For a decade, the network and the president have fueled each other’s rise

During President Trump’s “executive time” on a recent Sunday evening, one of the missives during a marathon Truth Social posting spree told the story of what was eating him as the week began. His centerpiece post carried overtones of heartbreak and its target was one that had long taunted him from inside the room: Fox News — his constant companion, his comfort zone, the powerful media engine that took a chance on him a decade ago and has, through thick and thin, fueled what has followed in his once-unlikely political career. Theirs is a marriage of convenience that’s been on the rocks since the wedding. Now, as Trump’s polls turn anemic and a restive Congress begins to splinter, the midterm elections are proving to be the tipping point that could send this marriage of mutual benefit spiraling into a messy divorce.

“You could listen to Fox News all day long, absolutely devour it,” the president wrote, “but then, when you hear SLEAZEBAGS, like Congressman Ro Khanna, ‘a wolf in sheep’s clothing,’ LIE, LIE, LIE, AND LIE AGAIN, without any pushback, or competent rebuttal from an anchor,” he added, singling out Fox News host Jacqui Heinrich and her guest, the Democratic congressman from California. The two had discussed the U.S. shunning domestic production and buying cheap steel from China, with Khanna noting that it isn’t a very “America first” look for the Trump Administration.

The “America first” dig landed where it was designed to — against Trump’s core political identity, at a moment when his approval has sunk to 37 percent in the latest New York Times/Siena poll, his lowest of either term, with underwater numbers on the economy and inflation that have traditionally been his strengths.

Trumpism didn’t emerge from nothing. Fox News rose to dominance by offering a 24-hour cable news home for what millions of Americans wanted: a romanticized version of American history, dog-whistle politics, and a place to channel the rage of economic displacement. It became a 24-7 safe harbor, and year over year, its audience — which certainly included Donald Trump — was growing and learning to rely on it.

The decade-long dance between the network and the political outsider-turned-party usurper began when the Murdoch family-owned cable outlet, surveying the uninspiring 2015 Republican primary field, begrudgingly took Trump’s hand. His fledgling MAGA movement played nicely with Fox News Republicans, whose Tea Party fervor had cooled but who were conspicuously glued to their screens watching his rallies. Fox’s audience, already primed to distrust anyone outside the GOP, found in Trump a natural fit. The honeymoon was brief — just ask former Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly — and a decade later, through years of public dressings-down, the network has stood by its man as an unprecedented retooling of Republican values unfolded.

But Trump was always playing a longer game. He understood that by keeping certain opinion anchors loyal — Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson before his departure — Fox’s institutional coherence could be fractured from within. Those on-air allies were not merely friends. They were assets in a long-running play to disaggregate the network’s editorial authority and replace it with personal fealty. Despite the bluster, the theatrical victimhood, and the periodic threats to walk, Fox and Trump have never been able to fully say no to each other. The only difference now is that we may be entering the twilight of that arrangement.

To understand how Fox lost control of the audience it built, you have to understand how completely it built them. Mastermind Roger Ailes, handpicked by Rupert Murdoch to run the network, used his background in local talk television and Republican presidential politics to create something that hadn’t existed: glossy news programming suffused with looming conflict, liberal boogeymen, flashy graphics, and celebrity-like on-air personalities who winked at their audiences like co-conspirators. Meanwhile, Murdoch was paying cable operators up to $11 per subscriber to carry the channel — reversing the industry standard entirely and buying his way into American homes.

It worked with historic speed. During the contested 2000 Bush-Gore election, Fox saw a 440 percent viewership surge. The September 11 attacks were the decisive turning point, and the Afghanistan and Iraq wars that followed were gifts to a network that had positioned itself as the patriotic alternative to what it derided as liberal media. Fox’s primetime audience grew to 2.4 million against MSNBC’s 791,000 and CNN’s 481,000.

What Ailes and Murdoch built in those years wasn’t merely an audience — it was emotional infrastructure. The Tea Party movement of the Obama era was its proof of concept: Fox gave wall-to-wall coverage to taxpayer marches and Tea Party rallies, with anchors like Sean Hannity and Greta Van Susteren broadcasting from the demonstrations themselves. Academic research subsequently documented that Fox News viewership correlated directly with fundraising and primary votes for Tea Party candidates. The crowd had learned it could move. Trump saw it and walked straight through the door.

The resistance at Fox didn’t last. When Megyn Kelly challenged Trump at the first Republican debate — asking about his treatment of women — Trump launched an all-out war against her, boycotted a subsequent Fox debate, and watched as the network’s audience sided with him. The audience had already made its choice, and the network followed.

That power dynamic — audience first, network second, journalism last — has governed Fox’s relationship with Trump ever since. Kelly was eventually pushed out. Shep Smith, the network’s most prominent straight-news anchor, departed in 2019 after sustained pressure. Trump gloated publicly over both exits. Fox’s former president, Bill Shine, became Trump’s White House communications director. Sean Hannity, Fox’s top primetime host, was the best friend of the man now running White House comms.

