President Donald Trump is casting yet another Fox News regular for a top position in his administration.
Trump announced on Thursday that he has selected Jeanine Pirro, co-host of Fox’s panel show “The Five,” to serve as interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. She is the 23rd former Fox News employee to date that Trump has picked for a high-ranking federal post in his second term in office.
Trump is notoriously obsessed with Fox News’s programming. The president relies on the network to inform his worldview and provide advice about how the federal government should respond to crucial events. So it comes as little surprise that he has brought many of its employees in-house, with Fox alumni occupying top positions in the White House, Cabinet and elsewhere in government.
The Trump administration ranks are filled with people whose Fox work has gotten them jobs well beyond their traditional qualifications.
And it’s even less surprising that Pirro will now join their ranks. As Fox remade itself as a Trumpist network, Pirro emerged as one of the president’s most notable sycophants. Her personal devotion to the president is impossible to parody — she once described Trump as “a nonstop, never-give-up, no-holds-barred human version of the speed of light.”
But hiring people to lead government agencies because you like their takes on right-wing TV comes with major drawbacks — ones that Pirro embodies. Like others she is following through the Trump/Fox revolving door, Pirro lacks relevant experience for the job she’s been assigned to do. Instead, she has spent years peddling the bigotry, conspiracy theories, and Trumpist fealty that mint Fox stardom.
The Trump administration ranks are filled with people whose work for Fox News has gotten them jobs well beyond their traditional qualifications. Pete Hegseth and Dan Bongino, for example, spent their early careers in relatively low-ranked positions in the military and law enforcement, made failed runs for office as Republicans, and then leaned on their past experiences to become successful Fox News pundits.
Now Hegseth is secretary of defense while Bongino is deputy director of the FBI. They lack the experience typically seen for those roles, and it shows: Hegseth has faced firestorms over his dysfunctional management of the Pentagon and his potentially illegal handling of sensitive military information, while Bongino is under fire even from MAGA partisans who think he is not working hard enough to address their needs.
Pirro’s career has followed a similar path. Though she has experience as a prosecutor, serving three terms as district attorney in Westchester County, New York, that tenure concluded two decades ago after an aborted run for U.S. Senate in 2005 and a landslide defeat for state attorney general the following year.
She promptly joined Fox News and has been a fixture there ever since. Before joining “The Five,” she hosted a weekend evening show titled “Justice with Judge Jeanine,” a reference to her brief stint as an elected judge in Westchester County in the early 1990s.
What Pirro has done with her Fox News platform raises even more questions about her fitness to serve as D.C.’s top prosecutor.
The range of potential outcomes is unnervingly wide.
Fox News’ programming is steeped in fearmongering about the threat a sinister “other” poses to its viewers, from the network’s Global War On Terror-era scapegoating of Muslims to its more recent targeting of Black Lives Matter activists and “migrant crime.” Yet Pirro is the rare Fox star to say something so manifestly bigoted that the network suspended her.
In 2019, her show was taken off the air for two weeks after she noted that Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., wears a hijab and asked, “Is her adherence to this Islamic doctrine indicative of her adherence to sharia law which in itself is antithetical to the United States Constitution?” That remark was part of Pirro’s long trail of anti-Muslim commentary at Fox News, including her call to “start having a conversation about surveillance in mosques.”
The Muslim population of Washington, D.C., may now wonder whether the attorney responsible for prosecutions in the city views them as equal members of society — and whether she is planning to spy on their houses of worship.
Fox News’ stars are notorious for pushing conspiracy theories — but here too, Pirro stands out. Her on-air promotion of lies about Dominion Voting Systems rigging the 2020 election against Trump was part of the company’s lawsuit against Fox, which the network settled in 2023 for a record sum.
According to Fox News internal emails revealed in Dominion’s filings, as Pirro continued to push conspiracy theories about the election, her executive producer described her as a “reckless maniac” who is “nuts” and “should never be on live television.” Less than two years later, she was promoted from weekends to weekdays with "The Five." Now, she will be running federal prosecutions in the nation’s capital.
Pirro’s commentary about how federal law enforcement should respond to the president’s whims raises real concerns about the rule of law now that she is in position to act on it. Throughout Trump’s first term, Pirro denounced various Justice Department leaders for not moving quickly enough to quash probes of the president and to investigate his political opponents.
Pirro even called for a “cleansing” of the FBI and the Justice Department, which she said were full “of individuals who should not just be fired, but who need to be taken out in handcuffs.”
At one point, after spending weeks pushing conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton that she claimed deserved federal scrutiny, she met with Trump in the White House and successfully pushed for the Justice Department to launch a probe. The U.S. attorney who conducted the investigation ultimately closed it without charges.
Now Pirro herself will have the power and authority to conduct similar reviews of the president’s enemies. The range of potential outcomes is unnervingly wide. If her Fox News commentary is any indication, she will try to harness the office in service of Trump’s authoritarian view of federal law enforcement as an extension of his personal will. But it’s also possible that her lack of experience and general incompetence will see her fail to make much of an impact at all. As with so much of the Trump administration, you will have to tune in to see what happens.