Fox News is airing soft-focus interviews on Fox & Friends with the apparent finalists for the Republican vice presidential nomination and their partners. The interviews demonstrate Fox’s preeminent position in the GOP — and serve as final auditions before an audience of one, Donald Trump.

Fox & Friends’ interviews with vice presidential hopefuls began on Wednesday, when co-host Lawrence Jones aired portions of his sit-down with Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) and his wife Usha Vance. Ainsley Earhardt’s interview with Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) and his fiance Mindy Noce will follow on Thursday, and Brian Kilmeade’s interview with North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum and his wife Kathryn Burgum is scheduled for Monday. Co-host Steve Doocy explained Wednesday that Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) had declined his offer of similar treatment.

Trump’s obsession with Fox — and in particular with Fox & Friends, the morning show which gave him a weekly platform to comment on the news before he ran for president — is well-documented. He typically began his days in the White House by watching Fox & Friends and tweeting about its content in real time, and he relied on the program and others on the network to vet ideas about issues from federal contracts to pandemic policy. 

Fox notably played a key role in staffing decisions during Trump’s presidency, with the then-president often seeming to make hires based on who impressed him on the network’s programming (and firing people who lost the support of the network’s stars). At least 20 former Fox employees, including Cabinet secretaries and senior White House advisers, ended up in his administration, with other veterans of the network’s green rooms joining his legal defense teams. 

The three apparent vice presidential finalists are all regulars on the Fox circuit. Since President Joe Biden’s inauguration, Scott has made at least 141 appearances on Fox’s weekday shows, while Vance has been interviewed at least 130 times, according to Media Matters’ database. Burgum has a relatively paltry 40 — but 39 of them came after he launched his presidential campaign in June 2023, and he reportedly has the support of Fox founder Rupert Murdoch.

Vance, meanwhile, was one of the four Republican nominees for U.S. Senate that Fox’s prime-time lineup effectively hand-picked in 2022 (the other three all lost their general election fights). Vance became a Tucker Carlson favorite by reinventing himself from bestselling author who explained America’s hillbilly culture to the Aspen crowd and worried Trump could be “America’s Hitler” to hard-edged culture warrior who invokes the use of extra-constitutional measures.

But if Vance’s Fox & Friends interview is any indication, these sit-downs won’t provide voters with much in the way of critical information about the potential vice presidential nominees. Fox aired only 3 minutes and 43 seconds worth of edited discussion from Jones’ solo interview with Vance, with the senator fielding broad softball questions like “a J.D. Vance economy would look like what” and “what would you do to solve the border crisis” and explaining that Democrats “fear” him because his “biography” means they can’t say he “hates poor people.”

The joint interview with Vance and his wife amounted to another 4 minutes, and it featured Usha Vance explaining what “people get wrong about” her husband, the pair discussing their faiths, and J.D. Vance saying that it will be fine if he is not Trump’s pick because “I love being a dad.”

The closest Jones got to a challenging question was when he obliquely referenced “past comments” in which Vance had been “critical of Donald Trump” and asked, “I don't think the country cares about that, but I do think they do care about the evolution in the sense of, why?” Vance replied that Trump had been “a great president” whose “results were so good” and his presidency “taught me a very important lesson about how the media lies.”

Mike Pence, the former vice president whom Trump is replacing because Pence refused to aid his coup attempt following the 2020 election, notably did not come up. 

But these interviews are happening on a pro-Trump propaganda outlet, not a news outlet, and their purpose is to inform the former president, not the Fox audience.

“Our plea to the former president is you may want to watch these interviews because they may impact your decision,” Jones said on Wednesday. That’s another piece of Fox advice that Trump almost certainly will take.