The New Trump-Family Megaphone | The New Yorker

Late last month, after President Donald Trump suggested that diversity initiatives were to blame for a plane crash in Washington, Lara Trump, who is married to Trump’s son Eric, went on Fox News to defend her father-in-law. “We should never be hiring anyone for any job other than the best person for that job,” she said. Critics mourned the death of irony, suggesting that Lara had landed her last job, as co-chair of the Republican National Committee, through nepotism. A few days later, she hit back on “The Right View,” a podcast and Web show that she hosts. “Well, yeah, O.K., of course I have the last name Trump, and of course that’s how I started in this orbit,” she said. But, she went on, she’d worked on Trump’s campaigns in 2016 and 2020, and the election results in 2024 spoke for themselves. “I say that very kindly, to all the trolls and the losers out there who somehow were, like, ‘Oh, she—the irony of her statement!’ No, no. No irony.” She then cut to a promotional spot for a cross-shaped necklace worn by Mike Lindell, the MyPillow guy and a 2020 election denier.

The same day, a separate announcement concerning Lara and Fox again raised charges of nepotism: she would be getting her own show on the network, “My View with Lara Trump,” airing in prime time on Saturday nights. The program would “focus on the return of common sense to all corners of American life as the country ushers in a new era of practicality,” Fox said, in a press release. Lara said that she was looking forward to covering “the success of The Golden Age of America.” This did not sound like a recipe for hard-hitting accountability journalism, as various observers were quick to point out. “Fox News viewers getting Trump-family talking points straight from the source for one hour on Saturday night is a far cry from say, Vladimir Putin’s crackdown on independent media in Russia,” Margaret Hartmann argued in New York magazine. “But it’s not great!” Meanwhile, Tom Jones, a media critic at the Poynter Institute, wrote that hiring the President’s daughter-in-law “felt like a line that even Fox News wouldn’t cross,” and that, in doing so, the network had handed its critics “an absolute, pardon the pun, trump card” whenever it next tries to claim that it’s a serious news outlet. Matt Gertz, of the liberal watchdog group Media Matters for America, called the hire “a natural progression for a network that merged with the White House during the president’s first term and is returning to that form for his second.” The move, he added, “eliminates any subtext.”

“Merged” does feel like an apt word to describe the new Administration’s relationship with Fox. By Inauguration Day, last month, President Trump had tapped no fewer than nineteen people with ties to the network for senior posts, most notably Pete Hegseth, a scandal-plagued host, for Defense Secretary. A similar dynamic played out in Trump’s first term, as Gertz noted: advisers went from Fox to the Administration (John Bolton) and vice versa (Tom Homan); Trump devoured Fox talking points and spat them back out, seemingly as he watched; he took hosts’ late-night calls and even tried a dubious COVID-19 cure that they had hyped. The relationship has been somewhat rockier in recent years. On Election Night in 2020, Fox’s decision desk called Arizona for Joe Biden, infuriating Trump. As he entered the political wilderness, he appeared on the network less and occasionally railed against it. Rupert Murdoch, then Fox’s chairman, seemed to flirt with supporting Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, ahead of the Republican primary that Trump would go on to win. (As recently as October, Trump blasted Fox for going “weak” and said that it had “totally lost its way.” The supposed offense? “Polluting the airwaves with unopposed Kamala Representatives,” he posted on Truth Social.)

The Lara hire, perhaps, solidifies a rapprochement. If anyone still feels that the network is insufficiently MAGA, she told Time this week, “I certainly hope they can take me being on the team at Fox as a very clear indication as to where Fox stands.” And it appears to be unprecedented in at least one respect: never before has a major TV network bestowed such a prominent on-air perch to the close relative of a sitting President.

