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Silence Is Golden With Trump, but It’s Only a Matter of Time Before He Finds Another Megaphone

When this editor’s letter is published on Jan. 20 we will have at long last said good riddance to Donald Trump and sworn in President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.

It’s a gross understatement to say that it’s been such a relief not to be subjected to Trump’s relentless Twitter rants since he was permanently kicked off the platform two days after inciting the deadly Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol.

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I wish we didn’t ever have to hear from him again in any form. But that’s unfortunately unlikely. He’ll find another public megaphone. It’s just a matter of which one.

Many pundits are saying that the chances of him launching Trump TV are now looking bleak given the reputational hit he’s taken for encouraging the insurrection.

I would not, however, dismiss the possibility of the disgraced president landing a regular gig on Fox News, which has been his mouthpiece for the past four years and continues to propagate his lies about voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election and deny his attempted coup. This past week has seen a great deal of well-deserved negative coverage of Fox News, with The Washington Post and The New York Times each calling out Rupert Murdoch’s profit engine for bearing some responsibility for the Capitol Hill catastrophe.

These headlines were apt: “The pro-Trump world peddled the lies that fueled the Capitol mob. Fox News led the way” (The Washington Post); “Yes, You Should Blame Fox for Whipping up Radicals” (columnist Ben Smith, The New York Times). CNN’s Brian Stelter ran this headline: “Fox News and Facebook are part of the pro-Trump fantasyland that enabled the Capitol siege.”

Our senior TV editor Brian Steinberg wrote a story questioning how Fox News was going to “navigate a world with a president other than President Donald Trump,” who during his term gave the network “frequent and sustained interviews.”

That gets me back to my supposition that Trump could very well join his Fox News BFFs Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson. Perhaps the network believes that adding him to its lineup will boost its ratings, which have trailed those of rivals CNN and MSNBC post-election. My wishful thinking is that Trump will help shrink Fox News’ viewership even further.

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