I was just as surprised as anyone was that Megyn Kelly acted like such a sycophant when interviewing Trump, and it appears that it was so bad that it’s actually going to hurt her career:

Megyn Kelly’s much-publicized broadcast special with Donald Trump was supposed to launch the Fox News star into the stratosphere of television anchordom. Instead, the widely panned show seems to have achieved the opposite result: It exposed the extent of her limited mainstream appeal. Kelly drew just 4.8 million viewers on Tuesday night, a number television executives say is a disappointment by any measure. Three senior executives I spoke with say an audience of 9 million would have been a success. “Not good for her at all,” was how one insider put it.

In the days since, Kelly has been working to contain the fallout. She took aim at critics on her cable show Wednesday night by deploying an age-old Fox News tactic: claiming the backlash was a result of liberal media bias. But behind the scenes, she is said to be worried about the response. “She’s very upset with the show reaction, and in hindsight with how it was produced,” one Fox veteran told me.

The stakes for Kelly are high. As the Times recently reported, she’s in the final year of her contract and has been on a media blitz campaigning for a bigger job at Fox or another network. In recent interviews, she’s said her ambition is to be a combination of Oprah, Charlie Rose, and Barbara Walters. The special was essentially a public interview for her next job. But Kelly’s chummy treatment of Trump may have damaged her brand as tough and fair-minded (this being Fox, the bar was pretty low). Worse, she cozied up to Trump at the very moment Rupert Murdoch decided Fox News will support the GOP front-runner. By lobbing softballs — or, as Times TV critic James Poniewozik described her questions, “airballs” — at Trump, Kelly came across like any other GOP cheerleader at the right-wing network.