It is hard to imagine now, but there once was a time when Rupert Murdoch sternly told Trump to “calm down.”
The date was February 18, 2016. The octogenarian mogul was gradually giving up on Jeb and giving in to Trump. His reluctance was palpable for all to read on Twitter. When Trump flipped out at Kelly after the first debate, Rupert defended Fox’s moderation and said “friend Donald has to learn this is public life.” On December 15, 2015, he tweeted that Donald “seems to be getting even more thin skinned!” He wondered, “Is flying around the country every day tiring him?”
All campaign season long, aboard Trump Force One and atop Trump Tower, the candidate watched Fox to get talking points, used Fox to vanquish his rivals, and complained about Fox to manipulate the coverage. He was constantly on the phone with Ailes ranting about perceived slights, which Rupert then heard about.
“You’re showing the wrong polls!”
“When are you going to fire Karl Rove?”
“Why is Megyn such a bitch?”
And he ranted in public too. On February 17, 2016, he claimed Fox didn’t want him to win. The next day he accused Murdoch of rigging a scientific poll. That’s when Rupert talked down to Donald like a grandparent soothing a toddler.
“Time to calm down,” Rupert tweeted. He observed that if he was running an “anti-Trump conspiracy” then he was doing a “lousy job!”
Rupert “always craved a relationship with the US president. And he really craved it when it could help his business,” according to a family friend. Rupert wanted the ability to strut into the Oval Office at a moment’s notice. He wanted the state dinner invites and the policy briefings. Trump could be his ticket, if only the fellow could settle down.
If only.
Trump continued to come up with new ways to attack Kelly. Fox execs fumed—at Trump, at the RNC for not corralling the guy, and at the press for delighting in the so-called “feud.” They weren’t feuding—Trump was just wildly thrashing around, trying to cull Kelly from the Fox herd and make an example out of her. Almost every week during the primaries, I heard from a Fox exec or anchor who groused about the GOP front-runner.
“He’s nuts,” one Fox exec complained to me.
“He’s out of control,” said another.
“Fuck him,” said a third exec.
But their complaints rang hollow for this reason: Whenever Trump wasn’t pissing on Fox and Fox producers weren’t cursing over him, he was live with Hannity or O’Reilly or Greta Van Susteren or Fox & Friends or Special Report or Fox News Sunday. And his rallies were being carried live on Fox and all across cable TV. His campaign was fought mostly on television, with the rallies serving as elaborate stages for the show.
Kelly noticed all the interviews and rallies and live shots. She felt like Ailes did the bare minimum to defend her. Other insiders saw it the same way. Ailes, on the other hand, wasn’t sure what more Kelly expected from him. He was like an ego juggler, having to keep up with a dozen multimillionaire stars and Trump too, and he wasn’t as nimble as he used to be. For all the talk of him as an all-powerful and sinister force in politics, what was not well understood is that he was, according to ex-employees and even friends, “losing it” in his final few years. “It was so sad, seeing him lose his fastball,” one confidant said. He simply didn’t have much fight left.
And his history of abuse was finally, finally catching up with him.
When Gretchen Carlson sued Roger Ailes on July 6, 2016, Trump thought the lawsuit was a hoax.
It turned out to be a history-maker.
With one bold legal filing, Carlson exposed Ailes’s predatory tactics, dragged Fox News into the twenty-first century, affected Trump’s presidential race, and lit the match that led to the modern-day #MeToo movement. The Ailes scandal led The New York Times to look more deeply into Bill O’Reilly, which led other Times reporters to ask around about Harvey Weinstein, and now Weinstein is behind bars and the world is at least a little bit more equitable.
Here’s the part of the story almost nobody knows: The plan stretched back many years. Carlson’s suit accused her former cohost Steve Doocy of “severe and pervasive” sexual harassment too. Somehow Fox has successfully memory-holed this part of her complaint—as far as I can tell, the claims against Doocy were never thoroughly investigated. But Carlson said Doocy’s misconduct went on for years. In fact, it’s the first thing she brought up when she called attorney Martin Hyman in 2014.
By then, she was off Fox & Friends. In 2013 Ailes bumped her from the morning show and gave her the 2 p.m. hour. In case it wasn’t clear enough that this was a demotion, he also cut her pay. Carlson tried to make the most of it, and she booked Trump as her inaugural guest, leveraging her a.m. show connection from his weekly phone calls. “Gretchen will be a big success!” he tweeted. Well, sort of. Carlson held her own, but at one of the lowest-rated times of day. She felt underutilized by the company and disrespected by Ailes, who ogled her and flirted like an ogre. Carlson also experienced what another one of Ailes’s targets, Alisyn Camerota, called “emotional harassment”—bullying that was intended to show who’s boss and keep everyone in the right-wing line. Toward the end of her time at Fox, “I started refusing to go to Roger’s office,” Camerota told me.
Carlson continued to go, but she started to bring a tape recorder with her.
First she consulted with Hyman and told him about Doocy and the atmosphere at Fox. She said she was worried that Ailes would exercise a one-year “out” in her three-year contract and dump her overboard. She wanted advice. Hyman said she should be measured in her meetings with Ailes.
“Be careful with what you say,” he said. “Remember he might be tape recording you.”
“He can do that?”
Hyman explained that certain states, including New York, were one-party consent states, meaning one person could tape without telling anyone else.
“Ohhhh,” she said, with her eyebrows raised.
Her tapes were eventually Ailes’s undoing.
Carlson wasn’t the first Fox anchor to gather evidence against Ailes to be used in case of termination. But in this case, Hyman’s co-counsel Nancy Erika Smith said, Carlson intended to sue even if Ailes kept her on the air. In June 2016 Hyman and Smith sketched out a plan for filing suit in September and started to draft the paperwork. But Ailes decided to can her on the day her contract expired, June 23. Bill Shine and the top lawyer at Fox News, Dianne Brandi, called Carlson in and told her she wouldn’t be allowed back on the air to say goodbye.
