Thread by @PalmerReport

Why are Fox News personalities ranging from Bret Baier to Brit Hume all torching Donald Trump today? Why is Fox allowing him to? Because Trump is finished, and even Fox’s audience is starting to figure it out, and Fox has to keep pace with that in order to keep its audience.

As always, you don’t need to give anyone at Fox News any credit for finally torching Donald Trump. Fox isn’t doing it for the right reason. But this kind of thing is a reliable harbinger of how public opinion is shifting, even when it comes to the other side.

Fox News does not exist to help Republicans get elected. Fox News is a for-profit corporation that exists to drive revenue and ratings. Its right wing approach is just a means to an end for driving ratings. Its goal is to make money, not to help its “side” win elections.

Trump is ten days into a DOJ Espionage Act indictment and he’s maybe twenty days from another DOJ indictment for January 6th, and maybe forty days from a Fulton County RICO indictment. He’ll have four criminal trials well before the election. Four!

Even right wingers are about to start putting it together that he’s simply not going to be politically viable. And because he can’t even provide an answer on why he kept the classified documents, he’s making it so much harder for right wingers to keep the faith with him.

And so even as Fox News viewers are increasingly scratching their heads and wondering “why didn’t the idiot just return the boxes,” Fox News has to match that same tone in order to keep its viewers staring at the screen all day.

After all, (approximately) eleven billion other Republicans have all jumped in the 2024 presidential race, because they know Trump is toast, and half of them are now bashing Trump for not returning the boxes. Fox News knows its audience is hearing that.

So Fox News is just doing what all soulless for-profit mega corporations do whenever they see their target market shifting in a certain direction: they match their target market’s tone so that they can retain that market.

Remember, this is never about whether anyone at Fox News is has “grown a spine” or “deserves credit” or “is still bad.” Who cares? What matters is that Fox’s sudden anti-Trump shift is a *very clear* indicator that right wing audiences are also shifting away from Trump.

Nor does it matter that some Fox News personalities like Hannity will try to hang in there with Trump a bit longer than the rest of the network. Again, who cares? This isn’t about who at Fox is “good” or “bad.” It’s about Trump falling so far that even Fox is now tiptoeing away.

If you only follow politics so you can feel outrage, you’ll be so desperate to spin this into “but Fox is still bad” so you can keep feeling outrage toward Fox, you’ll miss the entire point, which is that Trump is toast.

Of course the outrage addicts on our side don’t want to hear that Trump is toast either, because they’re afraid that when he goes down, they won’t be able to feel as much outrage toward him going forward. And their only reason for living is to get to feel outrage.