Way back when the prospect of a Donald Trump presidency was mostly a punchline—when his polling success was a sign that the Republican Party had gone a bit nuts, but surely not that nuts—there was the first Republican debate. It was on Fox News at a time before the network had really picked a horse. The immediate proof of that was the contest's first question, from then-Fox host Megyn Kelly, that went all-out in challenging Trump's record of saying vicious and barbaric things about people—particularly women—who challenged him in public.

But Kelly took her best shot and missed. In a genuinely grotesque, but undoubtedly effective maneuver, Trump defused the situation and demonstrated that if he assumed the armor of pure and utter shamelessness, he might just be invincible in Republican politics.

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Note the Free Beacon's toady headline on the video. Presidential candidate DESTROYS liberal celebrity with disgusting language totally unbecoming of the office he's seeking. But whatever, it worked with The Base.

Except, according to an explosive look at Fox News in The Trump Era by acclaimed reporter Jane Mayer in The New Yorker, it may not have been all that it seemed.

A pair of Fox insiders and a source close to Trump believe that Ailes informed the Trump campaign about Kelly’s question. Two of those sources say that they know of the tipoff from a purported eyewitness. In addition, a former Trump campaign aide says that a Fox contact gave him advance notice of a different debate question, which asked the candidates whether they would support the Republican nominee, regardless of who won. The former aide says that the heads-up was passed on to Trump, who was the only candidate who said that he wouldn’t automatically support the Party’s nominee—a position that burnished his image as an outsider.

These claims are hard to evaluate: Ailes is dead, and they conflict with substantial reporting suggesting that the rift between Trump and Fox was bitter. A former campaign aide is adamant that Trump was genuinely surprised and infuriated by Kelly’s question. A Fox spokesperson strongly denied the allegations, and declined requests for interviews with employees involved in the debate.



So it's still somewhat in dispute whether Trump was given the question, or at least the outlines of it, so that he had time to prepare a get-out-of-jail-with-sleeze card. But considering Trump is a devout follower of the Accuse Them First of That Which You Are Guilty school, and he subsequently harped incessantly on the fact CNN contributor Donna Brazile gave Hillary Clinton some Democratic primary debate questions, it certainly adds up. Then you tack on that Trump's political career is the most obsessively performative of any in recent history. It's all dominance theater and displays of weaponized cruelty, stomping on The Other to get The Base's blood flowing. It's a show. It seems reasonable Trump might see a script before the cameras start rolling.

Trump fields a question during the first Republican presidential debate, hosted by Fox News and Facebook, at the Quicken Loans Arena on August 6, 2015 in Cleveland, Ohio. Scott Olson Getty Images

But even if you ignore the debate issue, Mayer's chronicle of the Trump-Fox symbiosis is more than slightly horrifying. It's not just that Bill Shine, currently the White House deputy chief of staff for communications, was hired soon after he was pushed out of Fox News for his alleged role in covering up the culture of sexual harassment there—and was, for a time, getting paid millions by Fox simultaneously with his White House salary. It's not just that Sean Hannity is known to White House aides as the Shadow Chief of Staff, or that Lou Dobbs (the fascistic Benjamin Button) and Pete Hegseth (who recently declared on-air, with no-little pride, that he hasn't washed his hands in a decade) are patched into Oval Office meetings on speakerphone to advise on policy.

Trump has told confidants that he has ranked the loyalty of many reporters, on a scale of 1 to 10. Bret Baier, Fox News’ chief political anchor, is a 6; Hannity a solid 10. Steve Doocy, the co-host of “Fox & Friends,” is so adoring that Trump gives him a 12.

If Hannity or Doocy were journalists, this would be an embarrassing indictment of their work. In truth, reading this probably makes for a very proud moment for them.

Trump and Hannity demonstrate the power of true love at a Make America Great Again rally in Cape Girardeau, Missouri on November 5, 2018. JIM WATSON Getty Images

But the symbiosis has real consequences, and not just because Trump—a know-nothing vector who absorbs feelings and explodes them back out without examining them for even a fleeting second—watches the network obsessively and repeats whatever he hears. Fox News, according to Mayer, has done Trump some formidable favors.

