Liberal Forum

Donald Trump Has An Ace To Play Against Fox News

When Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump launched a crusade against Fox News and its star anchor, Megyn Kelly, last summer, many political insiders saw the move as the beginning of the end of Trump’s upstart campaign.

Why would anyone seeking the Republican presidential nomination attack a network that reaches huge swaths of the Republican primary electorate?

One answer is that Trump was angry with Kelly and Fox News after the anchor asked him a tough question during a Republican presidential debate in August.

But in a newly published article Sunday in New York Magazine, author and journalist Gabriel Sherman reveals how Trump came to possess ultra-insider information about Fox News and its founder, Roger Ailes, that could be damaging if it were ever to be made public.

It’s this leverage, Sherman writes, that has so far discouraged Fox News from launching an all-out war on Trump.

Below is an excerpt from Sherman’s piece:



Sherman’s reporting may also help explain why Trump was so willing to drop out of a major Fox News debate in Iowa in January, a decision that might have hobbled the campaign of a typical GOP candidate.

In March, Trump participated in a Fox News debate in Detroit, where he flagrantly violated the debate rules by consulting with his campaign managerduring a commercial break. Fox did not penalize the Trump campaign.

As CNN reported, Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski refused to leave the stage when Fox News staff asked him to.

Fox said the consultation happened quickly, and other campaigns’ managers were allowed to talk to their candidates as well once the channel realized what was going on.

Even though Trump is accused of breaking debate rules to consult with Lewandowski during other debates, Fox News was the only network to then invite other campaigns backstage, CNN reported after the early March debate.

A spokeswoman for the Trump campaign declined to comment on Sherman’s report.