Hours before Republican voters in Iowa decide on their presidential nominee, GOP frontrunner Donald Trump spent much of his morning whining about how his once-favorite cable news morning show was covering the race.
Trump’s complaints about Fox News come just days after the twice-impeached ex-president was given an extremely friendly town hall event by the network. Besides giving Trump the opportunity to counter-program CNN’s GOP debate featuring his top two rivals for the GOP nomination, last week’s forum also represented the first time Trump had been interviewed live on Fox News in nearly two years.
Apparently parked in front of the television on Monday morning, the media-obsessed former president did not take too kindly to Fox & Friends interviewing the other Republican candidates and their surrogates ahead of the Iowa caucus. Additionally, he was upset that Fox was covering recent polls that showed former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley narrowing his lead to single digits in New Hampshire.
Trump got rolling by taking yet another shot at New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu, who has been hitting the stump with Haley. While Sununu has strongly endorsed Haley and has built up a brand as a centrist Republican, the governor has still said he will vote for Trump if the ex-president is the nominee.
“Just watched the guy, on FoxNews, of course, who ran for President, but never had the ‘guts’ to announce that he was doing so,” Trump groused on his social media site Truth Social. “He was polling so low, including in his State of New Hampshire, that he correctly took a pass on formerly getting in. He wouldn’t have had a chance, and now he’s politically dead. His name is Chris Sununu, and he is the now very unpopular Governor of New Hampshire who endorsed Nikki ‘Birdbrain’ Haley, who is seldom able to beat Crooked Joe Biden in the polls, and will never beat the Democrat Party in reality.”
The insults kept coming.
“Sununu is Chris Christie, without the weight. He does lots of television, and just spews out false fact after false fact. He knows Nikki is way down in her home State of South Carolina, just as he was to me in New Hampshire,” Trump added. “She is an unwanted Globalist who is weak on the Border, and will always be willing to obliterate Social Security and Medicare, while at the same time raising your taxes and endangering you already under siege 2nd Amendment. MAGA!!!”
With Fox & Friends welcoming the three remaining GOP challengers to Trump on Monday morning, the president expressed his discontent with the show’s programming choices.
After grumbling that a “vote for Vivek [Ramaswamy] is a wasted vote,” Trump then took issue with Fox News seemingly trying to push Haley and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis over the finish line in Iowa. (All three candidates have spent time as the network’s apparent chosen successor to Trump’s throne.)
“Fox & Friends is giving DeSanctimonious & Haley one last shot,” he exclaimed, invoking his favorite nickname for DeSantis. “They are working hard, even using an old CNN Fake Poll, which shows I am only up on Birdbrain by 9 points in New Hampshire (all other polls say 20 to 25 points up!). Why are they using CNN polls? That’s why! Nikki is using an old poll to show she’s beating Crooked Joe. She’s not. Almost all new polls show she is being decimated by him. I am beating Crooked Joe, by a lot, in the polls. MAGA!”
The CNN poll that Trump is fuming about actually shows Haley is down by just seven points in New Hampshire and was released last week. Additionally, the current average of all recent New Hampshire surveys has Trump only up by 11 points in the state.
After Haley appeared on the morning program, Trump blasted out another post complaining that she told Fox & Friends “she’s up in the polls” even though he’s “beating her by 57 points.”
“What’s up?” Trump added.
Trump’s broadsides against Fox News are nothing new, especially in the past couple of years when his relationship with the conservative cable giant had soured. With the network facing billion-dollar defamation lawsuits related to the ex-president’s 2020 election lies and Trump’s incitement of an insurrection (which eventually cost the company $787 million), Fox effectively banned Trump from appearing live on its airwaves.
At the same time, it appeared in recent weeks that the right-wing network was willing to give up on its attempted “pivot” away from Trump and fully get behind the quadruply indited former president. Besides giving Trump a live platform in primetime, the Iowa town hall last week was full of “softball” questions with little pushback from moderators Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum.
In fact, Trump expressed his approval over how the televised event was handled, declaring on social media that the town hall “received wonderful reviews” while thanking Baier and MacCallum “for doing a really professional job.”
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