Carlson had a vacation scheduled, so she asked Shine and Brandi for time to process the news before signing her exit papers, and they agreed. She left the building, called her legal team, and told them to prepare for battle. The legal filing two weeks later so blindsided Ailes that it took him all day to come up with a public response. Privately, he erupted: “She’s a crazy bitch,” he told associates, and “her ratings suck.”
Trump was incensed too—not about the possibility that Ailes had assaulted and harassed women for decades, but about his perception that Carlson was trying to take down a great man. The lawsuit landed a couple of months before women spoke out en masse and accused Trump of misconduct. “This is sad,” Trump said to an associate. “What can we do to help Roger?” Then he fired up his old-fashioned social network.
Many of the men in this network subscribed to their mutual friend Roger Stone’s rule: “Attack, attack, attack.” That’s how Ailes built Fox, that’s how Hannity built up his profile, and that’s how Trump won the GOP primary. And these men constantly talked with one another. Since Carlson filed suit in New Jersey Superior Court, Trump told Ailes to hire attorney Michael Sirota, who’d helped resolve Trump’s Atlantic City casino woes. Sirota’s specialties were bankruptcy and corporate restructuring, so the recommendation didn’t really make sense, but Sirota, wanting to help somehow, called a crisis PR person named Karen Kessler.
When Kessler and her partner Warren Cooper drove over to Ailes’s Cresskill, New Jersey, home, they found Ailes “in this humongous chair, larger than life, hooked up to an IV stand,” Kessler said. A male nurse was dispensing… something. Rudy Giuliani was on the phone in another room of the house. Rudy wanted to steer Fox’s internal investigation so that Ailes would be cleared and Carlson would be humiliated. But Rupert Murdoch’s sons wanted this matter to be taken seriously. James and Lachlan had differing politics and very different views about how Fox News should evolve, but they agreed on this point: Ailes was a pox on 21st Century Fox’s house. Both sons had fought with and lost to Ailes before. This was their chance to get even and get control of Fox.
Ailes explained this family drama to Trump in one of his calls with the candidate.
“Those boys, those punks are not going to get me,” Ailes said.
Ailes and Trump’s instincts were the same: to destroy Carlson. Trump sided with his friend publicly, saying Carlson’s claims “are unfounded just based on what I’ve read.”
“What he read” was planted by Ailes’s PR machine to smear Carlson as self-absorbed and flirtatious and unpopular. It was character assassination. Fox PR people transcribed Carlson’s past praise of Ailes and publicized the weak ratings for her 2 p.m. hour. Reporters covering the case received long emails with sections labeled “RATINGS DETAILS” and “HISTORY OF SUPPORTING WOMEN.” Some of the emails even included 21st Century Fox’s stock chart. “The stock has gone up following the news,” a PR exec wrote. “That, coupled with the ratings, show business has not been impacted.”
But dozens of other women knew what Ailes had done to them. The phones at Smith’s law firm lit up with other women registering complaints about Ailes, some dating back to the 1960s. “Please tell Gretchen to hang in there.” “Thank her for speaking out.” “I can’t come forward, but…” “It happened to me too.”
Still, stars like Hannity were firmly in Ailes’s corner. Hannity told me on July 9, “He is loved by the overwhelming majority, 99 percent. Just a fact.”
Kimberly Guilfoyle was the head of Team Roger. She was on the phone with his wife Beth constantly, exchanging info about who was cooperating and who was not. “You’d better stick with Roger,” Guilfoyle told colleagues. “I’m taking notes.”
Multiple insiders said Guilfoyle coordinated all of this with programming exec Suzanne Scott. “It was at Suzanne’s behest,” one of Guilfoyle’s best friends said. (A source close to Scott firmly denied this.)
Guilfoyle’s cheerleading for Ailes confused some staffers, since Ailes was known to be dismissive of her in private. According to unsubstantiated allegations in a lawsuit filed by former Fox cohost Julie Roginsky, Ailes once said to her that Guilfoyle would “get on her knees for anyone.”
One explanation for Guilfoyle’s allegiance proffered by sources: She likely believed Ailes would prevail and believed she’d be rewarded with her own show. “Remember, we all thought Roger would survive. We figured he was invincible,” a well-known host reminded me.
Which is one of the reasons why Megyn Kelly stayed silent at first. When Kelly was a new reporter at Fox, Ailes had hit on her, offered to trade sex for career advancement, and tried to kiss her. Kelly firmly shut him down and sought help from her supervisor in the DC bureau. Ailes got the message and moved on to other targets. They went on to have a perfectly normal, mutually beneficial, very profitable working relationship. But she wasn’t going to lie and pretend that he was incapable of what Carlson alleged.
Kelly saw stories pop up on Ailes-friendly websites calling her “selfish” for not defending him. She knew Ailes’s minions were behind it. She also knew, from a source, that Rudy and Ailes’s other allies were trying to limit the scope of the Fox investigation. Briefly, they succeeded: Talent would be excluded from the internal review, Kelly learned, and just a small circle of people around Carlson would be interviewed. That’s when she decided to come forward. Three days after Carlson sued, Kelly called Lachlan and told him the truth. His first words were “I’m sorry.”
Kelly’s call had an immediate impact. Soon came word that the Murdochs had hired law firm Paul, Weiss to interview staffers about potential misconduct. Additional evidence of Ailes’s misdeeds was uncovered almost every hour. What ultimately mattered was the pattern and the pervasiveness of his behavior, backed up by so many accounts. One week after Carlson’s lawsuit was filed, the Murdochs were in agreement that Ailes had to go. There was nothing Trump or anyone else could do to save him.
