A Wednesday MSNBC opinion piece by
Fox News has been between a rock and a hard place, Aleem contended: a lot of their higher-ups don't like Trump and want him gone from politics, but he's just so darn good for ratings that they can't fully ignore or turn their backs on him.
This led to at least some criticism of Trump on the network, and was probably responsible for Fox News calling Georgia for Biden before other networks in 2020, which some say impacted the outcome of that election.
But, Aleem wrote, what he called those "occasional bouts of sobriety" have disappeared since the indictments began, and Fox News has returned to being solidly pro-Trump.
Certainly, there are legitimate grounds to criticize the former president (his social media habits, harping on the 2020 election as fraudulent, for starters).
Furthermore, it probably should not be the job of any news network to endorse a presidential candidate, even though most cable news networks are solidly on one side or the other of the political spectrum.
It's not surprising, in any case, that Fox News would appear to be once again supporting Trump, given that the indictments against him have been perceived even by liberal legal experts like Alan Dershowitz to be politically motivated against Trump for his conservative views, and anything but impartial.
Fox News and its conservative hosts and commentators are naturally feeling attacked by the indictments almost as much as Trump is, because they realize that it's Democrats and deep staters going after their political opponents.
After all, Hillary Clinton's classified documents problems were worse than Trump's (or Biden's), and yet only the Republican out of these three was charged with anything.
Al Gore in 2000 did a lot of the same things Trump is accused of doing--in fact, he got numerous vote recounts and did more to try to steal the election than Trump is accused of doing and the election had to be settled by the Supreme Court-- and yet he, a Democrat, never faced any charges for what he did.
As for Trump's "falsified" business records, what about the Biden family's 20 shell companies and 70 reports of possible money laundering by numerous banks?
That seems worse than what Trump did, but instead of charging Hunter Biden with any sort of crime, prosecutors let the statute of limitations expire on anything serious and tried to offer him a sweetheart plea deal that would have let him off the hook for anything illegal he ever did, in the past, present or future.
If Republicans don't do something about all of these political indictments of Trump or at least start holding Democrats equally accountable, they can kiss our democracy goodbye.
The U.S. might as well be a banana republic if the justice system is going to be applied so unequally, and Fox News knows it even if they haven't suddenly fallen back in love with Trump the politician and presidential candidate.
