U.S. President Donald Trump delivers remarks on his administration's healthcare policies, in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., August 31, 2026. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
Last week, Fox News dropped a media bombshell when it announced that Maria Bartiromo – a longtime anchor and ally of President Donald Trump – had been fired. According to political columnist Liz Dye, Bartiromo’s mistake was simple: she forgot that Trump wasn’t her boss, but that Fox – which has been at odds with the president – was.
As Dye explained on Wednesday, “Bartiromo got axed for leaking confidential company information to the White House. She made the mistake of thinking that the network and the administration were one and the same — an understandable error, since they operated as a seamless entity for almost a decade. Bartiromo believed that her job was to support Trump and use her platform to let his agents spread their message. And for many years, it was. But now Trump is a lame duck whose disastrous policies are driving the country into a ditch, and Fox is trying to execute a delicate pivot. Bartiromo doesn’t do delicate, and she’s not about to pivot. So now she’s out.”
According to Dye, this breakup has been a long time coming. Trump has long held a close relationship with Fox and its hosts, to the point where the network would back down from punishing pundits at his behest. For example, notes Dye, “In 2019, Jeanine Pirro was suspended after questioning whether Rep. Ilhan Omar’s hijab was ‘indicative of her adherence to Sharia law, which in itself is antithetical to the United States Constitution.’ She got her job back after Trump publicly demanded she be reinstated, warning the network not to go ‘politically correct’ and hand its ratings lead to competitors. Pirro is now the U.S. attorney for D.C., while another former Fox host, Pete Hegseth, serves as secretary of defense. And the exchange goes both ways: Trump’s former Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany has her own show, and Deputy Press Secretary Raj Shah served for years as senior vice president.”
Amidst this dynamic, Trump took it personally when Fox accurately called Arizona for Joe Biden during the 2020 election. Afterwards, Trump took to social media to tell his followers to look to “great alternatives” like OANN and Newsmax, Fox’s then-emerging far-right media competitors. This set off alarms within the network, which then made “the calculated decision to push Trump’s flagrant lies about a stolen election.”
Bartiromo was one of the network’s main purveyors of Trump’s election lies. For example, the day after the election, she hosted election denier Sidney Powell, whose “evidence” of voter fraud included a rambling email – reviewed by Bartiromo – from a person who claimed that “The Wind tells me I'm a ghost” and ”it appears that I was shot in the back shortly after submitting a tip to the FBI two years ago.” The email also noted that its writer had dreams that were “clearly predictions,” and that former Supreme Court Justice Antony Scalia was shot and killed during a “weeklong human hunting expedition.” Later, when Fox was hauled into court for spreading Trump’s lies, Bartiromo conceded that the email was “kooky,” but she never pushed back against Powell’s claims on air. Fox didn’t pressure its hosts to do so either, and ended up paying nearly $800 million in damages for its role in the denial campaign.
While Fox remains a “conservative behemoth,” it learned its lesson about pushing Trump’s most blatant lies. It fired Tucker Carlson in 2023 for a variety of reasons, including his participation in the big lie, and the network has backed down in other cases when Trump’s allies have attempted to stretch the truth too far. “And while the network remains comically pro-Trump,” writes Dye, “it seems to have dawned on management that yoking itself to a president whose approval ratings are sinking like a stone is not a long-term growth strategy. On July 16, Trump gave what he promised would be a blockbuster speech proving his electoral fraud claims once and for all. Fox dutifully aired it live during primetime, then instructed staff to give the fraud claims no further oxygen.”
Bartiromo, however, continued to push Trump’s conspiracies, scheduling an interview with Trump’s aide Peter Navarro, who had been convicted of contempt after refusing to testify before the January 6 Committee. According to Dye, “When Bartiromo canceled on Navarro, she forwarded the internal text from management warning against covering Trump’s speech. Navarro then passed it to the White House as evidence of Fox’s perfidy, inadvertently sealing Bartiromo’s fate. Bartiromo subordinated the needs of her employer to those of her real boss in the White House,” and learned who her real boss was the hard way.
