Two days after Donald Trump effectively turbocharged the MAGA meltdown over the Jeffrey Epstein “no client list” memo by going full “Streisand effect,” it appears that at least the president’s favorite morning show is following his demand for his “boys” and “gals” to just move on.
While the bulk of right-wing media is gripped in a state of chaos over Trump chastising his “so-called ‘friends’” for remaining obsessed over the Epstein files, which he suggested were fake and “written by Obama,” Fox & Friends decided Monday morning that the best course of action was just to ignore the raging firestorm completely.
Since the start of his first term in office, Fox News’ flagship morning program has largely served as Trump’s daily agenda-setter, as it is typically the first thing the cable news-obsessed president flips on to start his day. Whether it is peddling the administration’s talking points unvarnished or amplifying culture war outrages to grab Trump’s attention, Fox & Friends is the first and most important stop in the president’s day-to-day MAGA media diet.
At the same time, whenever the conservative cable giant wants to send a message to the president about potentially changing course on a specific issue, the denizens of the curvy couch have stepped up in the past to warn Trump about potentially going down a specific path. That didn’t appear to be the case Monday, though, as Fox & Friends decided to heed his call to look the other way on Epstein.
What makes this decision by the morning show stand out somewhat more, too, is that the weekend version of Fox & Friends outright warned Trump Sunday that he couldn’t just sweep the Epstein story under the rug while lashing out at his own base for continuing to focus on it.
“If there’s anybody who could walk in and say, ‘OK, we’ve resolved all of the questions and there is nothing here,’ it would be President Trump and his crew,” Fox & Friends Weekend co-host Charlie Hurt said. “The problem is, you can’t really do it without giving some explanation. And there has to be some explanation. And I think that’s why you have a lot of people still pretty with a lot a very valid questions.”
Guest anchor Kevin Corke added that Trump could “defuse this ticking time bomb if you simply get out there,” noting that “you have to answer questions to the American people” because “this story won’t die and that is a distraction the president doesn’t want.”
Elsewhere on Fox News over the weekend, some criticism came the president’s way as the right-wing network was forced to deal with the backlash from its MAGA audience over the Justice Department’s memo that concludes there was no “client list,” Epstein died by suicide and he didn’t appear to blackmail prominent figures who engaged in his underage sex trafficking.
“The refusal to release anything from Jeffrey Epstein has really struck a nerve — a deep nerve — among many Trump supporters, many people in the MAGA movement who say they feel betrayed,” Fox News media host Howard Kurtz acknowledged on Sunday’s broadcast of MediaBuzz.
One of Kurtz’s guests, Washington Examiner editor Sarah Bedford, called it a “huge PR disaster for the Trump administration” and that they could not “have scripted a better way to keep the conspiracy theories alive than the way they handled it.”
While other Fox News stars, particularly Laura Ingraham at this past weekend’s Turning Point USA conference, have sounded the alarm that much of the president’s base could turn on him over his handling of the Epstein fallout, the network seemed to do its level best to shrug it off starting Sunday night.
Over on The Big Weekend Show, for instance, co-host Lisa Marie Boothe delivered a short report noting that “President Trump is telling his attorney general to ignore the noise over the Epstein files and keep her eye on the ball arresting criminals and restoring integrity at the DOJ” before pivoting to the administration weighing criminal probes against James Comey and John Brennan.
Notably, some within the MAGA media universe are already wondering if the Brennan and Comey investigation is just an effort to “distract us” from the Epstein case, specifically pointing out that Fox News was the one that got the “scoop” on the probe.
A little while later during his weekend evening show, Brian Kilmeade – who is also a co-host of Fox & Friends – flat-out ignored his guest Michael Shellenberger’s observation that “the elephant in the room” was the Epstein files and how Attorney General Pam Bondi and the FBI’s leaders “led everyone to expect that we would see them” and this could lead to an ”end of the honeymoon period for the Trump presidency.”
By Monday morning, the message delivered appeared to be crystal clear – do not talk about the deceased sex predator under any circumstances. And that’s just what Kilmeade and the rest of the Fox & Friends crew decided to do.
While the cable news competition feasted on the story – MSNBC’s Morning Joe, for instance, mentioned Epstein over 100 times and Bondi an additional 80 times on Monday – Fox & Friends found other things to fill out its three-hour block to distract its most crucial viewer.
“I’m sure he needed a nap right after,” Kilmeade joked during a segment about Joe Biden’s recent interview with The New York Times in which the former president defended his use of an autopen, a Trump-made scandal that Fox News has heavily pushed.
Elsewhere throughout Monday morning’s broadcast, the Fox & Friends hosts also discussed how Gen Z men are using “boy math” to invest in Pokémon cards instead of traditional stocks and a New York Times column about the need to stop cutting off MAGA family members.
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The attempt by Trump’s morning buddies to put their heads in the sand and to pretend that MAGA isn’t tearing itself apart over the Epstein memo – and now coming for the president himself over his lengthy relationship with the convicted sex offender– still won’t make the issue go away, no matter how much Trump-pandering chum they try to throw into the water to distract viewers.
“Trump’s persuasive power over his base, especially during his first term, was almost magical,” said alt-right conspiracist Mike Cernovich, one of the 15 conservative influencers whom Bondi handed the “Phase 1” Epstein file binders in February of already-public information about the disgraced financier. That debacle blew up in Bondi’s face and sparked a months-long backlash that culminated in last week’s memo.
“The reaction on Epstein should thus be startling to him. No one is buying it. No one is dropping it,” Cernovich added.
MAGA podcaster Benny Johnson, who spoke at this past weekend’s TPUSA event that featured attendees raging about Trump becoming the “deep state” and “protecting pedophiles,” declared Monday that the long-fabled “Epstein client list” is now the “number one motivating issue for the base.”
“You don't have a political movement if you don't have a base,” he insisted. “And if that base feels like you're betraying them or not telling them the truth, then they're not gonna like that.
With former Trump strategist Steve Bannon also warning that the president could lose 10 percent or more of his base over the Epstein memo and his administration’s efforts to move past it, Bannon and other MAGA luminaries are pushing Trump to course-correct in an effort to tamp down the right-wing anger. Especially since conspiracy theories about Epstein – which Trump and much of his administration have long nurtured and fanned the flames of – have been a gravitating force of Trumpism for years now and an extension of the Pizzagate and QAnon pedophilia fever swamps.
Amid the infighting within the administration over the controversy – FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino has threatened to quit following a clash with Bondi over the way the memo was handled – Trump officials and aides are reportedly considering at least three ways to try to defuse the Epstein mess.
Still, even with these ideas being floated about, the administration is following the president’s lead for the moment, which is no more talk about Epstein stuff. And that Bondi, Bongino and FBI Director Kash Patel are all doing a “FANTASTIC JOB” and in “good shape,” regardless of the obvious disarray taking place behind the scenes.
“The president said to put this behind us, so we're putting this behind us,” a top Trump adviser told Axios. “If he changes, then the policy changes. Period.”
This edict would appear to hold true for his curvy couch pals as well.
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