The real reason Fox News is suddenly going for Donald Trump’s kneecaps today

| 10:22 pm EDT June 19, 2023
Dear Palmer Report readers, we all understand the difficult era we're heading into. Major media outlets are caving to Trump already. Even the internet itself and publishing platforms may be at risk. But Palmer Report is nonetheless going to lead the fight. We're funding our 2025 operating expenses now, so we can keep publishing no matter what happens. I'm asking you to contribute if you can, because the stakes are just so high. You can donate here.

Why are Fox News personalities ranging from Bret Baier to Brit Hume all torching Donald Trump today? Why is Fox allowing them 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 chatter nonstop.

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.

Meanwhile the upshot is that even Fox News thinks Donald Trump is such toast, it’s shifting its tone to an incrementally more anti-Trump stance. This was always going to happen to Trump on his way down. Even his “allies” were always going to ultimately choose their own prospects over his.

Dear Palmer Report readers, we all understand the difficult era we're heading into. Major media outlets are caving to Trump already. Even the internet itself and publishing platforms may be at risk. But Palmer Report is nonetheless going to lead the fight. We're funding our 2025 operating expenses now, so we can keep publishing no matter what happens. I'm asking you to contribute if you can, because the stakes are just so high. You can donate here.