'Meltdown': Trump puts Fox in 'terrible' position as 'awful news' cascades

Fox News' Laura Ingraham speaking at the Tampa Convention Center in Tampa, Florida on July 11, 2025 (Gage Skidmore/Flickr)

On Wednesday, September 16 — with the 2026 midterms a little over one and a half months away — right-wing Fox News released a poll showing that "Democrats are considered the party that would better handle inflation at a time when the cost of living and the economy are voters' top concerns." And according to The New Republic's Greg Sargent, this "absolutely awful news for Trump and Republicans" is putting Fox News in an increasingly tough position.

Fox News' Dana Blanton reported, "Overall, nearly two-thirds of voters (63 percent) say the Trump administration has made the economy worse, including a quarter of Republicans."

On The New Republic's podcast, "The Daily Blast," host Sargent discussed the Fox News poll with his guest, Media Matters' Matt Gertz, saying, "That's a big problem for a network that has the word 'news' in its title, yet also can't keep its audience if it tells the truth about Trump. So, Fox has taken to largely ignoring a lot of these very big bad stories. And this has us wondering what'll happen to the whole institutional superstructure that's arisen around our homegrown MAGA fascist movement if Trump soon passes from the scene."

Sargent described the Fox News polls as "just terrible for Trump," and he got no argument from Gertz.

Gertz, on the podcast, agreed that Trump's unpopularity is a big problem for Fox News — whose hosts have spent a lot of time aggressively defending the president.

Gertz told Sargent, "So, I've spent a lot of time over the years thinking and writing about the stories that Fox News talks about, their particular obsessions, their tendency to puff up Donald Trump, their attacks on all of his enemies. But what I've been spending more time on lately is thinking about what I call the 'negative space' — the stories that do not exist on Fox News, but are of a great deal of interest to people not only who don't listen to Fox News, but who might be of interest if Fox were to level with their audience about what's happening in the world. There's been a series of these, in particular since the summer began, where there's been an obvious interest in providing coverage, if this were in fact a news network, but Fox has been unable."

Gertz noted that Fox News hosts Sean Hannity and Mark Levin were "very enthusiastic" about Trump's decision to "go to war with Iran" — and it's coming back to haunt them.

Gertz told Sargent, "I've talked for years about this feedback loop between Fox and Trump, and I think this was its most consequential test. But a funny thing happened. The quick and easy war that all of these Fox stars were telling Donald Trump was on the table just didn't materialize the way they expected it to. Somehow, they were the only ones in American public life who were unaware that the counterattack for Iran is to close the Strait of Hormuz and shut down global trade in energy. And so, when that happened, the network had a problem. And they just stopped talking about it altogether."

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