Fox News Has a Growing Trump Iran War Problem: How to Cover an Unpopular Populist

(Sipa via AP Images)

For years, Fox News has had a remarkably straightforward business model. Find out what the audience wants to hear, tell them that, and when in doubt, follow Donald Trump. It worked spectacularly — historically high ratings, record revenue, and an audience so loyal it makes every other network television executive furiously jealous.

The Iran war is making that model complicated.

Here’s the problem that Fox News hasn’t quite figured out yet: Trump’s approval numbers are at historic lows — not just among Democrats, across the board. The campaign promises of no more forever wars, end inflation, and grow the economy that got him elected (and that Fox spent four years not unfailingly pinning on Biden) have all gotten steadily worse in the past year, and materially worse in the last month.

Since the Iran War started, gas prices are suddenly way up. Global shipping is strained and destabilizing a suddenly fragile global economy. Long-standing American allies are getting hurt in ways that aren’t their fault. And the president who helped start all this isn’t just disclaiming responsibility — he’s blaming the very allies he spent a year insulting and hitting with draconian tariffs.

That’s a lot to ignore. And yet…

The media beat newsletters have revealed palpable excitement about something they’re calling a crack in Fox’s pro-war consensus, which I cover in today’s Mediaite One Sheet.)

Laura Ingraham, who has long been of Trump’s most dutiful defenders on Fox, opened Monday’s show asking whether the president had fully grasped the risks of the conflict. “Was the president fully briefed,” she asked, “and able to understand the complexity of this?” Status founder Oliver Darcy flagged it as a departure in his Tuesday newsletter. Fox host Johnny Joey Jones went further, publicly begging Trump to “get the hell out of” Iran as quickly as possible. Stuart Varney opened his Fox Business show declaring the war “not going that well” as oil approached $100 a barrel and gas closed in on $4 a gallon. Even Fox’s business hosts are feeling it — Dagen McDowell said she was “eating doughnuts out of anxiety” over the economic data.

Here’s what all of that adds up to, according to the chattering class: a pro-war media ecosystem that is starting to fracture, at least at the margins.It’s a compelling narrative, even based on a whiff of truth. But it’s also mostly wrong — or at least, it’s asking the wrong question.

Spend a full news cycle actually watching Fox News  (not just the clipped gotcha moments shared by Acyn and ATRupar on X) and the network isn’t turning on Trump. It’s doing something more useful to the White House. It’s deciding what not to cover, and filling that space with the reliable chestnuts that have always worked: immigration crime, Democratic incompetence, liberal media bias. They play the hits for viewers who don’t mind hearing Stairway to Heaven for the 8,987th time.

So watch Fox for a day and you’ll see it gravitating toward a particular set of facts. Iran’s weakness. The necessity of the mission. The heroic success of the U.S. military. How the left is actively rooting for the U.S. to lose. When criticism does appear, it’s aimed away from Trump himself. He may not have been fully briefed. He may have received bad information. He may be navigating forces beyond his control. Trump is suggested to oddly be the victim in all of this, as bizarre as that sounds.

Doubt is permitted on Fox News, but agency is not.

None of this is new, and the pattern goes back further than this war. In 2023 I watched Fox essentially ignore former Trump chief of staff John Kelly going on the record to confirm that Trump called dead American soldiers “suckers” and “losers.” This wasn’t a leak or an anonymous source — it was a four-star general, Trump’s own chief of staff, and architect of Trump’s initial draconian and effective border policy saying it directly to CNN’s Jake Tapper.

Yet Fox’s response was the same as it always is: silence, a quick pivot, and an audience that never had to reckon with what a man who served Trump directly had just said out loud. The mechanism here is identical.

Sadly, there’s no transcript search that can effectively reveal which topics or narratives were NOT discussed. There’s no chyron that clearly indicates when a story is overlooked. What exists is a pattern: what gets repeated, what gets sustained, what gets treated as the main event.

Watch CNN or MS NOW, and the Hormuz disruption, the economic ripple effects, and Trump’s own statements are front and center. Watch Fox and those same elements show up occasionally, reframed, never allowed to drive the story. The difference isn’t access to facts. It’s a choice of which facts matter most, made consistently, in only one direction.

And it’s worth being clear about something the newsletter class tends to understate: Fox isn’t just a passive mirror of its audience. It is the most powerful media organization in the country, and it has spent years actively shaping what its viewers believe is true, what they’re angry about, and who they blame. The idea that Fox is helplessly following its audience rather than leading it is flattering to Fox and wrong.
The media newsletter set isn’t wrong to notice the strain. Ingraham’s question matters. Jones’s warning matters. Varney’s alarm matters. But none of it adds up to the suggested and dramatic fracture. In a system as large and adaptive as Fox News, uncomfortable moments get absorbed. That’s the whole point.

So all of this raises the inevitable thought experiment: What would Fox actually look like if it were genuinely breaking with Trump on Iran?

It would look like sustained scrutiny instead of one-off segments. Direct blame instead of speculation about bad briefings and manipulative advisers. The central contradiction of this war — the U.S. acting as both instigator and bystander — is treated as the premise of coverage, not the thing to explain away. We’re not there. We’ll almost certainly never get there.

Which brings Fox to a problem it hasn’t faced before. Its entire business model for the last decade has been built around one man’s populist movement. Fine when the populist is popular. But Trump’s political standing is in serious trouble right now — historically bad numbers, a war with no clear exit, and an economy moving in the wrong direction. Fox has more power in that dynamic than it usually gets credit for. It has shaped this audience’s beliefs for years. The question is whether it can — or will — lead them somewhere new.

Because here’s the thing about building a media empire around a populist: it works great until the populist stops being popular. Then you have a choice. Follow the audience as it drifts away, or try to hold them in place with the same playbook that’s getting harder to run every week.

Fox hasn’t made that choice yet. But the Iran war is forcing the question faster than anyone expected. The media beat noticed the doubt, which is real.

A system that controls what it ignores doesn’t need to change what it says. Until the people watching it do.

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

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