Widen the aperture a bit, and this starts to look more, well, precedented—the latest spin of the series of revolving doors that link the realms of political officialdom and TV news. And, if the revolving door between Trumpworld and Fox spins more often than most, it’s possible to see Lara’s new show as a relatively benign manifestation of the trend—certainly when compared with the elevation of Hegseth to oversee America’s military. But this isn’t to say that Lara will lack power in her new TV gig. It will give her a direct line into conservative viewers’ homes and help shape their perception of the new Administration in a world in which—thanks in no small part to her family—politics, media, and entertainment have themselves decisively merged.

To get the obvious out of the way, nepotism is, to borrow from Hartmann . . . not great! The President’s daughter-in-law having a right-wing media megaphone raises other concerns, too. Fox, by hiring Lara as a host, is putting money directly into the pocket of the President’s family. And she could very well use the platform as a springboard to further her own political career. After Trump lost the Presidential race, in 2020, she considered running for Senate in her home state of North Carolina; when Trump won, in 2024, and selected Marco Rubio to be Secretary of State, speculation swelled that DeSantis might pick Lara to fill the Senate seat that Rubio would be vacating in Florida. In both instances, she took herself out of the running, citing the negative effect the job could have on her two young children. But kids, of course, get older. In a statement about her new gig, she said that she was excited to see “where this opportunity will lead me in the future.” The show alone seems unlikely to make or break her electoral fortunes, but it will grant her visibility and relevance. (She is not the most recognizable member of the Trump clan. Trump himself reportedly used to joke that he couldn’t pick her out of a lineup.)

The path from political relative to TV star is hardly untrodden, however. Several news stories about Lara’s Fox show pointed out that Jenna Bush Hager, the daughter of George W., and Chelsea Clinton, the daughter of Bill and Hillary, have both worked for NBC. Neither was the child of a sitting President during their time at the network, but Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State when NBC News hired Chelsea; Meghan McCain co-hosted “Outnumbered” on Fox and “The View” on ABC while her father, John, was a senator. Being related to a sitting President may be a difference of degree here, but it is not really a difference in kind.

Sometimes, TV hosts’ family ties to politicians have created conflicts of interest. When Senator Bob Menendez’s indictment on corruption charges put his daughter, Alicia, a host on MSNBC, in a tricky spot, she recused herself from covering the story. In the early days of the pandemic, Chris Cuomo, then of CNN, did not recuse himself from interviewing his brother Andrew. Many liberal viewers seemed to enjoy the Cuomos’ on-air joshing and praised them for humanizing a scary new disease, especially after Chris contracted it himself. It later transpired that Chris got preferential access to testing from Andrew—and that he had privately helped his brother punch back against allegations of sexual harassment. (CNN eventually fired Chris. A sexual-harassment accusation against him also surfaced; both brothers have denied wrongdoing.) In the Presidential election of 2000, Fox courted controversy when its decision desk prematurely called Florida, and thus the White House, for George W. Bush—not least because the desk was headed by John Ellis, who was not only an open Bush supporter but also his first cousin. A few days later, Ellis blithely admitted to Jane Mayer, in this magazine, that he’d shared internal projections with Bush over the phone first. “Now, that was cool,” he said. (Ellis has consistently denied any impropriety.)

Putting family ties aside, it’s common for party apparatchiks to land plum jobs on cable news. Jen Psaki and Symone Sanders-Townsend weren’t related to Biden or Kamala Harris, but they were trusted to represent them in public prior to joining MSNBC as hosts. Politicos getting network contributor contracts—whereby they are paid to be at bay to respond to the news, in what the Washington Post once described as “a sort of gray zone between full-time employees and unpaid interviewees”—is even more common. One example of this trend is, in fact, Lara, who, after serving as a senior adviser and creating digital content for Trump’s 2020 campaign, was paid to be a talking head on Fox in 2021 and 2022. By then, she had appeared as a guest on the network so often that, she joked, Fox’s security guards told her, “Maybe we should just give you a key.”