Everything came to a head during the GOP convention in Cleveland, Ohio. When the convention began on Monday, July 18, Ailes was still convinced he could survive Carlson’s “attack,” as he called it. Hannity still supported him. Guilfoyle still leaned on reluctant colleagues to get on Team Roger, tempting them with promotions she couldn’t actually deliver. “Dana is dead,” Guilfoyle told one of her on-air colleagues, casually tossing The Five castmate Dana Perino overboard because Perino had refrained from backing up Ailes publicly. “Her seat can be yours,” Guilfoyle added.
But Guilfoyle didn’t have power anymore and neither did Ailes. Rupert called on Monday morning and urged him to step down. Agree to resign, he said, so that this doesn’t have to get any messier. When the call leaked, the entire Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland lit up with the news. “This feels like a coup that’s actually succeeding,” one Fox exec texted me. “How fast will Ailes launch a Fox rival?” another wondered.
The next morning, Tuesday, Ailes joined Fox’s 9 a.m. editorial call and acted like it was a perfectly ordinary day. He was able to keep pretending until noon, when New York magazine reporter Gabriel Sherman revealed that Kelly had been interviewed by Paul, Weiss and had described Ailes’s harassment in detail. Her testimony guaranteed nonstop coverage, just the kind of juicy scandal that Murdoch had built his empire on. But many of her colleagues were still in denial. “Don’t believe the crap about” Ailes, Geraldo Rivera tweeted. “Only ones talking dirt are those who hate #FoxNews & want to hurt network that’s kicking their ass.”
Fellow anchors were furious at Kelly for opening her mouth. Flanked by security, she silently entered and exited the arena. Once she found a corner for privacy near Fox’s set, she called a friend who had also been harassed by Ailes and interviewed by Paul, Weiss. They were both in shock about the leak. “I just want to crawl in a hole,” Kelly said. Paul, Weiss had promised that the interviews would remain confidential, but now her name was out there, and she was about to saddle up and co-anchor hours of convention coverage alongside men who, she told her friend, had literally turned their backs on her. Kelly wondered: Who leaked, and why?
The leak seemed to come from Murdoch’s inner circle—from James or Lachlan or people acting on their behalf to force Ailes out. Ailes finally got the message when, on Wednesday morning, his chauffeur pulled up to Fox News HQ and was told to circle the block. Ailes found out the Murdochs had locked him out—literally, they had deactivated his badge.
The man who had built Fox News could no longer get in the building. Before giving in and signing the separation agreement, he sought Trump’s counsel via phone. Trump cussed out Ailes’s accusers and said it was terrible how a powerful man could be wounded like this. Ailes told Trump the agreement barred him from joining a competing network, but contained a silver lining: It allowed him to help with Trump’s campaign. Wouldn’t they work well together? In an interview with Meet the Press, Trump suggested he might hire the disgraced political operative: “We’ll see!”
Ailes signed the paperwork, but he had one additional demand—he wanted to meet with Rupert in person. He said Murdoch owed him that much. The men met for lunch at Rupert’s $72 million triplex apartment on East 22nd Street along Madison Square Park. It was awkward but not outwardly confrontational: Ailes accepted $40 million and a muzzle while the Murdochs accepted his immediate resignation. Ailes also got to claim that he’d still be “advising” Rupert, although that was just a face-saving lie. The deal was announced at 4 p.m. on Thursday, July 21, almost overshadowing Trump’s coronation in Cleveland. One bully boss of the GOP stepped down while the new bully boss stepped up. It was Trump’s party now.
At 10 p.m. I watched Trump’s doom-and-gloom speech from the rafters of the arena. “There will be no lies. We will honor the American people with the truth, and nothing else,” he said, while making two dozen misleading statements. His depictions of extreme violence threatening “our very way of life” made little sense in an America where crime was on a decades-long decline. But it rang true in Fox’s America, where crimes by illegal border crossers and attacks on police officers were regular themes on Hannity and The O’Reilly Factor. Ailes’s fingerprints were all over this speech, so it made sense that Ailes’s creation was the most watched channel on all of television, even ahead of the broadcast networks, on the night Trump took over his party. Ailes was one of the 7 million Fox viewers who watched at home in the dark.
On the day Ailes was forced out, some Fox staffers were in tears. Yes, he was a tyrant, but he was also the only leader they’d ever known. They wondered if Fox would survive the loss. They wondered if they would still have jobs. When asked about the mood, one staffer texted me back, “utter disbelief.”
James and Lachlan Murdoch were much more composed. They agreed that Ailes needed to go, and they’d gotten it done in just two weeks’ time. But now they disagreed about everything else.
James wanted to hire a new Fox News head from the outside. His first choice was David Rhodes, the president of CBS News, who had previously held exec positions at Fox and Bloomberg. James thought Rhodes was a shortcut to making the news division stronger and reorienting the network to the middle. That’s what James wanted above all else—less Hannity, more Shep Smith. He shared the same world view as his wife, Kathryn Hufschmid, now Kathryn Murdoch, an environmentalist who’d once worked for the Clinton Climate Initiative. They were both tired of having Hannity and O’Reilly’s regressive beliefs tarnish their family’s name.
Rupert and Lachlan were both fond of Rhodes—but there was no way they were hiring him. Changing direction would be “business suicide,” Rupert said later in the year. “It would be foolish of us” to mess with what’s working, Lachlan said.
Plus, they didn’t trust James to be near anywhere Fox News. In their view, Kathryn had caused James to lurch to the left. They wanted to keep James away from the channel and keep gas in Ailes’s tank.
Rupert addressed employees in New York and said he would run Fox News temporarily, taking Ailes’s CEO title to give everyone a sense of stability. The eighty-five-year-old ignored questions about his complicity in Ailes’s crimes and commenced a long-overdue housecleaning.
Rupert found that Ailes had kept all sorts of people on the payroll at Fox. Ailes was just like Trump in this way—both men kept fixers and yes-men close at hand. Private investigator Bo Dietl, once dubbed “Roger Ailes’s top goon,” was under contract as an on-air contributor at Fox. His contract was not renewed. Other “friends of Roger” were sending monthly invoices to Fox for mysterious consulting work. Rupert put a stop to that too. Every day, something new cropped up. Three of Ailes’s personal lawyers who counseled him in July were also longtime Fox legal analysts. One of them even filled in on Fox & Friends! Not anymore.
