“I think a lot of Republicans feel that [Democrats are] more loyal than we are,” Giuliani said. “When they hear Shepard Smith or [the anchor Neil] Cavuto, they say, ‘Well, why are they monolithic one way and we’re not?’”

The comparison between congressional Republicans who buck Trump and news anchors who report information that may reflect negatively on him is, of course, a false one. That Trump sees the two groups as similar is crucial to understanding his hot-and-cold treatment of Fox.

On occasions when he’s unhappy with the network’s coverage, Trump will pick up the phone and call Scott to complain, a Trump-administration aide and a second Fox News employee told us. But the conversations, the Fox staffer said, don’t tend to go well.

“I’m not sure she tells him what he wants to hear,” this person said. “If you think about Suzanne, it’s like, I’m running the network. The president is not running the network. And if you’re Donald Trump, it’s like, Damn if you are—I’m running the network. And, to be candid, there have been times when the network probably gave Trump too much of the idea that he was running the network.”

Fox continues to showcase a pro-Trump lineup in its primetime hours: Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, and Laura Ingraham, who often expand on the president’s talking points during their shows. But under Scott, the network has ushered in a slightly more diverse set of voices. Donna Brazile, the former DNC chairwoman, is now a Fox News contributor. In 2017, the year before Scott took over as CEO, she and another senior executive, Jay Wallace, recruited Marie Harf, a former State Department spokeswoman during Barack Obama’s administration, for a job as a political commentator. In giving Harf an on-air role, the Fox executives told her that they wanted different views reflected in their broadcasts, a person familiar with the matter told us. (Harf left the network to join Representative Seth Moulton’s now-defunct presidential campaign.)

The person who’s spoken with Scott recently told us that if the CEO is sensitive about anything, it’s the criticisms of the network as propaganda—not Trump’s complaints. Scott started at Fox at the network’s inception in 1996, working as an executive assistant to the head of programming; led the launch of Greta Van Susteren’s primetime show On the Record in 2002; and went on to become network executive producer and executive vice president of programming.* Before becoming the network’s first female CEO, she oversaw some of Fox’s most popular opinion shows, including Fox & Friends, The Five, and Hannity. But what limited public profile she had was largely negative: After Ailes was publicly accused of sexual harassment and abuse at the company in 2016, she was alleged to have helped cover up the misbehavior. She and Fox have since moved to dismiss the suit, and she has claimed that she had “no clue on what was going on” in Ailes’s office.