Does Fox News Support Trump? Dominion, Personnel, and Costs

Yes. Does Fox News support Trump? Across two presidential terms, the network has functioned as his most influential media ally, bound to him by a steady exchange of personnel, tightly aligned messaging, and an audience whose preferences keep pulling the network back toward him even when its executives try to create distance. The support is not uniform, and it has cost Fox roughly $787.5 million in one defamation settlement with another still pending, but the pattern is consistent enough that one historian of conservative media has called the arrangement closer to state television than anything the United States has previously seen.¹

What the Support Looks Like on Air

The clearest measure is access. Between his first inauguration and March 2019, Trump gave 46 interviews to Fox News and 10 to all other networks combined. In the same period he tweeted Fox News stories more than 200 times, with segments on “Fox & Friends” often preceding presidential tweets on the same subject within hours.²

The opinion hosts do the heaviest lifting. Sean Hannity has been described by a former Trump aide as the “real chief of staff,” and administration officials routinely used him to press the president on policy calls, on the understanding that a Hannity phone call carried more weight than a Cabinet secretary’s.³ Jesse Watters, who took over Tucker Carlson’s prime-time slot, has been described as a reliably pro-Trump conservative voice.⁴ In the second term, Fox hosts have consistently framed Trump’s agenda as a “restoration of common sense,” language that mirrors the phrasing used by White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt.⁵

Fox maintains a nominal separation between its news anchors and its opinion hosts, and figures like Bret Baier and the late-2019 departure Shepard Smith have at times fact-checked the administration. But the wall is thinner than it appears. When Fox anchor Eric Shawn ran a fact-check of Trump’s election fraud claims in December 2020, CEO Suzanne Scott emailed a colleague: “This has to stop now. The audience is furious and we are just feeding them material. Bad for business.”⁶

The Personnel Pipeline

The most concrete proof of the relationship is that people move between Fox News and the Trump administration as if the two share an HR department. Trump named roughly 20 Fox-affiliated individuals to positions in his first administration, including national security adviser John Bolton, a longtime Fox commentator, and communications director Bill Shine, who had risen to co-president of the network before joining the White House in July 2018.⁷⁸ The second term accelerated the pattern, with at least 19 people carrying Fox ties proposed or appointed to administration roles, several while still working for the network at the time of their announcements.

Among the most visible second-term hires from Fox’s on-air talent:⁹

Pete Hegseth, former “Fox & Friends Weekend” host, now Secretary of Defense
Sean Duffy, former Fox Business host, now Secretary of Transportation
Tulsi Gabbard, former Fox contributor and substitute prime-time host, now Director of National Intelligence
Jeanine Pirro, former co-host of “The Five,” now interim U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia
Dan Bongino, former Fox News host, now FBI Deputy Director
Tom Homan, a Fox contributor since 2019, now serving as “border czar”

Traffic runs the other way as well. Lara Trump, the president’s daughter-in-law, joined Fox as a contributor in 2021, left to co-chair the Republican National Committee, and returned to the network in February 2025 to host a weekly Saturday show called “My View with Lara Trump.” Matt Gertz of Media Matters said the arrangement puts money “directly into the pockets of the sitting president’s relative” and makes it difficult to view Fox as independent from the White House.¹⁰

What the Dominion Documents Showed

The strongest evidence about the nature of Fox’s support came from its own internal communications, disclosed during the Dominion Voting Systems defamation lawsuit. In private, Fox’s hosts and executives dismissed the election fraud claims they were amplifying on air.

Tucker Carlson texted a producer that claims about Dominion’s software were “absurd” and that Trump ally Sidney Powell was “lying.” He called Trump a “demonic force” in a private message.¹¹
Laura Ingraham texted Carlson that Powell was “a complete nut” and that “no serious lawyer could believe what they were saying.”¹²
Hannity wrote that Rudy Giuliani was “acting like an insane person” and testified he never believed Powell’s narrative.¹²
Rupert Murdoch described Trump’s fraud allegations as “really crazy stuff” and, in a January 2021 email to CEO Scott, wrote, “Best we don’t mention his name unless essential and certainly don’t support him.”⁶
Fox’s internal research unit, the “Brain Room,” concluded within ten days of the 2020 election that the Dominion conspiracy theories were false.⁶

The on-air product told a different story. On the same day Hannity privately called Giuliani “insane,” he told viewers about “serious election misconduct” and mentioned software that “wrongfully awarded Joe Biden thousands of ballots.” The day after Ingraham called Powell a “nut,” she told her audience the election was “rife with problems and potential fraud.”¹¹ Dominion’s summary judgment brief concluded that “from the top down, Fox knew ‘the Dominion stuff’ was ‘total BS.'”¹²

