That didn’t last long. Just a week after his victory in the presidential election, Donald Trump is already raid Fox News’ stable of talking heads to round out its administration.

Tom Homan, the intellectual “father” reported of family separations as acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the first Trump administration, is leaving the network where he helped oversee mass deportations as The “frontier king” of the future president. Mike Huckabee, the former Fox host and frequent network commentator, is Trump’s pick US Ambassador to Israel. And if Trump has his way, the Defense Department’s nearly 3 million employees will be overseen by “Fox & Friends Weekend” co-host Pete Hegseth..

The Fox-fueled hiring represents a return to form for the former president. The network dominated broad branches of federal decision-making during Trump’s first presidency as his administration effectively merged with the right-wing propaganda network that propelled him to power. But as Trump returns to the White House, Fox is not as dominant in the right-wing media ecosystem as it was during the last Trump administration. The battle for the president’s attention within a larger and more fractured MAGA media will shape the contours of governance.

Trump owed his political rise in 2016 to that right-wing media ecosystem. For a long time Common foxhe was obsessed with the network’s programming and channeled his demagoguery on the campaign trail, winning over its audience as well as upstart alt-right organs like Steve Bannon’s Breitbart.com. He dit killed Fox’s airtime on his way to victory in the primary campaign, bending the network and the GOP to his will before winning a slim majority in the Electoral College.

Once Trump was in office, Fox News became a state television station that praised him and denounced his enemies, and in doing so won unprecedented influence on the US government. The hours Trump spent each day consuming the network’s content and talking privately with its stars shaped his worldview and dictated his reaction to various events. His hyper-aggressive, seemingly self-conscious tweets often came in response to what he saw on TV. I doubled this phenomenon, the “Trump-Fox feedback loop” and tracked it for years, eventually PLOTTING almost 1,300 Trump tweets back to Fox News and its sister channel, Fox Business.

Fox employees affected highly important policy decisions on matters of war and peace and turned right-wing crises into matters of national importance because the President of the United States happened to tune in.

It’s impossible to overstate how ridiculous — or dangerous — this Fox-Trump pipeline could be. Here are five things that really happened during Trump’s first term:

• According to a Fox contributor he turned to the room and urged Trump to drop his support for a bill, the president appears to be doing so on Twitter, causing chaos on Capitol Hill.
• At the urging of Fox News personalities, Trump triggered the longest partial government shutdown.
• Trump’s homeland security secretary resigned after losing a power struggle with a Fox Business host.
• trump card put all the force the government behind a purported “miracle cure” for the coronavirus that he had seen promoted on Fox News. The drug was ineffective against the virus.
• trump card light an administration-wide pushback against diversity training after watching a negative Fox News segment on the topic.

Since Trump left office in a failed coup, the right-wing media ecosystem has simultaneously become more fragmented — and even more pro-Trump.

Fox responded to a brief exodus of viewers after Trump’s defeat desperately renewing his support for him. Its evening range of Laura Ingraham, Jesse Watters, Sean Hannity and Greg Gutfeld it’s all for once and the future president. MAGA stars like it Maria Bartiromo and Jeanine Pirro have maintained or increased their roles at Fox, while the network devastated its “straight news” ranks. Fox’s job is to protect viewers from damaging revelations about the former president or to explain them away played a crucial role in Trump’s return to power.

But the ranks of Fox competitors have also swelled. Bannon’s “War Room” podcast is at the center of a vast field of MAGA media influencers, with notable others included Charlie Kirk and Jack Posobiec. Podcasters love it Joe Roganwhose show it is Trump friendly but they don’t focus entirely on politics, they have huge audiences. And a diaspora of former Fox stars like Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro and Megyn Kelly are now competing with their former employer at their own pro-Trump outlets (all three campaigned for him in 2024).

Carlson in particular has both own blood and soil political agenda and Trump’s ear. Apparently the former Fox prime-time host played a key role both in Trump’s decision to name Sen. JD Vance of Ohio as his running mate and Endorsement of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. of the former president.

Trump himself maintains a frequent presence on the Fox airwaves and regularly promotes his content on his social media platform. They are likely to take others out of the network to hire their administration. But stick a stick next to the carrot, drone THE network whenever he perceives its coverage as insufficiently hagiographic. And the fractured right-wing media environment gives him plenty of options if he’s looking for other voices to step up and ask for advice.

The result can be a fatal loop, as Fox’s hosts get better and better at keeping their audience — and attract a Trump watching along with them.