But Rupert was in the odd position of relying on Ailes’s lieutenants to clean the general’s messy house. The problem was that Ailes had never groomed a successor. Most people explained this by saying he thought he’d run the joint forever. He encouraged rivalries to form on the second floor, where his executive team worked. Now the same execs who’d carried out Ailes’s orders, who’d sat on the couch and laughed at his racist and sexist remarks, who’d claimed not to notice when he leered at young staffers, remained in place. In some cases, they were promoted. On August 12, Rupert named Bill Shine and Jack Abernethy copresidents of Fox News. They would report to him. Two other Ailes loyalists were one rung lower on the ladder: Jay Wallace, the newsroom boss, and Suzanne Scott, whose new title was EVP of programming and development. They would both report to Shine. All four executives were Fox News originals—and had the baggage to prove it.
After Shine became copresident, his name came up in multiple lawsuits, with repeated allegations that he enabled Ailes’s misconduct. These suits kept Fox lawyers busy for more than a year and cast a permanent shadow over the management team. Rupert, undeterred by the concerns about management’s awareness of Ailes’s abuse, gave Abernethy and Smith multiyear contracts on September 15.
For Hannity, Trump was a shortcut to renewed relevance. Eight years of Obama-bashing was awfully repetitive. His eponymous show was a snooze and his producers knew it. That’s why, back when Ailes was still in charge, some of the execs mused about sticking Hannity with a cohost again. They thought a younger female liberal host would make the show more interesting.
Then along came Trump, the most interesting story of the decade. It was a match made in TV producer heaven and a solution to the “Hannity problem.” Trump was pushing the same GOP policy goals and culture war battles that Hannity promoted every day. “Hannity was Trump before Trump was Trump,” one of Hannity’s friends observed. He continued to have his own solo radio gig in the afternoon, which meant that he was more in touch with “the base” than other Fox hosts. His nightly TV commentaries reflected the bitter feelings of his radio callers. It was a vicious circle—his audience’s anger made him angrier, which made them angrier, and so on.
Trump took his cues from what he heard from Hannity’s show. And like Trump, Hannity had no one to check him anymore—no one to stop him from following his own worst instincts.
“Ailes wanted us to step right up to the line, but not cross it,” one of Hannity’s sparring partners said.
Without Ailes around, Hannity was free to indulge Trump’s looniest lies about voter fraud and about Hillary Clinton’s health. It was a difference of feet: Instead of tiptoeing up to the line, the way Ailes had taught him, Hannity strode right past it. He helped Trump sow doubts about election security without a shred of evidence. “You said in a speech today you’re afraid this election is going to be rigged,” Hannity said in an August interview. Instead of asking a question, he simply cued Trump to start talking. “Yes, well, I have been hearing about it for a long time,” Trump claimed. From whom? Hannity didn’t ask. He just lapped it up as Trump predicted the election “is going to be rigged.” Any self-respecting executive producer would have gotten in Hannity’s ear through the IFB (one-way communication from the control room) and demanded that the interviewer follow up. Probe further, push back, do something—Trump’s claims were Third World dictatorship stuff. But Hannity simply wrapped the interview and thanked Trump for his time.
This was a prime example of how Hannity did Trump and their audience a disservice. Hannity had tried to back up Trump’s BS by citing a Philadelphia Inquirer report that said Mitt Romney did not get a single vote, “not one,” in fifty-nine separate precincts in Philadelphia in 2012. Come on, Hannity, I said in my retort on CNN—a simple Google search showed that there were also precincts in other states, like in Utah, where Obama did not get a single vote. Hannity wielded his megaphone irresponsibly.
In response, Hannity came after me on Twitter and changed the subject, asking, “Is HRC a liar?” Given Trump’s pathological lying, I thought it was cute that Hannity claimed to value honesty. He simultaneously used misleading videos to advance the “Hillary is secretly sick” conspiracy theory in front of millions of people. One night he even asked a Fox News doctor if she could be suffering from a traumatic brain injury or a stroke. When I spoke out against this, Hannity called in to Fox & Friends and called me a “little pipsqueak.” Trump and Hannity both name-called their way through life.
One month earlier, when Ailes was at the precipice, Hannity had led a brigade of Fox hosts who threatened to follow him out the door, using the “key man clause” that Ailes had inserted in their contracts. The clauses were like get-out-of-Fox-free cards. They were originally Ailes’s idea, so that if he ever left, his stars could leave with him. “He viewed them as a poison pill, to protect himself in case the Murdoch family ever came after him,” a longtime Fox News exec said. From a corporate governance standpoint, it’s irresponsible to let everyone go down with the CEO’s ship. But Ailes had so much autonomy that he tried to ensure his invincibility. Once word got around, stars started asking for the clauses to be added to their contracts. According to an agent who did business with Fox for decades, the clauses turned into loyalty tests: “Roger wanted talent to want the clause.” And most hosts did.
When Ailes was ousted, several Fox stars did look around. Shep Smith and Bret Baier’s agents both put out feelers, just to find out their clients’ worth in the TV marketplace, and executives at other networks were startled to hear how much money they made. “Roger overpaid,” a VP quipped. “He bought people off,” another exec said.
Hannity wasn’t serious about leaving. There was nowhere else for him to go. But Greta Van Susteren eyed the exit with more sincerity. She felt embarrassed about having defended Ailes back in July. If she was going to stay, Greta and her husband, lawyer John Coale, wanted Fox to pay a price in the form of a huge raise. Rupert was furious at the maneuver. He felt that Greta was trying to hold the network hostage at a moment of weakness. “I can’t believe they just threatened me,” he said after a tense phone call with Coale. In early September, when Fox’s lawyers officially rejected her contract demands, she gave notice to leave. Murdoch responded harshly: He dispatched a courier to her home in northwest Washington with two letters that said her time on Fox was over, immediately.
