If you needed more confirmation that most of President-elect Donald Trump’s complaints about the media are psychological projections, look no further than a forthcoming book reporting he was fed questions from a Fox News insider ahead of the network’s Iowa town hall last January.
Then-candidate Trump sat down with Fox anchors Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum in front of a studio audience in Des Moines, just days ahead of the state’s Republican primary vote. Some of Trump’s advisers did not want him to participate in the event, Politico’s Alex Isenstadt reports in Revenge: The Inside Story of Trump’s Return to Power, according to excerpts published Wednesday by CNN. Some of these aides believed the conservative cable giant to be too antagonistic and feared their candidate would not seriously prep for interrogative questions.
“About thirty minutes before the town hall was due to start,” however, Isenstadt writes, “a senior aide started getting text messages from a person on the inside at Fox. Holy s–t, the team thought. They were images of all the questions Trump would be asked and the planned follow-ups, down to the exact wording. Jackpot. This was like a student getting a peek at the test before the exam started.”
(Fox News told CNN that “while we do not have any evidence of this occurring, and Alex Isenstadt has conveniently refused to release the images for fact checking, we take these matters very seriously and plan to investigate should there prove to be a breach within the network.” A Fox source familiar with the matter relayed to Vanity Fair that “if there was a breach, it was not from Bret or Martha or the top editorial levels of the network and there is a sophisticated and extensive digital footprint of all editorial material.”)
According to Isenstadt, Baier and MacCallum—no slouches when it comes to grilling Trump—intended to press the then-candidate about his business dealings and whether he would “disavow political violence” and whether he’d be “focused on retribution” in a second term.
“Trump was pissed,” Isenstadt writes in the excerpt previewed by CNN, and felt such questions constituted “attacks.” Nevertheless, “with the questions in hand” ahead of the live TV event, Trump’s team “workshopped answers,” the reporter notes.
If Trump did, indeed, receive questions in advance, it would be especially rich considering his long history of strategically alleging that pretty much debate or town hall moderator has been “biased” against him and that such events are “rigged” for his opponents.
After the president-elect’s unanimously panned ABC News debate performance against Kamala Harris, Trump repeatedly targeted moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis, calling them “low lives” who deserved to be fired for fact-checking him in real-time.
He’s consistently worked the refs like that since the bygone days of his 2016 campaign. Trump infamously blasted Megyn Kelly, then a Fox News anchor, as a “bimbo” with “blood coming out of her wherever” following her tough questions during a major GOP primary debate. After his first debate against Hillary Clinton, Trump initially praised NBC News moderator Lester Holt for a “great job,” only to change his tune once polling suggested he’d lost the debate. “He gave me very unfair questions,” the eventual president complained.
In 2020, Trump called ABC’s Martha Raddatz “extraordinarily unfair” and once again complained about a Fox News moderator, this time Chris Wallace, whom he labeled a “a total JOKE.”
