Fox News Pipeline to TrumpWorld

You wouldn't know it from the Trump administration, but voicing "strongly-held beliefs" and governing are two entirely different skillsets.

Pundits have often called out Trump as Vladimir Putin’s useful idiot — someone who could be easily manipulated using flattery and spycraft into doing what was in Putin’s best interests. The same can be said about Trump being a useful idiot for Rupert Murdoch, as well. By giving him unlimited airtime during the campaigns (and beyond), Murdoch and Fox News provided millions of dollars of support for Trump and his agenda. In return, Trump has delivered viewing audiences, along with skyrocketing profits, to Fox News.

From the outset, it became clear to anyone paying attention that the word “news” in Fox News was used very loosely, often simply to veil extreme right-wing viewpoints and eventually overt racism, homophobia, and misogyny. Monetization of misinformation became the business model. Murdoch and his heirs have made billions on the propagation of false or misleading information. There’s a willing audience to digest what Fox News spews, and there’s a willing group of companies eager to pass along advertising dollars to capture the attention of the Fox News demographic.

The Fox News business model was so wildly successful financially that it begat a whole cadre of imitators, each trying to outdo each other with more and more far-fetched conspiracy theories and far right opinions and each seeking a bigger piece of the profit pie.

During his first term, Donald Trump was said to have started his “work” day sometime around noon. He reportedly spent time in the White House residence and in the White House dining room watching Fox News.

Not coincidentally, there was virtually no breathing room between what was being spewed on Fox News and the policies that Donald Trump implemented during that first term. It was a chicken-and-egg situation. You could never be quite sure if Trump heard a fact-free opinion on Fox News and then implemented it as policy, or if Trump had a crackpot idea that he gave voice to and Fox News compliantly repeated it as if it were gospel.

But things have taken a more sinister turn during Trump’s second term.

There’s a distinct difference between having “firmly held beliefs” and having competence, particularly when those firmly held beliefs are not rooted even remotely in reality and, therefore, impede or prevent good decision making.

But in the second Trump term, the more committed and more outspoken one is about those “firmly held beliefs,” the more likely that person is to have become an integral part of the Trump administration. And if you possessed those “firmly held beliefs” and had voiced them on Fox News, you were practically a shoo-in for a White House position.

During the first term, there were a handful of somewhat competent staffers in the White House — folks who could counterbalance Trump’s worst impulses. Not so during this second term.

Instead he populated his cabinet and his administration with people who would bow down to him, many of whom came to the White House via the Fox News pipeline, most of whom had no government experience. Here’s a quick sampling:

• Pete Hegseth (Fox & Friends Weekend co-host) — Secretary of Defense. He’s a combat veteran and was a low-level officer in the military. But he has little to no strategic experience nor does he have any management experience whatsoever. However, that didn’t stop Trump from putting him in charge of close to 3 million personnel and an $850 billion budget. At least he has a lot of strong opinions.

• Sean Duffy (Fox Business co-host)— Secretary of Transportation (confirmed Jan 28, 2025) — “Real World” cast member, former Congressman, climate change denier, and serial procreator Duffy would hardly be most presidents’ first choice as a Transportation Secretary. But this is the Trump era, so all bets are off. His lack of relevant experience has been evident in his bumbling response to the Washington National Airport mid-air collision. Add to his Executive Office resume his meandering and sometimes conflicting positions regarding the air traffic control debacle and subsequent flight cancellations at Newark Liberty Airport.

• Tulsi Gabbard (Fox News contributor) — Director of National Intelligence. Gabbard never met an autocrat she didn’t like, or at least not one should wouldn’t defend. In the nation’s chief intelligence role, she brings her contrarian views — that is, views that are contrary to what people can witness with their own eyes and ears. Her bona fides were never very good, but their shortcomings were on full display in her buckling to pressure to align her position on Iran’s nuclear capability with Trump’s, to give him cover for unilaterally declaring war on Iran.

• Michael Waltz (Fox News contributor) — National Security Advisor; nominee for UN Ambassador. Waltz was dismissed from his NSA role for his involvement in hosting the now infamous unsecured Signal chat to discuss military plans. That was enough to get him removed from that role, but he was too valuable a sycophant to jettison him completely, so he’s been nominated as UN Ambassador.

• Tom Homan (Fox News contributor) — “Border Czar.” Immediately after the election, Trump announced that Homan would be the “border czar,” a threatening-sounding nickname for the official “White House Executive Associate Director of Enforcement and Removal Operations” title. That’s a mouthful of an official title for Homan, particularly for someone who always sounds like his own mouth is full of an unknown substance. Trump didn’t hire Homan for his intellect, relying instead on his career focus of ICE enforcement. Homan has had a single focus, and that may be all he is capable of.

