Fox News and Donald Trump used to get along. Not so much anymore. Earlier this year, after the former president suffered one blunder after another, the conservative news network tried to switch allegiances to Ron DeSantis. Welp, that’s not working out. Now Trump thinks he doesn’t need Fox News anymore. That means he’s free to trash them in his speeches, sometimes, awkwardly, while they’re covering him.
FOX CUT AWAY FROM TRUMP AS HE PROMOTES X
Fox News immediately cut away from Trump as soon as he mentioned the huge reach Tucker Carlson is getting on 𝕏.
Tucker's interview with Trump got 266 million views, dwarfing Fox ratings.
The media is threatened by 𝕏 and @elonmusk pic.twitter.com/9PTw3lwJC3
— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) September 25, 2023
As per Mediaite, Trump spoke at a rally in South Carolina. It featured the supposedly more mentally acute presidential candidate blaming Jeb Bush for getting America into the Iraq War. He also went on a tirade against Fox News. They eventually cut away, but not fast enough.
“We’re going up and we’re the only ones going up. They’re going down and they’re going down, down, down,” Trump said of his fellow candidates. He then brought up Fox News’ Trump-less GOP debates. “They ought to stop wasting their time. You know, they’re wasting a lot of time with these ridiculous debates that nobody’s watching.”
He wasn’t done. “Their last debate was the lowest-rated debate in history. That’s a good compliment,” he jeered. “Now, what was I doing — I was someplace else, wasn’t I? I was doing another interview. We had 271 million people listening to the Tucker Carlson interview. That’s an all-time record.”
As Trump boasted about his (dodgy) Tucker metrics, Fox News’ Martha MacCallum finally chimed in.
“So here we are, back in the thick of campaign season,” MacCallum told viewers, as casually as she could muster. “We are now just four months away from the Iowa primaries. And you see former President Trump in a place where you would expect to see him today and in the days to come, South Carolina.”
For the record, just because 271 million people started incredibly long and extraordinarily boring Tucker sit-down, in which he ranted about Joe Biden’s beach pics, doesn’t mean anyone finished it, or made it more than a minute or two into it. But we digress.
Oh, and one more thing: The Fox News GOP debate brought in some 12.8 million viewers, meaning it did better than 70% of all presidential debates in the previous two cycles. But Trump knows he can say anything and his fans will buy it.
(Via Mediaite)