Coales told me Greta volunteered to stay in the anchor chair for a few weeks to help with a smooth transition. Rupert had other ideas. She wasn’t allowed back in the building to say goodbye to viewers. Within hours, her biography was removed from FoxNews.com. It was like she was deleted from Fox’s history. Within hours too, Rupert reached out to weekend host Tucker Carlson about taking over her time slot after the election.
“Cable news is a snake pit,” Bill O’Reilly warned Megyn Kelly when she moved to prime time in 2013. He knew because he was the biggest python of them all. But Kelly could bite too: Years later, another Fox host told me “I’ve never known someone with as many enemies as Megyn Kelly.”
Those internal enemies existed long before Kelly spoke to the Paul, Weiss lawyers about Ailes’s sick treatment of women. Here’s why: When someone goes from a correspondent gig to the anchor desk and then to her own two-hour show and then her own prime time spot and a $15 million-a-year contract, others are going to feel passed over. And they’re going to hiss and moan. But Ailes picked the time slots, not the anchors. Kelly resented the fact that others resented her for being good at her job.
Then came the Ailes scandal. The perception that Kelly ratted out the old man further tarnished her image inside Fox. Some colleagues refused to speak to her. “If I stay here, I’m going to get cancer,” Kelly told a friend in late 2016 as she weighed what to do with her career.
Kelly had a “key man” clause, but unlike the others, she also had a contract coming due in July 2017. Normally her contract window wouldn’t have “opened” until early 2017, but Lachlan did something unusual: He “opened her contract in September and said, because of extenuating circumstances, you’re free to look around,” a source explained.
The week of September 12, executives from ABC, NBC, and CNN rotated through the Manhattan offices of CAA, Kelly’s talent agency, for meet and greets. ABC courted Kelly for GMA. CNN offered her a 9 p.m. talk show to go up against Fox. NBC said she could do pretty much whatever she wanted. She wasn’t looking to leave Fox right away, not with an election right around the corner, but the possibilities were tantalizing. Lachlan countered with a four-year contract renewal worth $100 million, putting Kelly on par with O’Reilly. He believed O’Reilly’s best days were behind him, and Hannity was reliable but predictable. Kelly, on the other hand, was capable of bringing in a new audience to Fox. She was youthful and unpredictable. He thought The Kelly File would be Fox’s signature show of the Hillary Clinton years.
The bosses wanted Kelly to sign on the nine-figure dotted line before Election Day. Rupert publicly urged her to hurry up and make a decision when he told his Wall Street Journal that other stars would “give their right arm for her spot.” Instead of hurrying up, Kelly tapped the brakes, as talent tends to do—she wanted to get through the release of her memoir first. Launch day ended up being the day she decided she had to leave Fox.
In the immediate aftermath of Ailes’s expulsion, the man was portrayed in the press like a nuclear weapon pilfered by a rogue state. There were numerous reports that Ailes was advising Trump ahead of the debates. Clinton campaign aides talked about what kind of advice Ailes might be feeding her opponent. But they didn’t need to worry. While Ailes did run a very informal debate prep in Bedminster, his coaching was of limited value, partly because he babbled about past debates and bragged about his past victories—a sure way to lose Trump’s attention. Besides, as Ailes once said, his talent was in getting people to loosen up and be themselves on TV. “If you see them at home,” he said of typical politicians, “they’re laughing and they’re physical and they could move. And as soon as you put them on television they turn into stiffs and they’re boring.” So his go-to move, he said, was to “peel the layers back so they could be themselves.” Trump definitely didn’t need that advice. There were no layers. What you saw on TV was what you got.
So Trump didn’t really need Ailes. Neither did Fox. The network kept humming along without him. The Murdochs and Shine and Abernethy were moving the network from a dictator model to a committee model of leadership. They didn’t try to improve the content; they just kept a good, profitable thing going. The summertime scandal had proven that everyone was replaceable, even Roger Ailes.
Trump was in charge of the television wing of the GOP now and had all the deputies he needed. Rudy Giuliani was at debate camp along with Fox commentator Laura Ingraham and assorted friends. Hannity was at Trump’s beck and call. And Fox & Friends spewed toxic waste at his opponent every day. On October 25, Rudy told Brian Kilmeade that “we’ve got a couple of surprises left,” and added, “I do think that all of these revelations about Hillary Clinton, finally, are beginning to have an impact.” Rudy had heard that FBI agents in New York were in possession of a laptop with a new cache of Clinton-related emails. The agents—some of whom detested Clinton—wanted to crack it open. Rudy alluded to “surprises” again the next day in an interview with Fox’s Martha MacCallum. It appeared as though he was getting leaks from current FBI agents (although he later claimed the info came from “former agents”). And it sure seemed like he was spreading the info on Fox to pressure FBI director James Comey into reopening an investigation in the final inning of the election. If that was the plan, it worked: On October 28, Comey took the highly unusual step of disclosing that investigators were examining the new cache of emails. “I think his decision to publicly reopen the case, rather than investigate quietly, was certainly driven in part by the fear that news of the laptop would leak,” Josh Campbell, Comey’s special assistant at the time, told me in 2019.
Clinton was exonerated by the FBI, but convicted by the Fox echo chamber. The words “Clinton” and “emails” were paired together like peanut butter and jelly in the critical closing days of the election. Comey’s “October surprise” tightened the race and, according to some political scientists, likely cost Clinton the election. And Fox was at the center of it all.
There was a moment, after Ailes lost, before Trump won, when Fox News could have gone in a different, truthier direction. Ryan Grim, the DC bureau chief of the Huffington Post, wrote a pivotal October 2016 story about what might have been. It was titled “Is Shep Smith The Future of Fox News?”
Shep was a hero to the Fox newsroom. He was unlike every other newsman on the air. First people noticed his boyish good looks and Mississippi drawl. Then his unflappable delivery. He exuded an electricity. Without shouting, he made viewers want to listen. A reporter once called Shep “the Red Bull of TV news anchors.”
Shep came from the Walter Cronkite “that’s the way it is” school of journalism—which, as Fox made its rightward turns, increasingly clashed with Hannity’s “this is the way I want it to be” school of spin. Shep stood for journalism while Hannity tried to tear down journalism. How could they possibly share airtime? How could they coexist? Eventually, in the Trump age, they couldn’t.
But in October 2016 Fox was planning for the Clinton age. Smith and others on the news side of Fox News “were hoping that with Ailes collapsing and Murdoch coming back in, that this was their moment,” Grim told me. “And perhaps with Hillary winning the White House—perhaps it was a moment for them to pivot.”
Trump was behind in the national polls. The GOP was bracing for a face-first collapse. The Fox brand was facing a reckoning. “I think they thought that perhaps Trump was going to discredit all of the energy that had been building since the Tea Party by getting annihilated at the polls,” Grim said. “Clinton’s victory—that was the world they expected to be living in.” So consider that world while you digest these quotes. Smith told Grim all about his recent meeting with Rupert, recounting it in great detail. “He wants to hire a lot more journalists, he wants to build us a massive new newsroom, he wants to make more commitments to places like this,” Smith said as he showed off his massive Studio H facility with its mine-are-bigger-than-yours screens.
He said it could get even bigger.
Murdoch wants to “just enlarge our news-gathering,” he continued. “When the biggest boss, who controls everything, comes and says ‘That’s what I want to do,’ that’s the greatest news I’ve heard in years. And he didn’t mention one thing about our opinion side.”
I could practically hear the journalists at Fox leaping to their feet and cheering. Smith recalled Murdoch saying, “I’m a newsman. I want to be the best news organization in America.” These words were inspirational to the oft-overlooked scribes at Fox. One of the network’s most-respected correspondents, Conor Powell, who left Fox in disgust in 2018, told me that the Huffington Post story was a signal moment for him and his colleagues. “If Murdoch is going to come in here and say we’re gonna double down on reporting,” he recalled saying, “this will be fantastic.”
It could have been. It might have been. But then America started to vote.
Everyone has their own Election Day story. Let me tell you mine.
It was three in the morning, and I was in a small studio, what we call a “flash cam,” on the fifth floor of CNN’s New York office. Trump and Clinton were both coming home to New York after holding late-night election eve rallies. Trump landed at La Guardia at three in the morning and slipped into an SUV for a lonely ride back to Trump Tower. There were no photos, no made-for-TV moments. His campaign staffers were already acting like losers. Clinton’s campaign, on the other hand, staged a welcome-home rally at Westchester County Airport. When her plane touched down at three-thirty, two hundred well-wishers surrounded her on the tarmac. I remember commenting on CNN that it was a brilliant bit of stagecraft—one final “winning” image for the morning shows to play on a loop. Trump only countered with a phone call to Fox & Friends.
“If I don’t win,” he told the cohosts, “I will consider it a tremendous waste of time, energy, and money.”
Points for honesty, I suppose.
Like Trump and almost everyone else, staffers at Fox headed into Election Day assuming that he would lose. Many news anchors and line producers and ad sales execs honestly wanted Clinton to win. Trump was, in a word, exhausting. And he had made media bashing a centerpiece of his entire campaign. While Hannity loved it, a lot of rank-and-file Fox journalists knew it was damaging and needed to stop.
There were business considerations as well. Network executives thought that four more years of a Democratic president would be good for ratings and outrage. Hey, maybe Trump’s consolation prize would be a show on Fox: Trump & Friends! Some of his campaign aides, expecting to be out of work, were already calling Fox execs about possible commentator gigs after the election.
The anchors filled the day talking about Trump’s long-shot paths to victory. In the afternoon he called in to chat with Martha MacCallum and stoke spurious fears about voter fraud one last time before the polls closed. Setting up an excuse for his loss, Trump confidently said there were “lots of complaints” about voting machines casting Republican votes for Democrats: “It’s happening at various places today, it’s been reported.” That was a lie, but MacCallum just let him say it without asking for any proof. An hour later, Shep Smith stepped in and said straight up, “We’ve seen no evidence of that, no evidence from authorities.”
Shep had voted in Greenwich Village first thing in the morning. His 3 p.m. opening monologue made clear his disgust at the bitter nature of the race: “A campaign season filled with name-calling, personal attacks, federal investigations, accusations of sexual assault, suspected interference from Russian hackers, false claims of widespread voter fraud, and the airing of dirty laundry from decades ago. And now, at last, it’s almost over.” The relief was palpable in his voice.
At 5 p.m. Megyn Kelly, Bret Baier, and a raft of producers gathered for a final pre-show prep meeting. “We were all around this long table, Rupert at the head of the table, and all of the producers and anchors on both sides of it,” Chris Wallace told me later. “They gave us the first wave of exit polls. While it didn’t flat out say Clinton was going to win, if you read it you had to think Clinton was going to win.
“In fact,” he added, the sheaf of paper even said “it was likely that we would make the call between eleven and eleven-thirty.” The networks never called the election before West Coast polls closed at eleven, so this was another sign of Clinton’s apparent strength. The forecast called for an early night.
An exec at ABC News, Chris Vlasto, shared the early exit poll results with the Trump campaign. Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump told the patriarch that the data looked bleak. “We’re not going to win,” Donald told Melania. But several of the president’s strategists, like Brad Parscale, insisted otherwise. The Trump clan worked the phones throughout the early evening, doing last-minute hits on radio stations in the Florida panhandle and other key battlegrounds, urging supporters to get out and vote.
