Is Fox News Planning for Post-Trump Future?

On Thursday, President Donald Trump lashed out at the typically loyalist network following a Fox News poll that found that 51% of respondents wanted to see the president impeached and removed from office and an additional 4% said he should be impeached but not removed.

Fox News is “much different than it used to be in the good old days”, he added, going on to catalogue a series of hosts and contributors to the network that have displayed insufficient deference in his estimation. Fox News “doesn’t deliver for US anymore. It is so different than it used to be.”

Trump, may, however be cheered after Friday afternoon’s news that the Fox News anchor Shepard Smith – who recently criticized him – is leaving the network.

According to The Guardian, it’s tempting to frame Fox News as playing a subservient roll to the president, but in truth it’s always been more of a symbiotic partnership, with the popularity of one bolstering the other and vice versa.

As fractures within the Fox network have grown, and many of their news anchors have become more stridently critical of Trump following the revelations of the impeachment inquiry, it may well be that Fox News, and other conservative media, are starting to wonder if it might be wise to make plans for a post-Trump future.

Outside of Fox News, another arbiter of the prevailing political winds on the right has long been Matt Drudge, whose website is a major driver of traffic to rightwing news sources.

As CNN noted, Drudge has become particularly aggressive in covering news of the impeachment inquiry of late, including giving prominence to stories about Fox News personalities such as Andrew Napolitano – who called Trump’s actions “criminal and impeachable” – and Shepard Smith’s suggestion Trump may have broken the law.

Previous reports of the demise of the Trump-Fox marriage may have been greatly exaggerated, and the news about Smith will be seen by some as evidence of its health, but arguably there does seem to be something different this time around. The mounting evidence in the impeachment inquiry is not helping, and Trump’s reckless actions in Syria this week have drawn criticism from a number of reliably lockstep supporters, like Republican senator and Senate judiciary committee chairman Lindsey Graham, who called it “the biggest blunder of his presidency”. Fox & Friends’ Brian Kilmeade called the decision “disastrous”. Breitbart also ran a critical story.

Remaining Trump defenders like Rush Limbaugh have noted the shift in Drudge’s coverage. Limbaugh too has pointed to the new tenor at Fox News, saying it should now be called “Fox Never Trumper Network”.