“Donald Trump is using Fox News as a staffing agency”: Matt Gertz discusses with On The Media the revolving door between Fox and the second Trump administration
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Matt Gertz on the revolving door between Fox and the 2nd Trump administration
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From the November 15, 2024, edition of WNYC's On the Media
MATT GERTZ (SENIOR FELLOW, MEDIA MATTERS): Donald Trump is using Fox News as a staffing agency.
BROOKE GLADSTONE (HOST): Matt Gertz is the senior fellow at the left-leaning Media Matters for America. He says it's worth revisiting all that we learned in the first term about Trump's relationship with his cable news channel of choice.
GERTZ: Fox & Friends has, for a long time, been his favorite show. Pete Hegseth, the potentially incoming defense secretary, has been working as a co-host of Fox & Friends' weekend edition for the last several years.
GLADSTONE: What should we know about him and his career trajectory from Fox News contributor to secretary of defense nominee?
GERTZ: What Hegseth was able to do, after catching Trump's eye, was get Donald Trump to sign on to his own aims, which during Trump's first administration was securing executive clemency for several service members who had been accused or convicted of war crimes.
GLADSTONE: Yeah, the killing of civilians.
GERTZ: He put family members of various accused or convicted war criminals on the show to talk up how they had been persecuted.
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GERTZ: This is how Trump gets his news. This is how his worldview is changed. It's one segment at a time.
GLADSTONE: He has a certain set of skills, certainly as a Fox News host, right? But secretary of defense needs a different set of skills.
GERTZ: Right. The set of skills that you need for being a Fox News host is understanding how to push the buttons of the MAGA faithful. And the way that Fox hosts traditionally do that is by making those viewers afraid, making those viewers angry.
GLADSTONE: Providing enemies?
GERTZ: Providing enemies. Obviously that is not the job of defense secretary. We're talking about a sprawling bureaucracy that employs nearly 3 million service members and civilian employees that has a budget of hundreds of billions of dollars. It's a serious job for serious people.
GLADSTONE: You've also noticed that this revolving door also works the other way. Several Trump staffers signed on with Fox News after Trump left office.
GERTZ: During or after his term, yes. Tom Homan was previously the head of ICE. After he retired from ICE in summer of 2018, he got a job at Fox News. He would denounce Democrats for standing against Trump's border policies. He would call for evermore draconian measures. He would say the things that Donald Trump wanted to hear.
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GERTZ: Now he's gone through the revolving door; now he's coming back into the administration.
GLADSTONE: You have observed that the more often you go on Fox News, the more likely you are to clinch one of these top jobs in the Trump administration. One Fox frequent flyer was Congressman Matt Gaetz, just nominated attorney general.
GERTZ: We have counted at least 347 weekday Fox appearances that Gaetz did from August 2017 through Election Day of 2024. He's actually not the most frequent Fox guest to be taking a jump to the administration though. His Florida colleague, Rep. Michael Walz, who is Trump's pick for national security adviser, actually made at least 569 weekday Fox appearances, 176 since January 2023, which is the most of any member of Congress in that period.
GLADSTONE: Wow. The last nominee -- Tulsi Gabbard -- is a former Democrat-turned-MAGA Fox News contributor and more. Is that how she caught Trump's eye?
GERTZ: In Gabbard's case, she became a favorite of Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News star host. And as she underwent a sort of political transformation that brought her further and further onto the right, Fox was an opportunity for her to rebrand herself. Tulsi Gabbard is the pick for director of national intelligence. It's a position that oversees the 18 U.S. intelligence agencies. It's also responsible for the presidential daily brief, though that is somewhat less important in a Donald Trump administration, as Donald Trump rather famously ignores his daily briefing. He would take advice from Fox News hosts, either through their programs or he'd reach out to them directly. Those are the experts he wanted to hear from, not people with actual subject matter expertise.