WASHINGTON — Election night ended at the White House with the discovery of something the rest of the country had known for more than a decade: Fox News exists, and the President is not happy about it.
The President spent Tuesday evening on the phone with the network’s election-night coverage, and by Wednesday morning had issued his verdict on the Republican wipeout. The network, he wrote on Truth Social, “bears responsibility for these losses”. He called one of its commentators “dumb as a rock.” He accused the network’s parent company of making donations to Democrats. He blamed, in quick succession, Fox News, never-always-Republican governors, and “lazy” candidates, before arriving at the explanation that comforted him most: “I wasn’t on the ballot, and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!”
This site extends its sympathies to the network. Not because the accusation is true — no television channel in the history of television has ever caused an election — but because the accusation arrives at the end of a long romance. The President has watched this network more faithfully than any subscriber in Ohio. That is not betrayal. That is a viewership record.
A decade of loyalty, for the record, deserves documentation:
A DECADE OF LOYALTY: THE RECEIPT
- Primetime coverage for roughly ten years, every night, including holidays, including the holidays nobody celebrates anymore.
- An anchor corps employed, dressed, and returned to hotels at the airport nearest the story.
- Carried free on basic cable in every truck stop, barbershop, and waiting room between here and the Rio Grande.
- Zero elections rigged, as far as the audience can tell, and full credit for rating records claimed under oath.
The network’s chief executive has offered his own theory for the ratings declines: “viewer fatigue.” Read that however you like. This desk reads it as the sound of a company discovering that a country can be tired the way a road is tired — from being driven on, all day, by everyone, in both directions.
What the White House is doing, in its own confused way, is applying the standard test of every administration at 2 a.m.: finding the room’s most reliable witness and telling him he lied. The skeptics calling this a purge are simply unfamiliar with Washington, where gratitude has never been a storage category. The White House did not turn on Fox News this week and lose an election. It turned on Fox News this week and saw an election it had stopped visiting years ago. The network cannot be blamed for having eyes. It can only be blamed for the country agreeing with them.
By Wednesday afternoon, staffers at this site had passed the hat for flowers, and a florist two blocks from the network’s newsroom was arranging them. The card, at the florist’s suggestion, read: “With sympathy. From the channel you already changed to.”
The President, for his part, appears to have enjoyed the evening. Photographs obtained by wire services show him at various points holding a red cap, embroidered with the single word VETO, which he has reportedly not yet used, which is not the same as never.