Trump: “Nobody Can Ever Trust Fox News”

by Sharon Rondeau

(Jun. 19, 2024) — On Wednesday afternoon amid a string of reposts of others’ recent election-related articles on his TruthSocial account, presumptive 2024 Republican presidential nominee Donald J. Trump, who also served as the nation’s 45th president, opined, “Nobody can ever trust Fox News, and I am one of them…”

His post targeted former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, who sits on the Fox Corporation Board of Directors, terming him a “weak and ineffective RINO.”

Ryan served as Speaker from 2015 to 2019 following the resignation from Congress of then-Speaker John Boehner. Elected president in 2016, Trump worked with Ryan, ostensibly on a collegial basis, through Ryan’s departure from government in early 2019.

In April 2018, Ryan announced he would not seek an 11th term in Congress serving Wisconsin’s first district. Two months after departing, Ryan was “appointed” to Fox Corporation’s Board of Directors in addition to joining a private-equity firm and becoming the vice chairman of the “global CEO advisory firm” Teneo.

On June 11, Ryan used the Fox platform, specifically “Your World” hosted by Neil Cavuto, to criticize Trump for holding himself “above the Constitution” and being generally “unfit for office.”

“He’s a total lightweight, a failed and pathetic Speaker of the House, and a very disloyal person,” Trump continued his post on Wednesday. “Romney was bad, but Paul Ryan made him look worse,” a reference to the 2012 presidential race against Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

“Rupert and Lachlan, get that dog off your Board – You don’t need him,” Trump expounded, addressing Fox Corporation Executive Chair and CEO Lachlan Murdoch and his father, Rupert Murdoch, who served as Fox’s chairman, CEO and executive chairman in a media career spanning more than four decades.

Despite their earlier positive relationship, in May 2021 Trump termed Ryan a catalyst for “loss,” while Ryan has recently said the same of Trump. When Trump announced he would again seek the presidency after the 2022 midterm elections, Ryan attributed Republicans’ 2018 loss of majorities in the House and Senate, Trump’s reported loss of the 2020 election and Republicans’ disappointing showing in 2022 to Trump’s failure to present himself as a “traditional conservative Republican.”

In June 2018, as reported by The New York Times, Ryan “contradicted President Trump’s assertions of a broad conspiracy by federal law enforcement…, joining other lawmakers in saying that the F.B.I. did nothing wrong by using a confidential informant to contact members of the Trump campaign as it investigated its ties to Russia.”

The claim that the 2016 Trump campaign “colluded” with the Kremlin to impact the election cast a pall over the former businessman’s presidency, though in the end no evidence of improper coordination was discovered by a 22-month Special Counsel investigation.

To many, the FBI’s reputation was sorely damaged after former U.S. attorney and Special Counsel John Durham issued a 2023 report stating his lengthy probe to discover the origins of the FBI’s “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation uncovered no plausible predicate for its launch.

The Times‘s barrage of articles citing anonymous sources alleging Trump-Russia “collusion” earned the paper a Pulitzer prize for which one veteran reporter later apologized.

“…for Republicans, no issue has consumed more oxygen than the Justice Department inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 election,” The Times reported on June 6, 2018. “Mr. Trump has seized on the disclosure of the use of an informant to claim, without evidence, that federal law enforcement officials had improperly placed a ‘spy’ in his campaign ‘for political purposes.’ He demanded a Justice Department inquiry of the matter and named the matter ‘SPYGATE’ in repeated posts on Twitter.”

The article continues:

Mr. Ryan became the highest-ranking Republican to throw cold water on that interpretation, which Democrats and former high-level law enforcement officials have claimed is part of an unrelenting effort to discredit the open investigation into Mr. Trump and his campaign. Mr. Ryan backed Representative Trey Gowdy, Republican of South Carolina, who led the House’s politically charged investigation into the 2012 attack in Benghazi, Libya, but infuriated some Republican partisans by rebuffing Mr. Trump on “Spygate.”

“Chairman Gowdy’s initial assessment is accurate, but we have more digging to do,” Mr. Ryan told reporters at a news conference on Wednesday.

Gowdy is now host of the Fox News program, “Sunday Night in America.”

In December 2023, Ryan decried that Trump was politically “resurrected.”