Credulous reporters spent the years after Donald Trump left the White House declaring that Fox News’ love affair with the former president had gone cold. Reading too deeply into reports of Rupert Murdoch’s personal dislike of Trump and his right-wing propaganda network’s often flattering coverage of his would-be successors, they confidently asserted that Fox was moving on.

But claims of an imminent Fox-Trump breakup have aged as poorly as the similarly confident predictions that Trump himself was on the verge of a pivot. Forget the network’s brief flirtations with Ron DeSantis, Glenn Youngkin, Vivek Ramaswamy, and now Nikki Haley. Fox never fully abandoned Trump, and its biggest stars spent 2023 furiously defending him from legal jeopardy. Its political and business models demand that as the GOP field clears and leaves him as the party’s nominee, Fox will inevitably backslide into being Trump TV.

The twice-impeached, four-times-indicted former president is now seeking a return to office, with a stated goal of using the federal government to exact “retribution.” He has openly toyed with the “termination” of the Constitution’s limits on presidential power, promised to unleash the FBI and Justice Department on his enemies, and said he would act as a “dictator,” albeit only on “day one” of his term.

But for much of this year, the legacy news outlets that helped usher Trump to power were complacent. Nakedly authoritarian comments from the would-be president drew relatively muted coverage, while his potentially disastrous policy proposals were often ignored. If the press’s over-coverage aided Trump’s previous ascendance, this time around he has benefited from its relative neglect. 

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It's possible that as the presidential primaries come to a close, reporting focusing on “not the odds, but the stakes” will become more of the norm rather than the exception.

But the job of the political press will become only more difficult over the next year. Republicans and right-wing media will pressure journalists to repeat the mistakes they made during Trump’s first general election campaign. They have spent years assembling a series of debunked conspiracy theories and bad-faith innuendoes related to the business interests of Biden’s son, Hunter, and next year they plan to leverage those phony grievances to impeach the president. Republicans recognize that they lack actual incriminating evidence of wrongdoing by Joe Biden — but they know that if they can stir up a scandal, they can give legacy news outlets something to talk about besides Trump’s alleged criminality.