Don’t Look Now, But Trump’s Own Media Base is Revolting

By any objective measure, President Donald Trump has had a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week.

In just this past week, we saw the growing list of Trump’s troubles continue to bulk up. There are the legal entanglements, the troubling inconsistencies from his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, the very public threat to own a government shutdown if he didn’t get congressional border wall funding, his surprising Syrian withdrawal that almost no one agrees with… all of this went down this week. And that overlooks a number of cabinet issues that, in any other administration, would each take a dire political toll.

And yet, impossibly, none of these represent the biggest existential threat to the Trump administration, nor are they what this column is about. The biggest reason why Trump will look back at this week with icy horror is that it was the first time that the president’s very loyal support group of pro-Trump media outlets turned on him, and started openly criticizing his actions in a manner that we haven’t seen before.

Where to begin? The once-loyal media outlets now criticizing Trump’s political missteps and policy moves include:

Fox & Friends, whose denizens laid into Trump for losing the battle over the border wall on Wednesday. On Thursday, they shifted more of that blame to congressional Republicans, but that segment was followed by Brian Kilmeade’s shocking rebuke of Trump’s sudden announcement of the withdrawal of US troops from Syria and Trump’s claim that ISIS had been defeated in Syria. Kilmeade even drew rare praise from competitor Joe Scarborough after calling Trump’s foreign policy “stunning and irresponsible.”

On Wednesday, Ann Coulter predicted that Trump’s Border Wall folly will doom him politically. Coulter told The Daily Caller, “Either Trump never intended to build a wall and was scamming voters from the beginning or he hasn’t the first idea in how to get it done and no interest in finding out… My prediction is his support will evaporate and Trump will very likely not finish his term and definitely not be elected to a second term.”

And even professional blowhard (and fellow Palm Beach neighbor) Rush Limbaugh got in on the Trump hate (though to be fair, has made sure his animus was primarily directed toward the Republican Congress.) Limbaugh strafed the author of Art of the Deal by saying “Trump is going to get less than nothing because this compromise strips out the $1.6 billion for the wall that the Senate Appropriations Committee had already approved weeks ago, that’s gone too.”

The last vestige for the pro-Trump point of view is the 9 p.m. hour on Fox News. and fortunately for both the president and the titular host,  Sean Hannity was off on vacation this week. But even the guest host (and not ready for prime time player) Dan Bongino had to qualify his critical comments on the border wall failure by reminding viewers that he was still a loyal supporter of the president before questioning the counsel he’s following on border security.

Is Trump’s’ media base in full revolt? It’s too early to tell, but the torches are lit, and the pitchforks are being sharpened. At a minimum,  this week’s event showed cracks in the foundation. And anyone experienced in construction knows that cracks are never fully repaired.

The larger question is this: Which organism is more important in this symbiotic relationship? That depends, literally and figuratively, on the host.

Individual pundits like Ann Coulter, for example, don’t really enjoy a large enough constituency to compete with Trump’s influence. At this point, turning against the president will likely come at the expense of those pundits’ audiences, which are likely to choose loyalty to Trump over, say, Coulter’s shrill style.

Fox News, on the other hand, has far more power in this dynamic, and Trump can ill-afford to lose the Fox News viewer base.

Despite all of the controversy and administrative missteps, Trump has maintained a remarkably steady approval rating in the low 40s. This is a result of his craven smears of any journalism critical of the job he is doing as “Fake News,” but also because of the siloed nature of opinion news programming. Fox News is the most watched cable news outlet by far, and regular viewers are accustomed to hearing nary a critical word said about President Trump. Until now.

I’ve previously made the point that Trump will never be impeached until Fox News ends their blindly loyal support. I’ve also argued that the next Howard Baker (the Republican Senator who famously put country ahead of party and made the Watergate investigation a bipartisan one) is far more likely to come from Fox News stable of hosts than the Republican side of either hall of Congress.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen Trump criticism on Trump-friendly outlets. But this week felt like an entirely new level of frustration from outlets that have previously shared little to none. Most of it is focused on what looks like a failed border wall agenda, in light of the “Build that Wall” base that both voted for Trump and watches Fox News.

Trump is entering the second half of what, based on current polling figures, feels like a one-term White House stint. And this last two years will be very different with a Democratic-controlled House of Representatives. Threats of investigations, subpoenas, and divided government suggest a tough couple of years for Trump.

And without the support from his previously loyal media outlets, it’s difficult to imagine that Trump will enjoy the next two years.

Colby Hall is the Founding Editor of Mediaite.com and believes that loyal political journalism is both oxymoronic and moronic.

[Photo credit: SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images]

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.

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