The eldest son of former President Donald Trump is griping about supposedly receiving the cold shoulder from Fox News as the network faced a historic legal fight as a result of the lies and misinformation spread by Mr Trump’s team in late 2020 and early 2021.
Donald Trump Jr outlined his complaints on his podcast, which is likely the driving motivating factor behind his desire for exposure itself. Since his father’s departure from the White House, Mr Trump Jr has worked to maintain his own political profile through his program, while filling his pockets — he signed a seven-figure deal with Rumble in January.
“I used to be on Fox three, four, five, six, 10 times a week. I haven’t been on in nine months. Not a call, not an invite, not anything,” he told his listeners, while trying to make the issue political in nature: “You saw what Fox did to Tucker Carlson last week, and the week before that, it was Dan Bongino, and, you know, the people who would actually question some of that narrative like: Is it a brilliant plan to send $130 billion to Ukraine, one of the most corrupt nations in the world?”
The charges of Fox’s supposed leftward slide are hardly new in the Trump sphere and have been echoed by the former president many times in the months since the network finally clamped down on guests and even presenters who were endorsing the false claims spread by the Trump campaign about the 2020 election. While Fox did stem that tide of false claims emanating from its primetime opinion shows, it was not fast enough to free the network from legal liability. The network would go on to settle with one voting machine company targeted by those conspiracy-peddlers for $787m last month.
Mr Trump Jr’s father has also been a far rarer presence on the network where he used to be a frequent caller to the Fox & Friends morning program as well as participant in interviews with its primetime hosts. He has continued to do the latter, sitting down for a chat with host Tucker Carlson just weeks before Carlson’s firing, though much less often.
Fox has undergone possibly the most tumultuous time in the company’s history over the past six months as brutal revelations stemming from the Dominion lawsuit portrayed the network’s primetime shows as a hotbed of sexism and vulgar behaviour where hosts like Carlson were platforming people they explicitly said were lying to Fox viewers.
The network’s firing of Carlson has been the only major change to take place in the wake of the legal battle, but even that was enough to make the companys stock price drop. The network’s journalists have largely kept silent about the issues at their network, while their detractors on the left and in the mainstream media have gleefully watched the network’s public implosion.
