Texts Between Fox News Host and Trump White House Revealed By January 6th committee
Among other tidbits from the January 6th committee, text messages from three prominent Fox News hosts begging then-President Trump to intercede and do something are now public.
Three Fox News hosts who have been among Donald Trump’s most ardent media boosters were so horrified by the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol that they begged the then-president’s chief of staff to convince him to intercede, according to newly aired messages from that day.
“Mark, the president needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home,” Fox News prime-time star Laura Ingraham texted Mark Meadows. “This is hurting all of us. He is destroying his legacy.”
The text messages were read aloud by Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) during a Monday night hearing of the House select committee investigating the events of Jan. 6, which voted to hold Meadows in criminal contempt for defying a subpoena to appear before the committee.
“According to the records, multiple Fox News hosts knew the president needed to act immediately,” Cheney said. “They texted Mark Meadows, and he has turned over those texts.”
Ingraham, as well her colleagues Sean Hannity and Brian Kilmeade, urged Meadows to implore Trump to take the riot seriously and to work to protect his accomplishments as president.
Kilmeade, who co-hosts the morning show “Fox & Friends,” urged Meadows in a text message to “please get him on TV.” He said that the riot was “destroying everything you have accomplished.”
Hannity asked Meadows if Trump could “make a statement” and “ask people to leave the Capitol.”
The texts, which were among thousands of pages of messages and documents that Meadows turned over to the committee before deciding not to cooperate further, demonstrate a high level of alarm about the events of that day among Fox’s top opinion hosts, two of them fretting about the long-term impact on Trump’s reputation.
During the hearing, Cheney also read out frantic texts to Meadows from the president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., who called on his father to “condemn” the actions of the rioters and make a speech from the Oval Office.
The hearing was not carried on Fox News on Monday evening. Representatives for the network have not yet responded to a request for comment about the texts.
But the texts stand in contrast with some of the messages that Ingraham, Hannity and Kilmeade sent to Fox News viewers in appearances on the night of Jan. 6.
While Ingraham that afternoon called the attack “disgraceful” and said that “the president needs to tell everyone to leave the building,” later that night, she suggested on-air that some of the rioters might have been left-wing agitators rather than Trump supporters. “I have never seen Trump rally attendees wearing helmets, black helmets, brown helmets, black backpacks — the uniforms you saw in some of these crowd shots,” she said.
Kilmeade made a similar point in an appearance that night on Fox. “I do not know Trump supporters that have ever demonstrated violence that I know of in a big situation,” he said.
While Hannity expressed his displeasure with the riot — “I don’t want to ever see our Capitol building breached like this ever again” — he also cast doubt about whether Trump supporters were largely responsible. Of the Jan. 6 participants, Hannity said that “the majority of them were peaceful.”
Hannity hosted Meadows on his Fox News show on Monday night but did not address his messages to the former Trump aide.
That is what spin looks like.Report
They see the end goal of their 50 year march to overturn the new Deal, roll back civil rights, and instill white conservative male minority rule. Even absent Donald Trump they believe they are winning and will continue to do so.
We keep underestimating them at our own peril, even though they have been VERY clear about who they are and what they are doing. That they would do this on personal cell phones, turn it over willingly and then seek to gum up the works by not answering questions about it ANOTHER example among many of their complete lack of shame or caring.Report
The Fox News hosts didn’t realize that the coup WAS Trump’s intended legacy.
From the standpoint of MAGAs Trump’s mandate is to overturn democracy and install himself as a strongman by any means necessary, and he has the stones to do what others are too afraid to contemplate.
This bit of news will make the tee vee hosts look bad to the base, not Trump.Report
Agreed. Much like Abbot and Texas have now cleared the way to end Roe, Trump was perfectly content to finish the Republican’s 50 year march to authoritarianism.Report
While they seem disconnected, I see a deeply disturbing pattern emerging:
We see repeated instances of American corporations, institutions and individuals surrendering to demands from the autocratic regimes around the world, such as censoring media or college courses that offend China.
Or people like Tucker Carlson delivering straight Russian government propaganda on the highest rated cable show on Fox.
Popular pundits lauding repressive governments like Hungary or Poland as exemplars to be followed, or directly condemning democracy itself without suffering any pushback.
Combined with the complacency and lassitude shown towards our homegrown anti-democracy movement, it shows me that the institutions we depend on to defend democracy are unequal to the task.
That they can be silenced or bought or bullied very easily.Report
And by the time the vast majority of the electorate rises to the damage done, it will be too late . . . .Report
How Ironic that Ted Cruz’s former communications director is essentially calling them all out:
https://www.thebulwark.com/fox-hosts-begged-trump-to-stop-the-january-6-attack-on-the-capitol/Report
Vox has a good essay on this but it does fill me with a lot of doom and gloom: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2021/12/14/22834009/fox-texts-trump-meadows-ingraham-hannity-capitol-riot
“This isn’t the only issue on which Fox’s dishonesty has been exposed. On one of the fundamental policy topics of the day, the pandemic, the right’s most influential news network is saying one thing to its audience and doing another in private.
Fox News’s programming on vaccines and vaccine mandates has been relentlessly hostile. Yet more than 90 percent of Fox News employees are fully vaccinated, and the company has a vaccine mandate that’s actually stricter than the one President Joe Biden has proposed for large corporations. Hosts tend not to mention this on air and, on the rare occasions that they do, they mislead their audience about it…..Of course, not all plutocratic populism is disingenuous. Some of the right’s billionaires, like leading Trump backer Rebekah Mercer, appear to be true-believer culture warriors in addition to being plutocrats.
This is consistent with a separate body of political science research that finds that, on the whole, self-interest is less politically salient than partisan and cultural identity. Broadly speaking, people identify with a political party based on cultural affinities; once they do, they tend to bring their economic views in line with whatever the party’s mainstream is. That’s part of why white working-class voters vote against social safety net expansions that would benefit them.”Report
In a development foreseen by just about everybody, it was senior Republicans, such as Rick Perry who were urging Republican-controlled states to simply overturn the votes and install their own electors.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/17/politics/rick-perry-jan-6-text-mark-meadows-nov-4/
Donald Trump could vanish tomorrow and the Republican war on American democracy would continue apace.Report