• Jeanine Pirro (Fox News host and panelist) — Interim U.S. Attorney for District of Columbia. Her sole judicial experience came from a brief stint as a county court judge, followed by her daytime TV courtroom show experience. (Do we count playing herself on “Law and Order: SVU” as judicial experience? You be the judge.)

• Dan Bongino (Fox News host) — Deputy FBI Director — Does time with the NYPD and the Secret Service qualify you to be the Deputy FBI director? Apparently, only when you include podcaster and Fox News host as rungs on the career ladder. Bongino’s aggressive — some would say overtly hostile — style clearly appealed to Trump’s pseudo-tough guy sensibilities, so Trump found him a place in his administration.
  Note: As of this writing, Bongino is threatening to exit the administration if Pam Bondi isn’t dismissed as Attorney General. Her crime? Flip-flopping on whether or not the rumored “Epstein list” existed, most recently deciding that there was no list, in direct contradiction to her saying publicly that said very list was sitting on her desk. There are also reports that FBI Director Kash Patel is also threatening to leave his post for the same reason.

The list of Foxxies hardly ends there. There Fox News host Mike Huckabee, who has been appointed Ambassador to Israel. Another Ambassadorship was handed to noted diplomat and facial reconstruction aficionado Kimberly Guilfoyle, former Fox News host and Don Jr.’s fiancee. There’s also Tammy Bruce, the State Department spokesperson who has been a Fox News host and contributor. Strident Fox News regular Mark Levin is a member of the Homeland Security Advisory Council. Fox News prime time host Laura Ingraham and Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo have both been named as Board Members to the newly Trump-appropriated Kennedy Center. When Sebastian Gorka lost his gig at Sinclair Broadcasting, he failed up to Fox News as a guest commentator. Even Fox News producers have a shot at this administration, as Alex Pfeiffer, Tucker Carlson’s Fox News producer can attest.

That’s just a sampling. The list goes on and on. And as easy as it is to point and laugh at many of these choices, it’s deadly serious.

As Americans, we’ve come to expect that a U.S. president surrounds himself with the best and brightest in every position — people who will provide clear and informed counsel so that the president can make the best decisions possible. But that’s not the case in this administration.

In the first term, Fox News acted as a willing and eager mouthpiece for Trump, and Trump got his ego massaged by their fawning. In this second term, it’s a much more dangerous feedback loop. There’s no longer any distinction between the lies that get told to boost audience share and the lies that administration officials — and Trump himself — are telling the American public. Each falsehood gets passed along, repeated, magnified.

Here’s an example. In the run-up to the big terrible budget bill, Media Matters identified ten times as many mentions of Joe Biden on Fox News than there were mentions of Medicaid — an astounding 10:1 ratio — despite the fact that Biden left office months ago, leaving behind a booming economy and a strong legacy. Consequently, many Fox viewers didn’t learn of the massive cuts to Medicaid in the bill until after it was already passed. (I refuse to refer to that budget bill using Trump’s obnoxious alliterative moniker.)

People in red states are much more likely to be Fox News viewers, and those people in red states will be much more severely impacted by those cuts because, by a large percentage, those states have more Medicaid recipients than blue states. The likelihood is extremely low that folks in those red states (and right-leaning voters in all states) have even now learned of the many horrendous downsides to the budget bill.

If there’s good news in any of this, it may be that some of these folks may bump up against their own lack of qualifications and leave the roles they’re in under some other false pretense. (The threatened Bongino and Patel exits may be part of this phenomenon.)

I often ask myself what can be done to break the cycle of disinformation, misinformation, and outright lies that we’re being told. To combat it, I try to do the following:

• Develop an ongoing a list of news sources. From that list, develop a shorter list of those you come to trust. Don’t rely on any one source.

• If something read or hear seems fishy, do a little research. We have more information available to us than at any time in history, and it’s not all that difficult to do at least some surface level fact checking.

• Complain to right-wing legislators who become part of the Fox News feedback loop. Send emails. Make phone calls to their offices. Attend and complain at their town halls.

• Turn off Fox News! Fox relies on viewership that gets tracked through your cable, satellite or internet television signal provider. Don’t visit their website, don’t visit their social media feeds (or, if you do, make sure you fact check them by way of replies or community notes).

It’s admittedly not enough, but it’s at least something. It’s all part of the critical mass that we need to build to stop this administration from further destroying our democracy.