The massive bet Fox News made on Donald Trump’s political success turned to ash last night.

The right-wing network’s executives and stars, after boosting his return to the White House in the 2024 election, clearly calculated that if they showered the president with praise, propagandized for his administration, and shielded their viewers from its scandals, both the network and the political party it exists to promote would reap the rewards.

Last night was a historic rebuke to Fox’s effort. The midterm elections in which the network had desperately sought to prop up GOP candidates marked a resounding defeat for the president and his party, one which is being variously described by political analysts, strategists, and reporters as a “Blue-nami,” a “Republican cataclysm,” a “generational wipeout,” and the “biggest incumbent-party defeat since Watergate.”

For Fox’s troubles, the network received a significant drop in viewership leading up to Election Day — one apparently triggered by disaffected Republicans changing the channel — and election night attacks from a president who called in and lashed out at the network for being insufficiently supportive.

Consider the network and its personalities’ depravities over the past two years:

• They filled out the Trump administration with more than two dozen former Foxers hired to key positions — including Pete Hegseth, who was elevated from weekend morning host to defense secretary.
• They helped Hegseth and other extremist nominees overcome skepticism from Senate Republicans and gain confirmation.
• They touted the Trump administration’s purge of federal law enforcement and looked past his pardons of violent January 6 insurrectionists.
• They hired the president’s daughter-in-law to host a weekly program that she used to interview and propagandize for the Trump administration’s leaders.
• They spun for the administration’s unconscionable effort to send undocumented immigrants to a foreign prison notorious for torturing inmates and his acceptance of a $400 million plane from a foreign government.
• They cheered Trump’s war on the press and lashed out at its critics.
• They turned to Sean Hannity, a Trump operative who also hosts a show on the network, to lead special coverage of everything from the United States’ strikes on Iran to the GOP’s midterm “convention.”
• They obeyed Trump’s diktat to shut up about his old friend Jeffrey Epstein amid revelations of his deep relationship with the notorious deceased sex offender.
• They ignored and thus concealed from viewers a wide array of stories demonstrating the massive corruption of Trump, his family, and members of his administration.
• They downplayed the president’s historic unpopularity with the public.
• They justified the execution of Minnesota intensive care nurse Alex Pretti by federal law enforcement.
• They helped convince Trump to launch a war with Iran, then quickly declared that he had won it — and when it became a quagmire, the network stopped talking about it.
• They spent months ginning up “fear porn” about Democratic midterm candidates, most notably their explicitly anti-Muslim attacks on Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan and their bizarely homophobic attacks on Senate candidate James Talarico in Texas. (Both won on Tuesday.)

Fox traditionally molds itself in the image of the leading elements of the GOP, and its influence historically waxes when that party is out of power. But with Trump, his MAGA movement, and the Republican Party discredited at the ballot box, the network’s stars will be crawling out of a very deep hole that they dug themselves into.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters