By 11pm on election night, Fox News was declaring Donald Trump “a phoenix from the ashes”.
“[He’s] the biggest political phoenix from the ashes that we’ve seen in the history of politics,” said anchor Bret Baier.
As counts in some swing states were starting to show Trump in the lead, and Trump’s chance of winning seemed to increase, some of Fox’s biggest stars were writing the first draft of his comeback victory.
“This is the most incredible political comeback that we’ve seen since 1968,” said commentator Ben Domenech. It will be “not just the greatest political comeback of all time,” added Laura Ingraham. “It will be the greatest comeback in history.”
Fox News is still firmly in the center of the conservative media universe, despite growing competition from the likes of NewsMax, the One American News (OAN) network, and myriad conservative podcasts. The US broadcaster remains the most-watched cable news network in the country, consistently beating CNN and MSNBC in the ratings.
Though none of the crucial seven battleground states had been called by the network by 11pm on election night, Fox’s roundtable appeared to be getting ready for a Trump victory, speculating on what it would say about the future of politics and American media.
Sean Hannity, who did not make any election night appearances in 2020, said on Tuesday night: “After all they have thrown at this man, after all they have done to this man, with all the media that wouldn’t even vet [Harris] and her radical positions, what would this say about legacy media? It’s dead.”
Jesse Watters told viewers that a Trump win would be a “mandate” to run the country. A Trump victory would be a “complete rejection of everything [the media] has been telling us about Donald Trump”, he added.
Multiple Fox commentators noted that Trump appeared to be doing well with Black and Hispanic voters, noting the “diverse coalition” that Trump’s campaign has pulled together this election. Commentator Dana Perino called it the most “racially diverse political coalition that we’ve seen in generations”.
Things were looking quite different on election night in 2020. Just before 11.30pm, Fox News called Arizona in favor of Joe Biden. The call was pivotal. Arizona had voted for Trump in 2016, a slide to Biden would suggest Donald Trump’s grasp had loosened since the 2016 election.
The early call infuriated Trump, who had come to see Fox News as a friendly extension of his communications team, frequently calling into the network during his presidency and appearing for exclusive interviews.
Ever since then, the network, owned by media scion Rupert Murdoch, has had to navigate a sometimes tense relationship with Trump. The former president has given the network its highest ratings. On election night in 2020, the network got 14.1 million viewers between 8pm and 11pm – 5 million more than CNN during the same time block, and more than double the viewership of other news networks.
But the cozy relationship has also gotten the network in trouble. Fox News paid voting machine maker Dominion $787.5m in a settlement over misinformation in the 2020 election. It still has a $2.7bn lawsuit from Smartmatic in the courts.
Going into the 2024 presidential election, the network has been walking a tightrope. It hosted a town hall with Trump in January, the first time the former president had appeared on the network in almost two years. He has called into the network more and participated in another town hall hosted by the network in October. Murdoch, who in 2020 said that “Trump will be becoming irrelevant”, showed up to the Republican national convention in Milwaukee in July.
But Trump and Fox News have put some distance between each other since 2016. In the days leading up to the election, Trump told reporters that he was annoyed that the network kept playing clips from Oprah’s speech supporting Harris.
“You know who else should be ashamed of themselves is Fox,” Trump said. “Everybody thinks Fox is so pro-Trump. They’re not pro-Trump at all.”
But on Tuesday night, even with most swing states too close to call, Fox brought some of the network’s most Trump-friendly commentators on air to raise the prospect of a Trump resurrection – and discuss its possible implications.
“It would be up to the Democrats and the media,” Watters said. “What’s their posture toward the greatest comeback victory that we’ve ever seen?”
Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage