As Election Day came to an end, President Donald Trump began lashing out at his allies, including the network that was instrumental to the rise of his political movement, raging on social media that “FoxNews bears responsibility for these losses.” According to longtime New Republic political commentator Greg Sargent, this and other vitriol the president directed at Fox over the course of the night sound the “death knell” for MAGA, as Trump’s growing breakup with the network will leave him without a strong media platform to enable his lies.
“Trump’s fury has proven illuminating,” writes Sargent. “Because the logical extension of his own claims is that the MAGA movement will almost certainly not be sustainable going forward, at least not in anything like its current form.” As Sargent elaborates, “The MAGA coalition basically disintegrated on Tuesday night. Democrats flipped at least five Senate seats in states Trump carried by double digits, which could rise to seven if Democrats win in Alaska and Mississippi. Trump’s 2024 gains among Latinos and young voters — which were central to claims that MAGA had become a multi-racial, multi-generational working class realignment — evaporated.” What’s more, Democrats split the non-college voter, increased their vote share among working-class whites by 14 points relative to 2024, and won white women, reversing Trump’s 2024 support among them. At the same time, Democrats “forged deep into MAGA country,” flipping seats in rural places that were once unthinkable.
“Yet as the bad news rolled in, Trump raged at … Fox News,” writes Sargent. “He insisted that Fox ‘bears responsibility for these losses’ because it sometimes features the ‘Dumocrat opposition’ on the air. He fumed at Fox for its history of publishing polls that displease him. He even called into Fox to complain.” In Sargent’s estimation, all of this offers “a deeper revelation of MAGA failure" as Fox has functioned as a major disinformational support system for Trump and the MAGA movement. According to Sargent, it has "propagandized on behalf of his Iran war, sanitized his ethnic cleansing campaign, and hidden his corruption and self-dealing from public view, among many other things.” Essential to that role was plausible deniability. Fox does feature Democrats and has a reputable polling operation, which allows it to obscure its role as a “propaganda operation for Trump and his movement.” According to Sargent, “The Fox-Trump alliance has in a sense operated as a bigger experiment in running totalitarian-style state propaganda on behalf of a dictatorial presidency.”
“This whole project failed spectacularly on Tuesday night," notes Sargent, asserting that "Trump’s criticism of Fox is actually an attack on Fox for not doing enough to deceive its viewers.” And to a certain extent, Sargent thinks he's right. Fox was unable to trick voters into believing that the war was worth fighting or that Trump’s policies have wrought economic success. The MAGA agenda is so unpopular that it was overwhelmingly rejected by the national majority. “No amount of propaganda and lies from Fox could make any of it palatable,” writes Sargent, “nor will it be able to going forward.” As he concludes, “If Trump’s sound and fury signifies anything, it’s that it’s very hard to see where this movement goes from here, or what must happen for it to endure.”
