Fox News screaming desperately into wind as Trump loses grip

Fox News has always served as a purveyor of Republican war propaganda, but its coverage of the Iran conflict has been particularly aggressive, and in many ways unmoored from reality, giving their viewers a more than skewed vision of what President Donald Trump can — and cannot — accomplish in Iran today.

It appears that it has been an editorial decision at Fox to convince their audience (whose median age is 55) that the Iranians cannot be negotiated with nor trusted and that war was — and still is — the only option. Its range of hosts and guests continue to insist that Trump’s military campaign has been a rousing success (by all independent, observable accounts it has not) and he just needs to finish the job.

Of course this a bit of a far cry from the decisive regime change narrative that Fox had generated in the lead-up to the war.

Mark Levin, one of Trump’s favorite hosts on the channel, has been a leading champion of this narrative, saying for weeks before the February war on his Fox show “Life, Liberty & Levin,” that “if we don’t act, and by that I mean not diplomacy, but decisively, quickly, and overwhelmingly with our military against the top of the regime,” then Iran will certainly, according to Levin, “build nuclear weapons, as North Korea has.” Levin also warned his audience that Iran “will not hesitate to launch ICBMs with nuclear warheads against our cities.”

Trump made it a point to post these kinds of arguments from Levin and others on Truth Social, prepping the Fox News audience, and the American people more broadly, for war.

After the conflict began, longtime host Laura Ingraham reframed the conflict using a classic neoconservative spin. “The real debate here… is not between the interventionists and the isolationists, or even between Trump and some elements of his base,” Ingraham said, “The real conflict here is between those who believe America is good, and those who believe fundamentally America is corrupt and evil.”

This of course is a warmed-over strawman seeking to chill any debate over the war, and encouraging the Fox audience to label anyone who opposes Trump’s actions as “anti-American.”

As military force failed to meet Trump’s vacillating objectives, Fox’s hosts remained unfazed. Confident as ever, Jesse Watters stated on March 25 that the Iranians were “running out of time and firepower.” In an effort to convince his audience of imminent regime collapse, Watters also said that, “every day that our bombers fly unchallenged, the regime loses power.”

Of course time is not on our side. The regime is still in power but the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is now dangerously low, and the same goes for U.S. stockpiles of defensive missile systems. Meanwhile, the first and most intense stage of fighting did little to deplete Iran’s arsenal of ballistic missiles and drones.

Touted as Fox’s wisest military mind, Gen. Jack Keane is a key fixture of the network’s war coverage. He, like Levin, says that the Iranians are too irrational for diplomacy. In a recent appearance on “Life, Liberty & Levin,” Gen. Keane said, “We have said on this show multiple times, you cannot trust the Iranians. They will lie and cheat. And even if they make a deal… they will not comply with it.”

Now he is on Fox as recently as this weekend suggesting Trump was within range of victory when he paused fighting for the MOU (memorandum of understand) of which he said the Iranians did not comply. He said on July 29 that the U.S. must engage in a “comprehensive” military attack on Iran, focusing on civilian infrastructure like bridges and roads and airports, “isolating” it while the CIA and Mossad can help the people there overthrow the regime.

The network creates an echo chamber by bringing on guests to repeat and validate the hawkish positions of the hosts. Maria Bartiromo hosted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for a softball interview on July 26, in which she asked him what it would take for the war with Iran to conclude. The prime minister urged Americans to support another round of fighting, arguing that only regime change will stop Iran from “wreaking economic chaos through the world, murdering thousands of its own citizens, and shooting at everyone.”

“This is what this regime is doing when they don’t have nuclear weapons, so imagine what they would do if they had nuclear weapons,” Netanyahu told Fox News viewers.

Marc Thiessen — a prominent neoconservative, Bush administration alum, and Fox News contributor — is another voice in favor of escalation. Throughout the war, Thiessen, a former “never-Trumper,” has appealed to the MAGA base by painting attractive pictures of “simple” ways to win the war.

On a July 23 episode of “Special Report,” Thiessen said, “It’s very simple… We have about 14 days of combat where we have to take out all the targets we have available. We took out 85% of their defense industrial base, [so now] we take out 95% of it. We set back all their programs, and we further entomb the nuclear dust, then we stop major combat operations, we impose the blockade, we open up the Strait of Hormuz, and then we go and we help the Iranian people overthrow their regime.”

The network’s morning show “Fox & Friends,” offers Today Show-sized breakfast bites for war coverage. Recently, the program featured pro-Israel radio host Sid Rosenberg. He made the case that military action was the only path forward, saying, “it is inevitable that President Trump is going to have to do what he doesn’t want to do, which is go in there with this massive, all-out attack. There’s no other way to stop this,” Rosenberg said, “Once you start this,” he added, “there needs to be a finish, and the only finish is complete surrender by the Iranians. I hate to say it, but complete annihilation.”

The round-the-clock warmongering on Fox News has done little to move the general public, aside from a percentage of older Republican die-hards. But the network’s role as a source of validation for the president could give him the confidence to escalate.

If Fox News expresses support for any and all military actions Trump takes, he could well conclude that the public as a whole is supportive of his war – a devastating miscalculation, likely to be followed by ill-advised policy decisions.