President Donald Trump’s Iran war is a global strategic debacle and a domestic economic disaster that has taken his public support to new depths. With the president’s job approval hitting second-term lows, some Republicans are warning that he may hurt the party’s chances of retaining control of Congress in November’s midterm elections.
But even as some MAGA pundits are sounding the alarm about the war and its political implications, Fox News’ coverage of the Iran war remains consistently glowing. Trump is depicted on the network as a steely-eyed negotiator who had “the courage, the wisdom, the fortitude to confront this Nazi-like regime,” in the words of one host. He now “holds the cards” against Iranian officials who are “grasping at straws,” a Fox correspondent said. On rare occasions when Fox hosts buck that narrative and express concern about the war’s impact on the country and the GOP, they quickly pivot back to the pro-war propaganda Trump craves.
In 2020, Fox’s executives and stars faced a network near-death experience due to a rare moment of honesty.
Fox’s lockstep promotion of Trump’s war reflects two crucial factors: The influence of current and former Fox hosts on the Trump administration, and the network’s desperate desire to hold on to its MAGA viewership at all costs. And because Trump’s own worldview is shaped by the network telling him that he’s engaged in a globally historic victory that just needs more time — and perhaps further escalation — the result is a doom loop without a clear exit.
In Trump’s first term, his obsessive consumption of Fox’s programming turned the network’s hosts and correspondents into prominent participants in national politics. That pattern has intensified in his second term: Trump has selected more than two dozen former Fox personalities to fill top roles in his administration, leaned on current Fox stars for counsel and seemingly ordered policy changes like the deployment of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to U.S. airports based on segments that caught his eye.
Network hosts like Sean Hannity, Mark Levin and Brian Kilmeade have long supported military strikes against Iran, and over the first few months of the year, they repeatedly used their programs to urge Trump to take action. But since their predictions of a quick and easy resolution gave way to a quagmire, they have been unable to respond coherently. Instead, when not praising Trump for his bravery in starting the war, they suggest risky escalations they say will end it — from a special ops mission to seize Iran’s uranium to the targeted assassinations of more Iranian leaders.
Not all of Fox’s personalities, however, have track records of hardcore neoconservatism or an ideological interest in annihilating the Iranian regime. But the network is more deeply invested than ever in appealing to their MAGA audience.
In 2020, Fox’s executives and stars faced a network near-death experience due to a rare moment of honesty. When Fox’s decision desk called the state of Arizona for Joe Biden on election night in 2020, the result was a debacle: Trump lashed out at Fox, furious that the network had damaged his attempts to falsely declare victory. As viewers switched to alternative right-wing channels, Fox hosts course-corrected by platforming bizarre lies and conspiracy theories about purported election fraud. Subsequent defamation lawsuits against Fox led to the publication of internal communications, which showed network executives and hosts panicking at declining ratings, making their peace with promoting voter fraud claims they knew were untrue and seeking to punish Fox personalities who refused to get with the program.
When Trump turns on his TV, he sees Fox’s hosts and correspondents telling him he’s doing a great job in Iran.
Those misdeeds have already cost Fox a $787.5 million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems, and a $2.7 billion lawsuit from Smartmatic is ongoing. But for the network’s leaders, the big takeaway was apparently that telling the truth to the viewers poses a bigger risk than telling them what they already want to hear.
Applying that lesson to the Iran war makes it easy to understand Fox’s ongoing support for the increasingly unpopular conflict. Trump retains an iron grip on his party’s base, allowing him not only to oust dissident GOP officials but to retain Republican support for positions the rest of the country abhors. A New York Times/Siena poll found last week that while just 30% of respondents overall believe Trump was right to go to war with Iran, 70% of Republicans support his decision. Other polls show similar schisms between GOP sentiment and that of the public at large. Right-wing pundits who have struck out on their own, like former Fox hosts Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, can build out a sufficient audience by appealing to the 20%-30% of Republicans who oppose the Iran war, but Fox, a large company with much higher overhead costs, refuses to risk alienating the party’s majority.
This is the dichotomy of Fox’s influence in the age of Trump: Its hosts are more powerful than ever because they have a direct line to the president. But once he makes a decision, they can do little more than cheer the president lest they lose their audience.
The result is that when Trump turns on his TV, he sees Fox’s hosts and correspondents telling him he’s doing a great job in Iran, rather than expressing concern for the war’s impact on the country or party. As the network’s flattery deepens Trump’s unwillingness to back down, it becomes ever more difficult to see how this cycle ends.
Matt Gertz
Matt Gertz is a senior fellow at Media Matters for America, a progressive research center that monitors the U.S. media. His work focuses on the relationship between Fox News and the Republican Party, media ethics and news coverage of politics and elections.