This revolving door may be normal, but that does not make it a good thing, necessarily. The ethical guidelines that regulate such moves can be inconsistent and hazy; Fox, for example, ended Lara’s contributor contract shortly after Trump officially started running for President again in 2022, reportedly on the grounds that her continued employment would breach network rules on political activity. But it didn’t seem to have a problem hiring her while she was still openly weighing the North Carolina Senate bid (Fox, she said at the time, had been “very generous” about it), nor with rehiring her now that Trump is actually the President. In the past, I’ve argued that it doesn’t make sense to draw up blanket rules banning politicians from working for newsrooms or journalists from getting into politics. But, in some cases, the transition is clearly inappropriate. Last year, NBC hired Ronna McDaniel, the former chair of the R.N.C., only for stars at the network to rightly rebel given her history of election denialism. The deal was scrapped.

In the case of Fox, however, worrying about this sort of thing brings to mind the expression about horses and barn doors. Readers may recall that Dominion Voting Systems, a voting-technology company, sued the network for spreading lies about its supposed role in the supposed subversion of the 2020 election; eventually, Fox settled the case for $787.5 million following a highly embarrassing release of records during discovery and a deposition in which Rupert Murdoch himself admitted under oath that various Fox stars had endorsed Trump’s lies and that he hadn’t put a stop to it. Even so, Trump expressed anger at the network. He will surely see a family member on staff as a welcome sign of loyalty. “What he’s learned over the years,” Lara said last year, after being named R.N.C. co-chair, “is really sometimes the only people you can truly count on are people in your family.”

And yet, the on-again, off-again nature of Trump’s love affair with Fox—including offs sparked by only the slightest spasms of journalistic independence—proves that the President expects familial levels of loyalty from everyone in his political movement, and often sees it reciprocated. This dynamic is, frankly, more interesting than Fox rehiring an actual Trump family member, a move that is better seen as a symptom of current conservative politics than as some shockingly novel breach of journalistic ethics. Trump has routinely demanded that his adherents, family or not, state that black is white. Lara—who has frequently cast doubt on the 2020 election result—should, like the others, be judged primarily on those grounds, and on what she has to say now.

So, what does Lara have to say now? “Abraham Lincoln famously observed that a house divided against itself cannot stand,” she observed last night, at the top of her début show. “Radical fringes,” she went on—there followed footage of Cori Bush, Ayanna Pressley, Kamala Harris, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—have “dominated the conversation, warping our country’s values and priorities.” Lara was on hand with a unifying message. “It’s time to take back our nation’s narrative,” she said. She promised to use her show to interview “the key players who are doing the work to fuel the revival of rationality,” and “talk to those who the liberal media will only talk about.”

Last night, that meant talking to Pam Bondi, Trump’s Attorney General; Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s Director of National Intelligence; and Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s press secretary. In a series of cloyingly friendly conversations (Lara: “People are all working together for the same goals, and I don’t know that I’ve ever experienced that with a Presidential Administration before”; Bondi: “We all adore Donald Trump”), Lara lobbed softball questions about their respective priorities: ending the “weaponization” of the Justice Department against Trump; tackling the threat resulting from “President Biden’s open borders”; figuring out “what the truth is versus what the fake-news narratives are.” She then fielded softballs of her own, posed by members of the public. An experience that has shaped her significantly? Her dad helping her to perfect a cheerleading move in high school. Her dream interview subject from history? Her great-grandmother, “who, at sixteen years old, came over on a boat by herself to Ellis Island, New York, from her home in Czechoslovakia.”

The final question—how does Lara handle criticism?—prompted a possibly revealing note of self-reflection. “I didn’t always have the last name ‘Trump,’ ” Lara said. “My life before meeting my husband was probably much like most kids growing up in America.” After Trump started running for President, in 2015, everything changed. “It’s probably a good lesson for all of us to remember that the people who ultimately matter, and whose opinions I hold in the highest regard, are the people who actually know me,” she said. “Everything else is just noise.” ♦