Fox News Is Reclaiming Economic Populism — Leaving Trump’s ‘Con Job’ Excuse Behind

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In the week following Zohran Mamdani’s stunning victory in the New York City mayoral race, Fox News did what Fox News reliably does with unfamiliar left-wing figures: it reached for the culture-war playbook. A Ugandan-born Democratic Socialist who grew up on the Upper West Side and became the city’s first Muslim mayor — you couldn’t create a better political foe in a Rupert Murdoch-owned laboratory.

But while Mamdani made for excellent character casting, he wasn’t really the story. What New Yorkers responded to was not his résumé — a 34-year-old democratic socialist with limited executive experience — but the agenda he ran on: affordability above all else. That message drove historic turnout, especially among younger and working-class voters who don’t typically turn out in droves to vote in mayoral elections.

For many, Mamdani is less a sign of socialist ascendance than a vessel for a mandate about the crushing cost of living.  And Fox, to its credit, seemed to recognize this faster than most. The network has notably treated Mamdani less as an ideological outlier than as a news peg — and more as a frame to return to covering something larger and more urgent: the economic reality that helped elect him, and President Donald Trump, ironically, in the first place.

As my friend and former colleague, Aidan McLaughlin, noted on social media, over the last six days, Fox anchors, correspondents, and guests have used the word “affordability” far more than they did before last week’s election. According to the media monitoring service SnapStream, it was uttered 295 times in the previous six days, compared to just 102 in the seven days prior. It was uttered on-air only 42 times the prior week. Notice a trend?

I’ve been critical of Fox News for ignoring storylines before. In this instance, I come to offer praise: This seems far less like random variation and more like an intentional editorial decision. And, more importantly, it reveals something important about where the network sees the audience — and where President Trump does not.

The conservative media ecosystem spent years railing against inflation under former President Joe Biden, rightly understanding that the price of eggs carried more emotional charge than any campaign speech. But today, with Republicans running Washington, prices haven’t meaningfully eased. In many categories, they’ve worsened.

And while Trump claims the economy is booming, even his most loyal media surrogates refuse to join in on his gaslighting. During an interview that aired Monday night, Fox News host Laura Ingraham pressed Trump on this issue, asking, “Is affordability a voter perception issue of the economy, or is there more that needs to be done by Republicans?”

“More than anything else, it’s a con job by the Democrats. Are you ready? Costs are way down,” Trump bizarrely noted.

“They put out something, ‘Say today, the costs are up,'” the president continued. “They feed it to the anchors of ABC, CBS, and NBC, and a lot of other, CNN et etc. It’s like a standard– I’ll never forget they used a word like ‘manufactured.’ Do you remember the word manufactured? ‘It’s a manufactured economy.’ Nobody uses that word. Every anchor broke in, ‘Manufactured.’ They do exactly what they say.”

He then complained about “a rigged system” before returning to rising prices. “So, are you ready? Costs are way down,” he insisted. “Gasoline is gonna be hitting $2 pretty soon, or around $2. Gasoline is at $2.70 now.” The average price of a gallon of gas in the U.S. is $3.07, as of this writing.

Ingraham followed up by asking, “So, you’re saying that voters are misperceiving how they feel?” to which Trump pivoted aimlessly to Biden and Kamala.

As Semafor’s Dave Weigel snarked on social media, “Murdochverse trying to turn Trump in this direction; Trump continues to say it’s a big con, gas is 59 cents now, etc.”

The shift isn’t theoretical. On a recent America’s Newsroom segment, anchors spent nearly ten minutes breaking down grocery inflation, leaning heavily on firsthand viewer emails and Data Download-style charts. What stood out was what they didn’t say about Trump. There was no attempt to prop up his claim that prices are improving. Instead, the segment drifted toward a more uncomfortable truth: Trump’s own newly expanded tariffs are contributing to higher prices.

Trump’s tariffs are intended to sound like punishment for foreign adversaries, and politically, they’re tidy. But economists across the spectrum note they function like taxes on American consumers — and Fox is now saying that out loud.

That’s the tell. The network is repositioning itself  back to the voice of economic grievance that was so effective in the last general election — even when it complicates a pro-Trump storyline.

It’s not just language — it’s tone. Fox’s affordability coverage feels less like the partisan ammunition it was during the 2024 campaign and more like consumer reporting. The frame is evolving from “Biden made your life expensive” to “your life is expensive — and you’re not wrong to be angry.” It leaves Trump exposed to any viewer savvy enough to do the math. Trump’s political superpower has never been ideology, but rather his ability to sound like his supporters. But on the issue that defines daily life more than any other, he’s currently talking past them, perhaps because he cannot handle the ugly truth before him.

Fox, meanwhile, is signaling that economic pain is the new organizing principle — not immigration, not wokeness, not campus theatrics. And while the network is clearly not breaking with Trump openly, it’s creating space between what he insists is true and what viewers know is real. And given the hand-in-glove relationship the two have often enjoyed, this is potentially a huge deal, especially with midterms less than a year away.

Fox News has become a juggernaut of political media — record revenue, ratings, and even a successful streaming platform. And none of that is by accident — it’s come by hard work and savvy recognition of what its viewers are feeling and want to hear about. This is why this should be deeply concerning for the Trump administration.

The stakes are straightforward: when Fox has to choose between narrative loyalty and audience relevance, it will choose the audience—every time.

Trump can spin gas prices into fairy tales. But Fox has made a subtler — and potentially destabilizing — choice: listening to its viewers over its standard-bearer. And once that shift begins, it rarely reverses.

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