To be fair to Fox News, the network so intertwined with Donald Trump’s administration that they frequently swap employees, every single one of its cable competitors was once so captivated by the president that they, too, would cover his campaign rallies live. But as the administration wore on, the novelty wore thin, and by the beginning of 2018, only Fox followed in that grand tradition, broadcasting Trump’s rallies from start to finish. In July, it was not uncommon for the network to junk its own prime-time shows in favor of the president’s campaign-style stadium appearances—a choice that broadcast the president’s message into the living rooms of millions of his voters every night. Fox was proud of it, too: at one point, the station even knocked its competitors, via a snarky chyron, for declining to do the same.

Three months later, however, things have changed. Instead of airing the rallies live, Fox has opted either to air clips the next day, to bump the events to weekend coverage, or to live-stream them online, putting the president and his arena-full of jeering, red-capped supporters on the back burner. The primary reason for this decision, it seems, is that Trump is no longer the guaranteed ratings draw he once was. His speeches, at one time astonishing, have become relatively formulaic, meaning there’s no guarantee he’ll pull in more eyeballs than the network’s typical prime-time stable of Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and Tucker Carlson. Airing the rallies in full leaves little room for those lucrative prime-time ad slots. And with Trump blanketing the country ahead of midterms, it’s impossible to give every event the royal treatment. “They don’t want to give up so much prime-time real estate,” one Fox insider told Politico. “They’re going with the route they think will give the best ratings performance.”

But what’s best for Fox News’ bottom line has turned into a nightmare for the White House and the G.O.P. An online livestream, expedient though it may be, presents a barrier to entry for the network’s predominately baby-boomer viewers—the very voters Republicans are hoping to energize in the final weeks before midterm elections. “Being able to be onstage with the president in front of a prime-time audience is huge for a campaign trying to reach conservatives across the country who will open up their wallets,” one Senate Republican staffer told Politico. After a rally, “We tend to see lots of new sign-ups and small-dollar donations.” A source close to Trump added, “[It’s a] huge loss on the state and local level for Republicans, because they’re certainly not going to get any of that on other cable networks. If they stop taking them completely, that might create a problem.”

All this, of course, has made things rather awkward in the White House, where some of Fox’s foremost pundits whisper affirmations into Trump’s ear late at night, and where Fox has more or less taken on the role of state TV—as a former Fox anchor told my colleague Gabriel Sherman earlier this year, “What [Trump] usually does is he’ll call after a show and say, ‘I really enjoyed that.’ The highest compliment is, ‘I really learned something.’ Then you know he got a new policy idea.” The two entities are so interconnected that one of the network’s former talking heads is dating the president’s son. And there’s a very real possibility that the president will object to Fox’s programming choices: “Trump is a massive consumer of the media, so he may be disappointed,” the source close to him told Politico. Indeed, a White House official told Politico that the administration plans to “look into” the matter, and added that Bill Shine, the former Fox executive-turned-comms director, was “in touch with former colleagues about the trend.”