Text messages later obtained by the congressional committee investigating the January 6, 2021, Capitol attack showed the same private-versus-public split. Ingraham texted White House chief of staff Mark Meadows that Trump “needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home. This is hurting all of us. He is destroying his legacy.” Brian Kilmeade wrote, “Please get him on TV. Destroying everything you have accomplished.” Hannity asked whether Trump could issue a statement urging people to leave.¹³ The committee identified Hannity as a “confidant, adviser, and campaigner” for Trump and reported possessing dozens of texts between him and Meadows about the 2020 election.¹⁴

Where the Support Has Broken Down

The relationship is not seamless. Fox was the first network to project Arizona for Joe Biden on election night 2020, a call that infuriated Trump and prompted associates to phone Rupert Murdoch demanding a retraction.¹⁵ Hannity texted Carlson and Ingraham that the projection had “destroyed a brand that took 25 years to build.”¹² Chris Stirewalt, the political director who oversaw the decision desk, was fired a few months later; Fox described it as a “normal restructuring.” Shepard Smith left the network in 2019 after public criticism from Trump and internal conflicts. The pattern suggests professional consequences for journalists who push back against Trump’s preferred narrative.¹⁶

Trump himself attacks the network when its coverage disappoints him. In June 2025, after Fox polling showed him at 40% approval on the economy and 34% on inflation, he called the network’s polling “biased” and “discredited” while praising its anchors as “GREAT” in the same post.¹⁷ In July 2025 he sued Rupert Murdoch and the Wall Street Journal for $10 billion over a story involving Jeffrey Epstein, even as he called the Murdochs “American patriots” in a Fox News interview about a potential TikTok acquisition.¹⁸

The earliest signs of this dynamic came in the 2016 primary, when Rupert Murdoch privately called Trump’s candidacy a “catastrophe” and anchor Megyn Kelly challenged him at a debate over his treatment of women. Trump responded with a sustained public campaign against Kelly that ended with the network recalibrating rather than the candidate backing down.¹⁶

What the Support Has Cost Fox

Airing election fraud claims that Fox’s own staff and executives privately knew were false produced the most expensive defamation settlement in American media history. Dominion Voting Systems sued for $1.6 billion, and in April 2023 Fox settled for $787.5 million, days before a trial that would have put Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch, Carlson, Hannity, Bartiromo, and Pirro on the witness stand.¹⁹ The settlement did not include an on-air apology; Fox acknowledged only “the Court’s rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false.”²⁰

A second, larger case is still moving forward. Smartmatic sued Fox in February 2021 for $2.7 billion, alleging the network defamed it by reporting the company had rigged the 2020 vote.²¹ In November 2025 a New York state judge denied Fox’s motion to pause the case pending a separate federal criminal proceeding against Smartmatic in the Philippines, and summary judgment arguments were heard in December 2025.²² In May 2026 a New York appellate court allowed Fox additional discovery but affirmed the case would not be stayed.²³ No trial date has been publicly set.

Fox parted ways with its highest-rated host, Tucker Carlson, on April 24, 2023, less than a week after the Dominion settlement. His departure was linked to redacted messages from his phone that surfaced during the lawsuit and to a pending discrimination suit from former producer Abby Grossberg. Before his exit, Carlson had been described as “basically controlling the Republican Party,” with prospective 2024 candidates responding to his on-air questionnaires.²⁴ He went on to build an independent operation reaching 34 million monthly views.¹⁶

Why the Support Persists Anyway

The economics keep pulling Fox back. A 2025 Pew Research Center study found that 57% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents regularly get news from Fox News, at least double the share that uses any other single outlet surveyed.²⁵ Fifty-six percent of Republicans trust the network; no other source clears 31% in the same group. Shortly before the 2024 election, 69% of Republicans identified Fox News as at least a minor source of political news.²⁶

Trust runs deepest among older Republicans: 76% of those 65 and older trust Fox News, compared with 41% of Republicans under 30.²⁶ Observers have described the resulting arrangement as a power dynamic of “audience first, network second, journalism last.”¹⁶ Rupert Murdoch’s January 2021 instruction that Trump not be supported did not survive contact with the audience response documented by CEO Scott’s “bad for business” email.

Support, or Something Closer

Lachlan Murdoch consolidated control of the Fox and News Corp empire following a family succession settlement in September 2025 and maintains what has been described as a complicated relationship with Trump.²⁷ The Murdochs stand to be part of a Trump-endorsed TikTok acquisition deal while the president simultaneously pursues a $10 billion suit against Murdoch’s newspaper, a duality that captures the transactional character of the whole arrangement.¹⁸

Historian Nicole Hemmer has argued that the pattern brings Fox News “closer to state television than anything the United States has ever known.”¹ Whether the description sticks or the relationship eventually fractures under its own contradictions is unresolved, but the accumulated evidence — two terms of shared personnel, court-disclosed communications, and a $787.5 million settlement over what the network aired anyway — points in one direction. Fox News does not simply support Trump the way a newspaper endorses a candidate. The network and the presidency operate as collaborative enterprises with shared staff, shared messaging, and a shared audience whose preferences constrain both.

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