard Grenell, who joined Fox in 2009 and was still working there when he was nominated to be Trump’s ambassador to Germany in 2017? A few years later, Grenell was named Trump’s acting director of national intelligence. Or Ben Carson, a Fox contributor for years before becoming Trump’s secretary of housing and urban development?
One particularly memorable case was Bill Shine, a high-ranking Fox executive, who left the network after allegedly helping to cover up the company’s culture of sexual harassment that brought down his buddy, co-founder Roger Ailes.
No problem, though. Shine got a soft landing at the Trump White House as deputy chief of staff for communications, and later moved to Trump’s re-election campaign.
It’s hard to jump from Fox to a job at a serious news organization. But, if you want to work at the Trump White House, there are few better résumé-builders.
“The president’s worldview is shaped by the hours of Fox programming he watches each day, leading him to treat Fox employment as an important credential in hiring,” Matt Gertz, senior fellow at Media Matters for America, wrote in 2019.
In the past few days, he also tapped the Fox News contributor Tom Homan as his “border czar”. Homan joined Fox shortly after his retirement as acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement director in 2018, during Trump’s first term.
The door spins and spins again.
Going for the trifecta, Trump named Mike Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas and former host of a weekly Fox show, as his preferred ambassador to Israel.
Can a glorified perch for Sean Hannity – long the Trump whisperer – be far behind? And what about Tucker Carlson, despite being fired by the network last year?
The Trump/Fox fit is a natural; one thing they share is a truth problem. Trump, of course, lies with fluid impunity.
And Fox – though it insists on calling itself a news organization – has helped to spread lies and disinformation, including about the supposedly “rigged” 2020 election that Trump still insists he won. No matter that Fox had to pay Dominion Voting Systems nearly $800m in a court settlement after they sued for defamation.
“Instead of promoting lies and conspiracy theories from outlets like Fox News and the online fever swamps,” wrote Oliver Darcy in his Status newsletter, “these media personalities will now be doing so with the US government’s resources and backing.”
There could be no Trump as president without Fox. And Fox’s market capitalization is now approaching $20bn.
Whatever they’re doing is working for mutual benefit, if not for US democracy.
With this week’s developments, any line of separation – if it ever existed – is being erased. The two are nearly a single organism.
Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture
