Trump blamed Fox News for Republican losses even as network’s hosts went easy on him

Fox News pundits hardly criticized the US president in midterms coverage but Trump was still quick to cast blame

In the weeks leading up to Tuesday’s midterm elections, Donald Trump made clear that he would place some blame on his favorite cable channel, Fox News, if his party did poorly.

Even before races really started to be called, Trump hit the network in multiple Truth Social posts, criticizing Fox for featuring Democratic pundit Jessica Tarlov; attacking Fox’s polls as “always the worst”; mocking some recent softness in the network’s year-over-year ratings trends and accusing Fox of being “AGAINST” him. Just before midnight, Trump directly placed blame on Fox News for the Republican party’s failure to hold the US House and Senate, writing that “FoxNews bears responsibility for these losses by constantly and consistently putting on the Dumocrat opposition, and worse.”

In a surreal moment, Trump then called into Fox’s election coverage around midnight and directly criticized the network’s polls as “terrible,” telling the network’s employees: “You ought to get yourself a good pollster, because your pollsters are the worst.” Fox News anchor Bret Baier pushed back gently, pointing out that “tonight, actually, the results are pretty close to what the Fox polls showed.” (Trump also made a dig about Baier – or Fox writ large –not supporting him “when it wasn’t fashionable”.)

But while Trump was extremely critical of Fox News throughout the day and night, during more than six and a half hours of election night coverage viewed by the Guardian, commentators on the network seemed to take pains to not directly tie the party’s losses to Trump, and there were no suggestions that the party should back away from him.

Instead, several commentators on the channel turned the focus on voters for being “impatient” and wanting “instant gratification”, as host Jesse Watters put it just after 8pm. Many commentators said the president’s party historically performs poorly in the midterm elections. There were many attacks on Democrats, with conservative commentators in agreement that the party would overstay their welcome from voters and misinterpret their victory as a mandate, paving the way for Republican wins in 2028.

The only significant criticisms of the president focused on the White House’s messaging strategy and his decision to go to war in Iran.

“In some sense, Mr Trump was too successful in the first year and didn’t sell it enough in the second year,” said Larry Kudlow, a Fox Business Network host who served as Trump’s Director of the National Economic Council during his first administration.

Dana Perino, who served as press secretary to George W Bush, said: “From a messaging standpoint, a lot of times the administration has got too many balls in the air and it’s hard to figure out what is the headline we want to drive.”

And several commentators noted that voters seemed to be unhappy with the president’s decision to launch a war against Iran, particularly considering the rise in gas prices that resulted from it. Sean Hannity, the president’s biggest booster on the channel, agreed with Baier that the night’s outcome would have been different if he had not bombed the country.

“I think it’s prices. People are mad,” Watters offered later in the night.

Still, the overwhelming consensus from Fox’s election night panel – which included several former Trump administration employees, including his most recent press secretary Karoline Leavitt – was that the blame should not be squarely placed at the president’s feet. Instead, Leavitt singled out the media. “Unfortunately, I think the American people forgot about the good policy, [and] maybe listened to the lying media on the other side that is definitely in the back seat of the Democratic party,” she said.

Just before 10pm, Fox News host Will Cain said: “I look at the pros and the cons of the last two years under Donald Trump, and the pros significantly outweigh the cons.”

While primetime host Laura Ingraham acknowledged that the election was a “referendum on Trump”, she said that “overwhelmingly his policies have been phenomenal for the country. Overwhelmingly, the stuff he’s promised, he’s done, and it’s worked out fabulously.”

Despite his earlier comments, Hannity said that Trump’s policies “are rock solid”, that Iran “had to be done” and that his intervention will eventually be proven right.

One person who shared in the belief that the president was not responsible for the losses was the president himself. “I don’t view it as a hit on me,” Trump told the Fox News panel, adding that “historically, I think I’ll be judged for having done the right thing,” and largely placing the blame on the Republican candidates who were defeated. He repeated his contention that the outcome would have been different if he had been on the ballot.