The symbiotic relationship between Fox News and President-elect Donald Trump nearly reached new levels during the most recent presidential campaign, according to a new book by Politico political reporter Alex Isenstadt.
While the president-elect has already appointed or nominated at least a dozen Fox News personalities to his upcoming administration, Isenstadt reports in his forthcoming book Revenge: The Inside Story of Trump’s Return to Power that Trump seriously considered making one his favorite hosts his running mate.
Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo, a longtime MAGA sycophant who conducted the first post-election TV interview with Trump following his 2020 election loss, was in the running for the vice presidential slot just weeks ahead of the Republican National Convention, according to Isenstadt.
In fact, Trump was “dead serious about Bartiromo and was making the case for her during the flight to Butler (Pennsylvania),” Isenstadt wrote. It was the Butler campaign rally where Trump was the target of an assassination attempt in July of last year.
“She was great with the big-donor Wall Street types and she knew how to do TV, Trump told his team,” the Politico reporter added.
Notably, Bartiromo was one of the most prominent defenders of Trump’s false assertions that the 2020 election was “stolen” from him due to “rigged” voting machines. Her amplification of these baseless election conspiracy theories eventually resulted in Fox News paying out $787.5 million to settle a defamation lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems.
Eventually, the president-elect’s campaign team convinced him to move on as there “was no time to vet Bartiromo,” and they had spent months looking at other candidates. In the end, campaign chief of staff Susie Wiles brought the conversation to an end.
Incoming White House communications director Steven Cheung didn’t directly address the book’s claim in a statement. “Vice President-elect Vance was the perfect choice to be President Trump’s running mate,” he said. “There is nobody who is a better and stronger defender of the America First agenda, and he will continue to be a leader of the movement for years to come.”
As the book also noted, Bartiromo was long a “Trump favorite” due to her obsequiousness and fierce defense of all things MAGA. On top of that, she has conducted “numerous softball interviews with him over the years, including his first on-air sit-down following the 2020 election, for which she had given his team a heads-up on her questions ahead of time.”
Indeed, it was reported in 2022 that Bartiromo sent text messages to then-Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows to lay out what she would ask Trump during a November 2020 interview. The texts were made public during Congress’ probe of the January 6 Capitol attack.
Elsewhere in Isenstadt’s book, he states that Trump’s team was given the questions asked during a Fox News town hall roughly a half-hour before the event took place last January.
“About thirty minutes before the town hall was due to start, a senior aide started getting text messages from a person on the inside at Fox,” the book states. “Holy s–t, the team thought. They were images of all the questions Trump would be asked and the planned follow-ups, down to the exact wording. Jackpot. This was like a student getting a peek at the test before the exam started.”
Trump was reportedly “p*ssed” about some of the questions moderators Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum planned to ask him, such as whether he planned to divest from his businesses and if he would “disavow political violence” if he won. According to the book, the team “workshopped answers” with the questions in hand just moments before Trump took the stage.
“While we do not have any evidence of this occurring, and Alex Isenstadt has conveniently refused to release the images for fact checking, we take these matters very seriously and plan to investigate should there prove to be a breach within the network,” a Fox News spokesperson told The Independent.
Additionally, a source familiar with the inner workings of the network said that “if there was a breach, it was not from Bret or Martha or the top editorial levels of the network and there is a sophisticated and extensive digital footprint of all editorial material.”
