A Fox News defector gets it right on Laura Ingraham — and on MAGA

A Fox News defector gets it right on Laura Ingraham — and on MAGA

Donald Trump and Fox host Laura Ingraham. (Luis M. Alvarez/AP)

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By Greg Sargent

Columnist

Today at 10:42 a.m. EST

Last month, two Fox News contributors quit the network to protest its descent into rank propaganda about Donald Trump and Jan. 6. Now that Fox has been drawn into the House select committee’s investigation of the assault on the Capitol, one of those defectors has broadened his indictment — in scathing fashion.

The defector, writer Jonah Goldberg, just posted a new piece at the Dispatch that takes on Fox host Laura Ingraham over the news that she texted Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows on Jan. 6, urging Trump to call off the mob. “This is hurting all of us,” Ingraham warned.

Goldberg’s response gets at a set of disputes that go beyond those over Trump’s culpability for Jan. 6 or over Fox’s role in driving the abandonment of democracy highlighted by those events. At issue are deeper questions about the MAGA movement — what’s driving it, where it’s going, and the GOP’s cynical incorporation of its ugliest, most destructive impulses.

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Earlier this week, Ingraham issued a tortured response to criticism of her Jan. 6 conduct. She denied any conflict between her texts and her public comments at the time: Both, she said, expressed strong distaste over the violence and both openly called on Trump to stop it.

But as Goldberg pointed out in response, what’s more notable is what Ingraham would not meaningfully admit to: that the mob attacked the Capitol precisely because they were inspired to do so by Trump’s lies about the 2020 election.

In private text messages on Jan. 6, Fox News hosts condemned President Trump’s response to the attack. In public, those same hosts deflected blame from Trump. (JM Rieger/The Washington Post)

“Laura was still willing to condemn the president’s mob, but not the president,” Goldberg noted, adding that this has defined Ingraham’s approach ever since. “Laura spent the next 11 months cleaning up the president’s mess.”

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The crucial point Goldberg makes is that this act — the downplaying of the role of Trump’s lies in inspiring the effort to violently disrupt the election’s conclusion — is a widespread phenomenon. It’s essential to the “conspiracy-mongering, demagogic, populist personality cult nonsense that defines so much of prime time Trumpism.”

The GOP safe space

We can broaden out this argument. First, many Republican lawmakers in good standing in the GOP occupy this same safe space. They admit the violence was bad or potentially unlawful without admitting that Trump or his lies about our election system inspired it, lies that have continued widely since.

There was a time when Republicans contemplated a different direction. Right after Jan. 6, GOP leaders in the House and Senate gave speeches blaming Trump for the assault.

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But since then, Republicans reversed course, pushing nonstop falsehoods and absurdities downplaying the gravity of the attack, the antidemocratic impulses it represented, the role of Trump’s broader coup attempt in inspiring all of that, and their own complicity in spreading the same 2020 lies that Trump did. Meanwhile, Republicans have declined to take many of the off-ramps they could have taken to exit from the party’s ongoing MAGA-fication.

Here’s another thing Ingraham does not meaningfully address in her diatribe, and that many Republicans will not admit to: The Jan. 6 violence actually was about disrupting the election’s outcome. And it functioned as the outgrowth of a larger effort that actually was about thwarting a legitimately elected government from taking power. Here again, the safe space lies in detaching the violence — and Trump — from those larger aims.

All this is exactly what the Jan. 6 committee is currently exposing. The Meadows texts reveal that the plot to subvert the election through procedural corruption was far more elaborate than we knew, and that Trump refused to call off the mob for around two hours despite being under enormous pressure from Republicans to do so.

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As William Saletan notes, the texts show that Trump refused precisely because he wanted the mob to function as leverage to intimidate lawmakers. It was the continuation of the procedural coup attempt by violent means. This is what the committee is revealing, and what Ingraham and many of those same Republicans who frantically appealed to Trump now refuse to admit.

Liz Cheney, pariah

All this also shows why Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) is such a pariah in today’s GOP. Whatever the role of previous GOP impulses in leading to this moment — the embrace of voter suppression, the shredding of procedural norms, the race-baiting and Islamophobia, and so forth — Cheney wants to root out the MAGA-fication that Jan. 6 represents.

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But many Republicans and their media allies expressly do not want this.

In her diatribe, Ingraham aired video of herself on Jan. 6 declaring that the riot “is antithetical to the MAGA movement.” This is the essence of the dispute: Unlike Ingraham and many Republicans, Cheney believes Jan. 6 and the coup attempt do represent the truth about much of the MAGA movement, and must be exposed and destroyed.

Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) recently captured the truth about this underlying conflict with remarkable candor.

“She’s made a determination that the Republican Party can’t grow with President Trump,” Graham declared of Cheney. “I’ve determined we can’t grow without him.”

In short, Ingraham and many Republicans believe the GOP needs the energy of MAGA-fication to thrive. They will not confront or admit to the full truth about the events surrounding Jan. 6 if they think the GOP’s future lies in becoming a kind of MAGA host body.