Joining its peers MSNBC and CNN, Fox News has stopped regularly carrying President Donald Trump’s full campaign rallies, opting to stick with scheduled programming as fewer viewers tune in for his often long and repetitive stump speeches.
According to a Wednesday Politico report, Fox has mostly started following the other networks’ lead, slotting clips from the rallies into its shows.
This has reportedly worried both Trump allies and Republican candidates, as both groups want the airtime and exposure even more than usual, with the midterms just a few weeks away.
For Fox, it all seems to come down to ratings and economics. If the shows get better ratings than his rallies, they’ll stick with the shows. Also, per Politico, Fox can’t interrupt the President’s speeches to cut to commercial, creating a financial incentive to stick to the schedule.
Hannity’s show is more of a Trump rally than an actual Trump rally. I don’t see the problem…
Trump was a;ways going to be a flash-in-the-pan, because his rallies are repetitive, boring, and geared only to the small cohort of far-right-wing idiots who support him.
When even a rabid right-wing group like FoxNews won’t give him the free airtime he thrives on, it’s easy to see that the thrill is gone (to paraphrase B. B. King) and that Trump’s allure to Republicans is fading.
This is part of the reason that his statements have gotten more extreme and less factual—if that is indeed possible.
After the Blue Wave hits, he’ll get even worse. For Trump, there is no bottom.
Trump will panic at the thought of declining ratings. Perhaps he’ll pull a stunt like Vince McMahon and pretend he’s been killed in a fiery car crash.
Important threshold here if he bores FOX viewers so much that three weeks before one of the most important midterms in this country’s history they’d rather watch the regular lineup. A few weeks after the election, an Atlantic reader with experience in publishing wrote in anonymously to predict that eventually everyone, the all the people you can’t fool all the time and even the some of the people you can fool all of the time (looking at you, FOX viewers), would just get bored with the unchanging routine. “There will be some settling down around the time of the inauguration, followed by a steady slide. People only have so much patience for temper tantrums. Narcissists get old and ugly, especially when overexposed to sunlight,” this person said. And here we are. It isn’t over, and it’ll take a generation to clean up. But the only place Trump’s going is down, and the only question is how steep the slide will be.
Trump is boring, his shtick is very old by now. And his voice is like gravel fed thru a wood-chipper.