At Fox News, Donald Trump serves at once as assignment editor and fanboy-in-chief, watching—and tweeting—as his own wild conspiracies and policy ideals are echoed back into the White House residence. “The network has become a safe space for Trump fans,” a Fox executive told my colleague Gabriel Sherman earlier this year. And now, a new kind of reality show is playing out with Fox at the center. With Trump suddenly enamored of his pardon power—he recently pardoned conservative gadfly Dinesh D’Souza, and has floated a pardon for Martha Stewart and a commutation for Rod Blagojevich—Fox News has become a clearinghouse for appeals to the president’s magnanimity.

The spectacle began last week, with Patti Blagojevich appearing on-air to beg that her husband’s sentence be commuted. (The former Democratic governor is currently serving out a 14-year sentence after being convicted on 17 counts of public corruption, the most notable being his attempt to sell Barack Obama’s vacated Senate seat to the highest bidder.) “I see that these same people that did this to my family, [who] secretly taped us, and twisted the facts, and perverted the law [which put] my husband in jail—these same people are trying to do the same thing that they did to my husband, just on a much larger scale,” she said, tailoring her message to an audience of one. “[Prosecutors] create crimes where there are no crimes. They make up crimes. They make a big splash in the press just to bring down people who are controversial or who they don’t like.” Further eschewing subtlety, she added: “It takes a a strong leader like President Trump to right these wrongs.”

That remarkable entreaty has now become a trend. On Monday night, the wife of former Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos, who pleaded guilty last year of lying to the F.B.I. about his contacts with the Russian government, also appeared on Fox News, this time with host Tucker Carlson, to bend the knee. Asked whether her husband would go to prison, Simona Mangiante Papadopoulos replied that George had been a “dedicated and committed” member of Trump’s campaign. “Because of this incident, his freedom is challenged, so I trust and hope and ask [that] President Trump will pardon him,” she said.

There is no doubt the message was received: Trump is an inveterate Fox News viewer, and he has certainly been flexing his unilateral power of late. “As has been stated by numerous legal scholars, I have the absolute right to PARDON myself,” he tweeted on Monday, coinciding with revelations that his legal team sent a memo to Robert Mueller last June stating that “the Constitution leaves no question that the president has exclusive authority over the ultimate conduct and disposition of all criminal investigations and over those executive branch officials responsible for conducting those investigations.”

The memo continues: “It remains our position that the President’s actions here, by virtue of his position as the chief law enforcement officer, could neither constitutionally nor legally constitute obstruction because that would amount to him obstructing himself, and that he could, if he wished, terminate the inquiry, or even exercise his power to pardon if he so desired.”