In a precedent-setting move, Fox News will announce on Wednesday that the president’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump will host her own weekend show, which will debut later this month.
The New York Times first broke the news.
While the incestuous nature between the conservative cable giant and Donald Trump’s White House is no secret, as nearly 20 former Fox News employees were tapped to be part of the president’s new administration, there is really no criterion for a relative of a sitting president to be hosting a cable news show. That is, until now.
My View with Lara Trump will debut on February 22 and air every Saturday night at 9 p.m. ET. The network describes the program as a mix of analysis and interviews with prominent political figures. It will be focused on “the return of common sense to all corners of American life,” a recurring theme the Trump administration has echoed. The current occupant of that time slot, Fox & Friends host Brian Kilmeade, will move his weekend show to Sundays at 10 p.m.
Trump, who is married to the president’s son Eric, had been floated as a potential replacement for the Florida Senate seat vacated by Marco Rubio after her father-in-law tapped him to be secretary of state, saying in December that she “would seriously consider” running for senator. However, according to the Times, Trump dropped that notion after engaging in discussions with Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott about taking on a network role.
“I do have a big announcement that I’m excited to share in January, so, stay tuned,” Trump said when she dropped out of consideration for Runio’s Senate seat.
This isn’t Trump’s first time working for the MAGA channel. Following former President Joe Biden’s victory, she joined Fox News as an on-air contributor in March 2021 and remained with the network until the end of 2022, which coincided with the president jumping into the race. “Fox News is a much different place now than it was just a short time ago, but the audience loved Lara, her insight and vision—and so does the Trump Family!” the president lamented in December 2022 when his daughter-in-law left the network.
While she would later host a right-wing podcast and flirt with a singing career, Trump was eventually urged by her father-in-law to run for a leadership position at the Republican National Committee last year and was elected as co-chair, a position she left after the presidential election.
“Lara was a total professional and a natural when she was with us years ago,” Scott told the Times on Wednesday about the hiring. “She is very talented and is a strong, effective communicator with great potential as a host.”
There have been other instances of television networks hiring presidential progeny for on-air roles, but never while their parents were then currently serving in the White House. For instance, Chelsea Clinton was a special correspondent for NBC News from 2011 to 2014, which was more than a decade after her father Bill Clinton was president and years before her mother Hillary ran for the White House. (Though she was at NBC while her mom was secretary of state.) Jenna Bush Hager, meanwhile, joined NBC’s Today show a few months after her father George W. Bush wrapped up his second term.
Lara Trump’s return to Fox News comes as the network is enjoying record-setting ratings following the election, which has seen the right-wing channel dominate its cable news competition amid the reemergence of a MAGA administration. Additionally, it also shows that whatever hard feelings there were between the president and Fox News before the election is almost certainly buried in the past.
Following the president’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results and the January 6 Capitol riots, Fox News founder Rupert Murdoch repeatedly attempted to pivot from Trump to a new GOP standard-bearer, throwing his and his media apparatus’ support behind Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley and Glenn Youngkin as possible 2024 presidential hopefuls. Furthermore, the network’s promotion of Trump’s election fraud conspiracy theories resulted in the Murdochs paying out $787.5 million to settle a defamation lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems, who accused Fox News of trumpeting election lies about the company to boost sagging ratings after Trump’s loss.
Much of the president’s post-insurrection period was spent raging at Fox News and Murdoch for showing insufficient obedience to him and backing away from his baseless claims that the 2020 election had been “rigged” and “stolen” from him. At one point, the president was subject to a “soft ban” by the network ahead of the network’s Dominion trial, not appearing for months on Fox airwaves, and his son Don Jr. griped that he wasn’t getting invited for guest spots. At the same time, other GOP presidential hopefuls were given the “red carpet” treatment.
But those days are long gone, as Murdoch was not only a guest at last month’s inauguration but was spotted in the Oval Office earlier this week as the president signed executive orders. Beyond that, several former Fox News hosts and commentators have been given Cabinet-level positions in the new administration.