The early exit poll findings informed the tone of the early evening TV coverage. But by 8:30 p.m., as actual votes poured in, the picture started to change, just as Parscale had expected. “The sweep that the exit polls had predicted just wasn’t happening,” Wallace recalled. “Now we were down to counting individual votes.”
There were no immediate calls in states like Michigan or Wisconsin. Wallace factored that in as, on-air at 9:05, he told Kelly that he was becoming “open to the possibility that Donald Trump could be the next President of the United States.” His voice betrayed his own amazement at the words. It was a pivotal moment in the coverage of the night because he said aloud what others had until then been saying only to themselves. “I’m kind of proud of it,” Wallace told me, “in the sense that it altered our coverage a little bit.”
It sure did. The crowd outside Fox’s sparkling new $20 million street-level studio started to cheer. “I turned around toward them and said, ‘I’m not saying he’s going to win, folks, but it’s possible,’ ” Wallace recalled. Trump’s election night party was five short blocks up the street at the Midtown Hilton, so some people strolled back and forth between the Fox broadcast and the ballroom. Pirro, Ingraham, and former Fox contributor Sarah Palin all hung out at the Hilton. Trump was still ensconced in Trump Tower, wondering whether to believe Parscale’s insistence that they could pull this thing off. Wallace’s comments had an immediate impact. There were tears of joy and tears of fear in Trump’s inner circle. Chris Christie, who was in charge of the transition team, sensed that Trump was scared shitless.
Trump watched from a room on the fourteenth floor of Trump Tower, which was actually just the sixth floor in a building full of exaggerations. Around midnight he went upstairs to his residence to come up with an acceptance speech. Once it was clear that Trump was going to win, Hannity called in to Fox and called the result a “modern-day political miracle.” At 2:41 a.m., Fox News was the first TV network to officially project that Trump was the president-elect. Baier credited him with winning “the most unreal, surreal election we have ever seen.” Wallace looked across the studio, where one of the oversized screens flashed “TRUMP ELECTED PRESIDENT,” and he shook his head, the way you try to wake yourself up from a nightmare or a dream. “Is this really happening?”
“There’s nothing more exciting for a political reporter,” Wallace said, “than when things go off-script.”
Kelly looked into the camera and wondered if she could remain at Fox.
Ailes watched from the sidelines from his mansion and took comfort in a bag of chips.
Closet liberals at Fox cried the night of November 8, 2016, while the network’s biggest Trump boosters partied until sunrise the next morning. Pete Hegseth and Jesse Watters walked around like they owned the building. They were drunk with power. And not just metaphorically drunk: Watters, once described as a “human Jäger bomb,” celebrated the election results at the boozy Hilton party and then stumbled back to work with Emma DiGiovine, a staffer on his show and his future wife. Watters high-fived and hugged his colleagues.
When Fox’s special coverage finally wrapped up, two hours later than planned, Baier and some others convinced Connolly’s, the Irish pub on 45th Street near the office, to stay open. “We just all had a beer and toasted the night being a broadcast success and how surreal the whole thing was,” Baier recalled a year later. “I remember telling people that night, ‘Well, at least now it will slow down.’ I was wrong.”
Hannity rubbed the win in the faces of the “elite media.” The overnight ratings showed that CNN topped Fox during prime time, 13 million viewers versus 12 million, but a greater number of Fox viewers stayed awake later as Trump’s victory looked more and more likely. In the immediate aftermath, Fox’s ratings stayed elevated. Carlson’s show debuted at 7 p.m. a week after the election, and one of his first guests was Laura Ingraham, who was in talks to become Trump’s press secretary. “I wanted to get you on before you get drafted by the Trump people,” Carlson wisecracked.
But Ingraham wanted to be more than just a hairsprayed spokeswoman for the president’s policies. She was willing to do battle in the briefing room only if she also had a seat at the policy-making table on issues like immigration and trade, to achieve the protectionist and nationalist goals she’d been pursuing for years. The competing factions on the transition team couldn’t agree on how to make room for her, and Sean Spicer was hired instead.
Tucker talked about Trump’s election as a peasants’ revolt—“a reaction against the people in charge,” against elites, he said the morning after, though these comments always sounded a little odd coming from Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson of “Carlson Island.” The conventional explanations of Trump’s win made even less sense once the popular vote totals were finally complete. How much of a rebellion was it, really, when 3 million more people voted for Clinton? I thought a buzzer should sound every time a Fox commentator invoked “the people”—e.g., “the people voted for a wall,” “the people voted for a travel ban,” “the people voted for corporate tax cuts.” The people were hopelessly split almost in half and the election proved it. Carlson did acknowledge this by bringing up the saddest part of the exit polling: 94 percent of Trump voters said they’d be scared or concerned about President Clinton while 95 percent of Clinton voters said they’d be scared or concerned about President Trump. “So there really is a real divide here,” Tucker said.
Yes, everyone felt it—but Fox stars seemed incapable of looking inward at their own contributions to the divide. And unwilling to admit that there were very good reasons to be concerned about the Trump presidency.
Trump suddenly needed to assemble an administration, so he turned to the people he knew best: Fox personalities. The revolving door between Fox and the Trump administration began to spin. On Friday, November 11, Dianne Brandi called up Fox Business weekend cohost Anthony Scaramucci and said he had to leave his show since he was being appointed to the Trump transition team. He was also making $88,000 a year as a contributor, and that deal had to end too.
“We have to cancel your contract,” Brandi said.
Fox management enforced a rule: No one could work for the network and Trump at the same time. Most outsiders laughed at this demarcation since so many of Fox’s stars helped Trump in so many ways. Still, they had to draw a line somewhere, and money, instead of, say, journalistic integrity, became the backstop.
“In the weeks and months after Roger was fired, Fox was pretty rudderless—no one was in charge,” correspondent Conor Powell said. “Nothing was approved, nothing was rejected. In theory Rupert was in charge, but he wasn’t really around to make many decisions.” When Powell flew from Jerusalem to New York for a visit to the mothership, news boss Jay Wallace told him the management team was “just trying to keep the place afloat.”
