By Vice President Kamala Harris understood that by agreeing to an interview on Fox News she was venturing into hostile territory. And from the outset of that discussion Wednesday, anchor Bret Baier pressed Harris on the record of the Biden administration and on policy issues that were of concern to Fox viewers, such as immigration.
That immigration is a central concern for Fox News viewers, of course, is in part because it is the centerpiece of Donald Trump’s bid to regain the presidency and, by extension, a focal point of the channel’s day-to-day coverage. Fox News helps amplify Trump’s perceived strengths and Harris’s perceived weaknesses, and that filtered into Baier’s questions.
It is worth noting that while Baier was aggressive in pressing Harris on the question of immigration from the outset, often interrupting her answers in an apparent effort to push her away from her prepared comments, he was also aggressive during the first major interview Trump granted the network after announcing his bid for the 2024 Republican nomination. Back in June 2023, Baier knocked Trump back on his heels with questions about his retention of classified documents at his home in Florida. Baier’s interruptions were not quite as sharp, but he did push back.
But that was June 2023, when it still seemed like Trump might not be the Republican nominee. Baier’s most recent conversation with Trump before Wednesday was on the last day of the Democratic convention, when Trump was already the GOP nominee. That interview was conducted by phone, making interjections trickier for the hosts, but there didn’t seem to be much inclination on their end to do so. The only forceful pushback came at the end, when Baier and co-host Martha MacCallum needed Trump to wrap up.
Baier is keenly aware of how important Trump’s political base is to his employer. After Fox News made the dangerously premature call that Arizona had gone for Joe Biden in 2020, Baier reportedly pressured higher-ups to reverse it, seeing the backlash that quickly erupted from viewers. There is often little value for Fox News hosts to challenge Trump and clear benefits to encouraging him.
A few hours before the Baier-Harris interview, in fact, Trump appeared on Fox for a “town hall” centered on women’s issues. Unlike the interview with Baier, the Trump discussion was conducted in front of an audience, one made up heavily of Republicans and Trump supporters.
The host of that conversation, Harris Faulkner, began not by pressing Trump on issues of concern to women but by giving him an open-ended opportunity to respond to criticisms of his campaign — after noting how well he is doing with non-White voters (at least relative to past Republican candidates). Here, again, the questions tended to center on issues where Trump and Fox seem to think Trump has an advantage. There was one question on abortion, for example, and one on trans women playing sports. (Baier had a question about trans people, too, a focus of Trump’s campaign ads.)
None of this, though, really captures how Fox News ensured that Harris’s appearance would do the least possible damage to Trump’s candidacy. That unfolded during the hours of programming that followed the interview, during which hosts and producers clipped the least flattering moments from the conversation and presented them to viewers with a slathering of spin.
Laura Ingraham’s show came on shortly after the interview. Harris, she began, “clearly wasn’t prepared to answer the real questions.”
She showed a clip of Baier pressing Harris on immigration.
“She is the sitting vice president of the United States who was put in charge of the border — what, in the first month that they were in office?” Ingraham said, making a claim about Harris’s mandate that misrepresents her role. “And she will not answer a direct and simple question.”
Another clip on immigration, and Ingraham offered her summary of Harris’s performance.
“She can’t really speak to the details despite the fact that, again, she’s the border czar,” Ingraham said, with that same inaccurate presentation of Harris’s role. “And again, she points herself into the same radical direction that she was in back in 2019, where people saw her back then as the true radical. She’s still a true radical. That’s why she refuses to renounce her policies.”
Ingraham’s show was followed by Jesse Watters’s. He led off by declaring that it was “disorienting” covering Harris’s campaign.
“Her record’s radical left, then she agrees with Trump but her values haven’t changed,” he claimed. “Her VP’s wooing White dudes and Obama’s scolding the brothas.” (This last word was offered in Watters’s estimate of an urban patois.) “She hid from CNN for five weeks, then she turned down the Fox debate, now she’s playing footsie with [podcast host Joe] Rogan and begging to come on Fox.”
“Well, be careful what you wish for,” he continued. “Because Kamala Harris just sat down with Bret Baier for a half-hour, and she was roughed up so badly Pelosi’s asking Joe to get back in.” (Former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was one of the most prominent voices to question whether President Joe Biden should continue his presidential bid this summer.)
An hour later, it was Trump’s pal Sean Hannity’s turn.
“I’d say the joy is gone in the Harris campaign tonight. And her obvious anger, that was on full display. The one she’s notorious for, that was on full display during the interview,” he said during his introductory monologue. “Kamala appeared agitated, obsessively tried to simply avoid answering basic, fundamental questions. She took zero responsibility for anything that has happened during the Harris-Biden administration.”
“And when all else would fail,” he continued, “she’d either flat-out lie or go to the default campaign mode — if the dog bites, if the bee stings, if you’re feeling sad, just blame Donald Trump for everything.”
This was the tone of each of those shows, the ones that air during prime time and which, on a day-to-day basis, earn the most viewers. Harris sat down with Baier in an effort to be heard by the channel’s heavily Republican and right-leaning base, only to have the network follow up that interview with a battery of voices focused on framing her as negatively as possible.
As we noted in 2019 when Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) sat down for an interview on Fox News, this is how Fox News operates. Contradictory voices are sidelined or buried; efforts by those not on the political right to reach the channel’s audience are inevitably hampered by the channel’s infinite ability and interest in recontextualizing things to fit its political objectives. Never argue with someone who buys ink by the barrel, the saying used to have it, though the modern iteration might instead quantify the amount spent on right-wing pundits.
It’s unlikely that the interview will have much effect on voters. Avid Fox News watchers aren’t going to be particularly sympathetic to Harris in the first place, given that they watch the channel avidly. Harris can claim something of a moral high ground as she tries to appeal to Trump-skeptical Republicans; here she was at least showing a willingness to engage her opponents in conversation. (Imagine Trump on MSNBC!)
But there was never a chance that she was going to beat Fox News at its game. After all, Fox is always and relentlessly playing that game, a game centered on boosting Trump and tearing Harris down. For the network and its hosts, the point wasn’t Baier’s interview. It was what they could do with that interview to win their game.
