In the early months of this year, when coronavirus was written off as a problem a continent and an ocean over, Fox News fed the White House countless lines about the media and Democrats supposedly using the crisis to hurt Donald Trump’s reelection chances. But since its dramatic arrival into America’s collective consciousness, which has led to unprecedented changes for millions, Trump has been forced to drop the “hoax” act—and as the president goes, so, too, goes Fox News.

“This very moment is a critical time for everybody in the country,” Sean Hannity stated soberly on Monday night, noting that the “virus doesn’t discriminate against Republican, Democrat, liberal, conservative,” so “all Americans, even those that well, don’t like a single thing [Trump has] done,” must now “join together in this effort.” It was a sharp turnaround from just days previous, when Hannity declared that the media was “scaring people unnecessarily” about the outbreak.

In her own twisted acknowledgment that coronavirus is indeed a serious threat, Laura Ingraham accused the press of “enjoying this moment that has brought great inconvenience, disruption, and suffering to American workers and families, let alone all the health challenges, the deaths, and the infection rate—because some people think it’s Trump’s downfall, and they are cheering that on as they did during Mueller and all these other crises.” (Last week she inventively imagined how a president Hillary Clinton might handle the “Wuhan virus” while downplaying fears.)

Both segments were a far cry from Fox Business host Trish Regan last week calling coronavirus “yet another attempt to impeach the president.” In the days after Regan’s claims, COVID-19 cases exploded in the U.S., Americans were forced indoors, Trump declared a national emergency, and Regan, along with much of the “hoax” rhetoric, was suddenly noticeably absent from the network.

Much has been made of the Fox News–Trump feedback loop, in which information passes from Fox’s hosts to the president’s Twitter feed to his comments to the press to, at times, official White House proposals. There’s flexibility and nuance in the loop, of course; sometimes talking points find their way back to Fox before they make their way into policy, and sometimes other White House officials come into the game. Coronavirus seems to be the rare instance in which the network is following Trump’s lead instead; Fox refused to cover the pandemic seriously, with the exception of host Tucker Carlson, until Trump was forced to confront the gravity of the situation himself. It would appear that Fox has now fallen in line and is taking cues from Trump’s official edicts, which have included a recommendation against gatherings of more than 10 people.

In practice, this means those at the network are showering praise on the president rather than offering their own take on things. On Monday’s edition of The Five, Fox News host Greg Gutfeld heaped praise on the “amazing” and “[unmatched] deeds that this administration is doing” to stamp out coronavirus. Over at Fox Business on Monday, Doug Wead, a right-wing presidential historian, likened Trump to a messiah figure who arose to save the U.S. from this pandemic: “What he’s doing right now, from the standpoint of history, is almost perfect. It looks like he was born for this moment.” And ever-loyal Hannity used similar terms to call the administration’s recent travel bans “the single most consequential decision in history.”

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