I could sense it from the outside—in the fall of 2016, sources began whispering, “the inmates are running the asylum.” The execs were, according to numerous sources, simply afraid to deal with the hot-air-balloon egos in prime time. Which explains what happened on November 15, the day Kelly released her memoir, and the same day O’Reilly was on CBS This Morning to promote his next book, even though it wasn’t coming out for another week. O’Reilly had been a staunch defender of Ailes, and on CBS that day he went further, saying he’d “had enough” of people treating Fox News like a “piñata.”
When the anchors asked about Kelly’s allegations against Ailes, O’Reilly said “I’m not that interested in this.”
Norah O’Donnell interjected: “In sexual harassment? You’re not interested in sexual harassment?”
O’Reilly: “I’m not interested in basically litigating something that is finished, that makes my network look bad. Okay? I’m not interested in making my network look bad. At all. That doesn’t interest me one bit.”
O’Donnell: “Is that what she’s doing?”
O’Reilly: “I don’t know. But I’m not going to even bother with it.”
This old white guy culture was still deeply entrenched at Fox even though Ailes was gone. Kelly, disgusted by the CBS appearance, wrote an email to management around three in the afternoon that called out O’Reilly’s “history of harassment.”
“His exact attitude of shaming women into ‘shutting the hell up’ about harassment on grounds that it will disgrace the company, is in part how Fox got into the decades-long Ailes mess to begin with,” Kelly wrote. She urged them to intervene—to defend her—and to defend the other women O’Reilly insulted.
According to Kelly, Bill Shine called her and promised to “deal” with O’Reilly. But he didn’t. O’Reilly went ahead and pretaped his 8 p.m. show and included another shot at Kelly. Her executive producer Tom Lowell caught wind of it early in the 8 p.m. hour and alerted her.
“We’ve got a problem,” he said. “I just looked at his rundown. At 8:50, he’s going to double down.”
Lowell tried to get through to Shine. O’Reilly was on tape, but Lowell had an idea for a breaking news insert that could replace the offending segment and stop the 8 p.m. host from attacking the 9 p.m. host. You’d think that the copresident of Fox News would call back and thank him—Yes, Tom, please break in, thank you for alerting me to this, I’m sorry I didn’t take action sooner—but that’s not what Shine said. He said, “The segment stands.” Lowell had to go tell Kelly.
At 8:50, O’Reilly devoted his “Factor Tip of the Day” segment to the Kelly fracas—disguising it, barely, as being about the subject of “loyalty”—by saying that “if somebody is paying you a wage, you owe that person or company allegiance. If you don’t like what’s happening in the workplace,” he lectured, “go to human resources or leave! I’ve done that. And then take the action you need to take afterward.”
This was beyond audacious, coming from a man who was credibly accused of sexual harassment in a 2004 lawsuit, and who had—unbeknownst to his viewers—settled multiple cases with other accusers. “Loyalty is good,” he concluded, condescension dripping from his voice.
Loyalty to whom? The Murdochs knew, from the law firm investigation, what Ailes had done. They had approved of Kelly writing about her experience. Her book was for their publishing house! Kelly was in disbelief and almost in tears. When she went live at 9 p.m., she hid her shock from O’Reilly’s drive-by shooting, but she mentioned the Murdochs at the end of the hour: “Like me,” she said, “they believe that sunlight is the best disinfectant.”
Right then, Kelly knew she was done with Fox. Done with these executives, done with this place. That night, she told friends, was the “final straw.” She wondered: Was the decision to allow O’Reilly’s drive-by made by Shine? Or did he consult with Rupert and Lachlan? Were they afraid to intervene because they were trying to sign O’Reilly to a new contract? Were they just ignorant? She never found out the answer. But the episode spoke to a basic lack of leadership that would hobble the network for years to come.
Lachlan truly wanted to keep Kelly in the fold. He offered her a $100 million contract plus all the sweeteners she could ever want. “When Trump won, Lachlan thought, ‘We need her more than ever,’ ” an insider told me. His theory was that The Kelly File would be the X factor of the Trump years—the unpredictable, buzzy hour that would make Fox News stand out.
But deep down inside, Kelly knew that she probably couldn’t be what the Trump-era Fox would need her to be—a PR flack pretending to be a fiercely independent journalist. What she really wanted was a more hospitable climate at work, a better schedule for her family, and fewer excuses for Trump to bully her. By Christmas, she had a deal with NBC. But she didn’t formally tell Lachlan until January 3, mere minutes before The New York Times broke the news of her historic defection. When Shine heard about the paper’s request for comment, he sputtered, “You’ve got to be kidding me. This is the way she tells us?” But from Kelly’s perspective, Shine gave notice to her back in November, when O’Reilly was allowed to shame her and all of Ailes’s other targets.
I was at a dinner with Lachlan the day after Kelly decamped for NBC. We were both in Las Vegas for the CES tech convention, and we both attended a presentation by Hulu, the streaming TV service, in one of Restaurant Guy Savoy’s dimly lit private rooms somewhere in the belly of Caesars Palace. I loved Hulu, but I wanted to talk about Kelly. Lachlan told me, “I wish she’d stayed, genuinely.” I believed him. But I think he also knew that Fox was unstoppable with or without her. He said he viewed CNN as being “soft left” and MSNBC as “hard left,” leaving a huge space, the “middle right,” for Fox. But there was nothing “middle right” about the increasingly extreme rhetoric that emanated from his network. Journalism at Fox was being suffocated. In hindsight, Kelly was just the first of many Fox journalists to jump ship in the Trump era. When she packed up, she took almost everything out of her office, but left one thing: a sign that said “You don’t have to be crazy to work here. We have on the job training!”
And it was about to get so much crazier.