In 2020, Fox News personality Bret Baier privately worried that his network was losing viewers to other outlets even more willing to air Donald Trump’s lies about an election that he’d lost, especially since his employer had been the first to call Arizona for President Joe Biden.
“I have pressed them to slow. And I think they will slow walk Nevada,” Baier assured Tucker Carlson in a text message, made public as part of Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit over Fox News knowingly airing false claims about the last presidential contest.
It was no surprise, then, that Baier acted more like a Republican partisan than a legitimate journalist during Wednesday’s prime-time interview with Vice President Kamala Harris. As The New York Times put in a headline, the Democratic nominee “Arrived for a Fox Interview. She Got a Debate.”
From the start, Baier was not just adversarial — as would be expected and indeed appropriate: Harris, a grown woman seeking the most powerful office in the world, can answer a tough question or two — but acting as a “surrogate” for the Trump campaign, as one media critic put it. On immigration, he asked her to estimate how many asylum-seekers the Biden administration had released in the United States with court dates.
“Just a number: Do you think it’s one million? Three million?” he asked.
Baier then repeatedly interrupted her as she tried to discuss Democrats’ efforts to reform a “broken” immigration system.
“I was beginning to answer,” Harris said while Baier, in the words of USA Today, “spoke over the vice president.”
“Our focus has been on fixing a problem,” Harris continued as Baier quizzed her about a murder allegedly carried out by a man from Venezuela (studies have repeatedly shown that immigrants commit fewer crimes than native-born Americans).
The vice president then discussed efforts earlier this year to pass a bipartisan immigration bill that would have limited the ability to apply for asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border while also increasing funding to process those requests; the American Immigration Council, while critical of the asylum restrictions, described the legislation as “a serious attempt to acknowledge, and solve, some of the key problems with current border and asylum policy.”
"Let me just finish," Harris told Baier. "Donald Trump learned about that bill and told them to kill it because he preferred to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem,” she said, a claim confirmed by Senate Republicans.
In another notable exchange, Harris noted Trump’s call to turn the U.S. military on “the enemy from within.”
“An enemy within — talking about the American people,” Harris said, “suggesting he would turn the American military on the American people.”
“We asked that question to the former president today,” Baier interjected, airing a clip from Trump’s Fox News town hall. The clip Baier then aired was deceptively edited, omitting Trump doubling down on his rhetoric about “the enemy from within” and clarification that he is indeed talking about Democrats and others: “the Pelosis, these people, they’re so sick and they’re so evil.”
“I’m not threatening anybody,” Trump said in the clip Baier presented. “They’re the ones doing the threatening.”
“Bret, I’m sorry, and with all due respect, that clip was not what he has been saying about the enemy within, that he has repeated when he is speaking about the American people. That’s not what you just showed,” Harris responded, continuing:
“Here’s the bottom line: He has repeated it many times, and you and I both know that. And you and I both know that he has talked about turning the American military on the American people. He has talked about going after people who are engaged in peaceful protest. He has talked about locking people up because they disagree with him. This is a democracy and in a democracy, the president of the United States, in the United States of America, should be willing to be able to handle criticism without saying he would lock people up for doing it.”
Trump, in fact, cannot even handle a question from Baier: Earlier this month, he declined to join Harris in a debate that would have been moderated by the Fox News anchor and his colleague, Martha McCallum. “I’d love to have somebody else other than Martha and Bret,” Trump said last month, before rejecting the possibility of another showdown altogether.
On Wednesday, however, Trump was all praise for a man he’d previously called “soft” and “nasty.”
“Great job by Bret Baier in his Interview with Lyin’ Kamala Harris,” Trump wrote in a lengthy post on social media.
Others were less fawning.
“It immediately devolved into an embarrassing, bad-faith effort by a once respected host to play to an audience of one,” MSNBC anchor Mika Brezinski commented Thursday morning. "The host's constant, rude interruptions were designed to distract from the issues and facts that Trump and his acolytes try and twist and distort every day and, on Fox News, they try and avoid.”
Baier’s former Fox News colleagues were just as scathing.
“Baier showed, again, he’s not a ‘straight news’ anchor. He’s a hack,” an ex-Fox News producer told media reporter Justin Baragona, likening him to the network’s openly partisan anchors like Sean Hannity and Jesse Watters. As in 2020, “He bowed to the pressure from his MAGA fans because he doesn’t care as long as they don’t change the channel.”
