U.S. President Donald Trump gestures during a press conference at a NATO summit in The Hague, Netherlands June 25, 2025. REUTERS/Yves Herman/File Photo
Since longtime Fox News host and President Donald Trump loyalist Maria Bartiromo was fired last week, those in the MAGA realm have been warning one another that the famously conservative network is out to “cancel” them. These claims have sprung up across conservative media, and were renewed on Wednesday when former vice presidential candidate and proto-Trump politician Sarah Palin took to social media to declare she’d be fired from Fox for “disobeying,” and that the same fate would come to similar “independent characters.”
Palin posted on X that she was “cancelled” by Fox twice. The first, she claimed, came when she was fired from the network “after refusing to sit quiet during NYT’s false and defaming allegations against me that I was to blame for the mass murder in AZ causing the deaths of a federal judge, an innocent child and others, and injury of Rep. Gabby Giffords (D). Fox wouldn’t defend me so I defended myself after being told by Roger Ailes I was not to talk about it on the air. Fox was capitalizing on the controversy while my reputation was getting ripped to threads [SIC], so I spoke up, as any responsible, ethical, innocent American would. They canned me for ‘disobeying,’ as per word from on high.”
Giffords and 18 others were shot during a 2011 assassination attempt. Six were killed, and Giffords – having been shot in the head – was forced to resign to focus on her recovery. The attack came shortly after Palin’s PAC ran ads showing Giffords’ district targeted by crosshairs. At the time, then-Fox owner Rupert Murdoch received calls for Palin’s firing, and the network declined to renew her contract in 2015.
According to Palin, she went on to anger the powers that be at Fox again. “Later,” she claimed, “no longer an employee, they cancelled my scheduled [Jesse Watters] interview after I shared my opinion with [Fox host Eric Bolling] that [Rupert Murdoch] handing management reins to his sons resulted in the network straying from the Right, due to the sons’ liberal-leaning wives’ influence. I was never allowed on-air again. (I stand by my stated observation that - good, bad or ugly - Fox changed when Rupert’s influence subsided.)” She went on to say that this “behind-the-scenes” experience taught her the network has a “prerogative to shift wherever they want to go, and more power to them exercising their absolute right to hire and fire whomever they deem best fits their agenda, but interesting that independent characters refusing to go along just to get along (all to collect a paycheck) seem to be the ones shunned. I went rogue by speaking up for truth. I’ll continue to do so.”
Palin posted this screed in response to a clip from Trump ally Steve Bannon’s podcast, in which senior Trump advisor Peter Navarro claimed, “What’s left at Fox is a lineup of chickens. No one was willing to stick their neck out the way Maria Bartiromo did. You will not see a solidarity walkout at Fox for Maria. It damn well should happen, but it won’t.” Navarro argued that Fox CEO Suzanne Scott had “muzzled” Bartiromo, and as Bannon’s podcasts declared, “MAGA is next.”