The arrangement’s fragility burst into view on election night 2020, when Fox was first to call Arizona for Biden. The backlash from Trump’s team — and from the audience — was immediate and ferocious. Conservative upstart Newsmax grabbed audience share. And what followed was arguably the most consequential editorial capitulation in cable news history: the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit revealed that Fox’s stars and executives were privately dismissive of Trump’s stolen-election claims while amplifying them on air. Carlson, then the network’s most influential primetime host, texted a producer days before Jan. 6 that they were “very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights,” adding, “I hate him passionately.” Fox CEO Suzanne Scott emailed a colleague demanding that a fact-check segment be pulled: “This has to stop now. The audience is furious and we are just feeding them material. Bad for business.” The two editors who correctly called Arizona — Washington Managing Editor Bill Sammon and political director Chris Stirewalt — were gone before Biden’s inauguration. Fox settled for $787.5 million.

Now, which of these two parties will retain custody of the volatile GOP voting base? It’s 2026, and the network and the president are staring each other down as the midterms approach. Trump is wielding influence over GOP primaries via full-throated endorsements of MAGA-groomed challengers primarying his perceived enemies in Congress; he’s been wildly successful in ousting career politicians, mostly over grievances dating back years. That is a power Fox News once wielded. Some of 2026’s primaries are showing a new schism — and the results should be ringing alarm bells across the network.

The congressional primaries for Kentucky’s 4th district and the Texas Senate seat — which saw Thomas Massie and John Cornyn vanquished by Trump’s handpicked challengers — illustrate where this is headed. Trump is running two overlapping, and sometimes contradictory, primary strategies, and the fault line between them is exactly where Fox’s institutional interests and Trump’s vengeful ones diverge. The network’s ownership class wants a functioning Republican majority. Trump wants a purged, curated, deeply loyal Congress.

In Kentucky, Trump endorsed Ed Gallrein, a former Navy SEAL, over Massie, who had been a vocal critic of the administration — particularly on the Epstein files. Gallrein won the primary on May 19. The takeaway is stark: Massie, a libertarian-leaning conservative with genuine ideological identity in a safe Republican district, was booted not for liberal leanings but for insufficient loyalty to Trump. Conservative bona fides no longer clear the bar. MAGA loyalty is the only test.

Fox News finally gave Massie airtime on the final day of his primary — his first appearance on the network in 14 months. Massie told Cincinnati Public Radio he had been “blacklisted,” with the intraparty feud as the explanation. “They’re afraid that if they give me a venue to speak, the White House will shut them out,” he said. “And they want access more than anything.”

The Texas Senate race showed how completely Fox has lost the ability to reason with the audience it created. Ken Paxton, scandal-plagued but MAGA-aligned, defeated John Cornyn — a senator with a 99 percent Trump voting record — after Trump’s late endorsement. Fox’s news division, sympathetic to Cornyn’s electability concerns, was relegated to Fox Digital. On the opinion side, Paxton was heavily platformed and portrayed Cornyn as an enemy of the president. When Paxton won in a landslide on May 26, Fox’s coverage fell into line within 24 hours. The network didn’t lead the conversation. It waited to see which way the audience went, then followed.

Beyond the midterms, Fox faces a structural crisis that no election outcome will solve. Succession within the Murdoch family has put Lachlan at the helm, and he will have to navigate the post-Trump landscape and find a path to audience and revenue growth. That will not be easy: only 32 percent of adults aged 30-49 and 28 percent of those under 30 watch Fox News, according to a Pew Research analysis from August 2025. In weekly prime time, Fox registered 278,000 viewers in the 25-54 demographic — down 5 percent year over year. The core audience is aging out. The replacement isn’t coming.

Carlson’s independent operation makes the point with uncomfortable clarity. He went from zero independent distribution in April 2023 to roughly 34 million monthly views — with no cable carriage, no affiliate deals, no bundle. He grew entirely on the brand Fox built for him. What used to require a network now requires a laptop and a mailing list, at a fraction of the cost.

The independent voices now competing for that audience — Carlson, Candace Owens, and others — have broken with the Trump agenda at times, and not on friendly terms. They are smaller, more agile, and untethered to the administration. They are inheriting an audience trained for two decades to distrust every institution — including, eventually, Fox itself.

Fox’s attempted solution — its reported $22 billion acquisition of Roku, aimed at making it an essential gateway between consumers and streaming services — reflects the scale of the problem and the willingness to spend big on distribution, data, and ad tech as the audience begins to shrink. But strategy won’t solve an audience loyalty problem that is fundamentally political.

Trump’s closing volley in that same Truth Social post — the ritual nod to his Fox friends after a public attack on the institution — was itself the tell. He knows the network still has value to him. He simply intends to use it on his own terms.

After the midterms, Fox may stand down further, temper any remaining opposition voices, and give the president more of what he wants. But Trump should study the logic of what he helped create. A base trained for two decades to distrust every institution — primed for outrage, conditioned for betrayal — is not a base that stays tamed indefinitely. He radicalized them with Fox’s help. If that partnership fully dissolves, the next target of their restlessness may not be a political enemy.

It may be him.