The 2016 campaign was nearing its end, and Trump and Clinton were all but tied. That fall, a FoxNews.com reporter had a story that put the network’s journalistic integrity to the test. Diana Falzone, who often covered the entertainment industry, had obtained proof that Trump had engaged in a sexual relationship in 2006 with a pornographic film actress calling herself Stormy Daniels...Falzone had also amassed e-mails between Daniels’s attorney and Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen, detailing a proposed cash settlement, accompanied by a nondisclosure agreement. Falzone had even seen the contract.

But Falzone’s story didn’t run—it kept being passed off from one editor to the next. After getting one noncommittal answer after another from her editors, Falzone at last heard from [Ken] LaCorte, who was then the head of FoxNews.com. Falzone told colleagues that LaCorte said to her, “Good reporting, kiddo. But Rupert wants Donald Trump to win. So just let it go.” LaCorte denies telling Falzone this, but one of Falzone’s colleagues confirms having heard her account at the time.

If this is accurate, Fox killed a story in the absolute homestretch of the campaign because it could have been highly damaging to Trump. It's also the kind of top-down editorial management that Dutch historian Rutger Bregman alleged Fox News employs when he told Tucker Carlson he's a "millionaire funded by billionaires"—except it's far more direct than Bregman even suggested. If anything bolsters the case that Fox is a faux-populist fear-and-resentment machine designed to keep white viewers' focus away from issues like wealth inequality and corporate power, this is it.

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Watch Fox News host Tucker Carlson call one of his guests a 'tiny brain...moron' during an interview. NowThis has obtained the full segment with historian Rutger Bregman that Fox News is refusing to air. pic.twitter.com/kERYPUaGLY — NowThis (@nowthisnews) February 20, 2019

But it wouldn't be a Jane Mayer story without a truly gobsmacking revelation about the behavior of the most powerful.

In the late summer of 2017, a few months before the Justice Department filed suit [challenging the AT&T-Time Warner merger], Trump ordered Gary Cohn, then the director of the National Economic Council, to pressure the Justice Department to intervene. According to a well-informed source, Trump called Cohn into the Oval Office along with John Kelly, who had just become the chief of staff, and said in exasperation to Kelly, “I’ve been telling Cohn to get this lawsuit filed and nothing’s happened! I’ve mentioned it fifty times. And nothing’s happened. I want to make sure it’s filed. I want that deal blocked!”



Cohn, a former president of Goldman Sachs, evidently understood that it would be highly improper for a President to use the Justice Department to undermine two of the most powerful companies in the country as punishment for unfavorable news coverage, and as a reward for a competing news organization that boosted him. According to the source, as Cohn walked out of the meeting he told Kelly, “Don’t you fucking dare call the Justice Department. We are not going to do business that way.”

When Trump came out against the deal publicly at the time—just another assault on the norms around presidential interference in the Justice Department—many assumed it was just about his hate for The Fake News CNN, a property of Time Warner. There were also legitimate reasons to oppose the merger on antitrust grounds, but the Trump Justice Department's Antitrust Division hasn't fought many other battles like this one. It appears to be just one of three different moves Trump's administration made that were expressly to the benefit of Rupert Murdoch, whose network, Fox News, was continually boosting Trump politically. The FCC blocked an acquisition by Sinclair Broadcast Group, a conservative Fox News rival, and the Justice Department laid out the red carpet for Fox to sell its major entertainment assets to Disney in a move that might normally have attracted antitrust concerns.

The takeaway is fairly clear. This is the president abusing his power to help an ally's business and attack private enterprises. It is cronyism and corruption. It would likely, in any normal time, be an impeachable offense. But in this peculiar historical moment, we'll probably just add it to the pile—until Republicans in Congress decide to help safeguard the American republic, or Democrats just come out and state the obvious: this man appears to have abused and degraded his office, and we must begin the process of deliberating if he should be removed.

Editor's Note: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Mayer has won the Pulitzer Prize. She was nominated twice.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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