As CNN and MSNBC carried the Democratic National Convention live during its Monday night kickoff, Fox News used that time to address a much more pressing matter: giving Donald Trump Jr. airtime to promote his new book, bash the media, and dismiss the virtual gathering as nothing more than “comic relief.” While the network did cut away from its star host’s usual routine to air the DNC remarks from George Floyd’s family, Sean Hannity spent part of his 9 p.m. hour raging against day 80 of the Portland protests and baselessly suggesting that the United States Postal Service might be weaponized to sway the election—a claim that was accompanied by a graphic blaring “VOTER FRAUD” across half of the screen. “Are you going to trust the United States Postal Service with the future of our country? How’s your local DMV working out for you?” he said, a comment he prefaced by stating he has always “loved my mailman.”
It’s unclear what Fox’s convention coverage will look like for the rest of the week, but if it’s anything like the opening hour, then there won’t be much of any live coverage aside from airing the most notable speeches. Fox News carried most of the remarks given by New York governor Andrew Cuomo and Michelle Obama and aired some of Rep. James Clyburn’s speech. The convention’s 10 p.m. slot was coanchored by Bret Baier, the network’s “hard news” flagship who happens to have several documented friendly ties to the Trump administration.
To close out the night, Fox News turned to Laura Ingraham, who offered her DNC day one postgame analysis while also voicing her outrage over rappers Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s new hit single, “Wet-Ass Pussy,” a title that one of the shows’s panel members explained could not even be uttered. She was joined by guests including Dinesh D’Souza, the conservative filmmaker pardoned by Donald Trump; a second Trump child, Eric; and Senator Ted Cruz, who warned viewers of the “radical socialist agenda” emanating from the virtual convention. In what would certainly be a surprising but welcome consolation prize for Senator Bernie Sanders’s disgruntled leftist base, Cruz warned that Joe Biden might just choose the democratic socialist from Vermont as his secretary of state.
While Michelle Obama’s Monday night remarks will likely not be plagiarized by Melania Trump at next week’s Republican National Convention—as the former first lady deemed Donald Trump “the wrong president for our country”—she did receive widespread media praise. Even Fox News anchor Dana Perino commended Obama, saying, “She has the ability to connect with people through the screen. You just got the sense that when you talk about authenticity, she has it in spades. She has that voice, she has clarity, and she knows what she’s out there wanting to do.” Chris Wallace chimed in to agree with Perino’s assessment, calling the speech “very effective” and commending how it “flayed, sliced, and diced Donald Trump, talking about the chaos and confusion and lack of empathy especially coming from this president and from this White House.”
Wallace and Perino’s colleagues at Fox & Friends, however, did not use those exact terms while discussing the most noteworthy convention speaker so far. “Everyone expected Michelle Obama to give a good speech, and she did,” said Brian Kilmeade, who was one of the hosts to interview Trump for the better part of an hour on Monday. “But why is she pretending as if we forgot about the eight years when her husband was in office?” Kilmeade then went on a tangent about “the birth of ISIS” and other international conflicts during the Obama years to fact-check Michelle Obama for “[acting] like it was paradise for eight years.” The show’s criticism of her “prerecorded” speech did force the Fox & Friends cast to inadvertently update their audience on the bleak new coronavirus death toll for the first time that morning. “She definitely taped it somewhere around the end of July, because she said that 150,000 people had died of coronavirus,” said coanchor Martha MacCallum. “That number’s now at 180 sadly.”
Earlier in the morning, Fox News contributor Alveda King responded to Michelle Obama’s DNC appearance by calling the convention “identity politics at its best,” adding, “I’ll just have to remind people, don’t be fooled by pretty brown faces.”
More Great Stories From Vanity Fair
— How Jared Kushner’s Secret Coronavirus Testing Plan “Went Poof Into Thin Air”
— Why Trump’s Black Lives Matter Protest Response Could Cost Him 2020
— Behind the Scenes of the NBA’s Dystopian COVID-Free Bubble
— Experts Worry Trump’s DHS Crackdowns Ignore the Real Threat
— How Carlos Ghosn Escaped Japan, According to the Ex-Soldier Who Snuck Him Out
— Former Pandemic Officials Call Trump’s Coronavirus Response a National Disaster
— From the Archive: The Untold Story of Dallas’s Heroic Ebola Response
Looking for more? Sign up for our daily Hive newsletter and never miss a story.