That Was Awkward: Fox News Forced to Fact-Check Trump’s Lies on Air

  • Oops!
    Something went wrong.
    Please try again later.

Donald Trump’s former sycophants at Fox News appeared somewhat reformed on Saturday, interrupting the GOP presidential candidate’s unhinged campaign speech to fact-check his election lies.

During a couple of back-to-back campaign stops in Iowa, Trump reiterated claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen and even went so far as to claim he wanted to “redo the election” and encourage his followers in Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta to “watch those votes when they come in” in 2024.

Fox News took note.

“Well, the former president finally got around to some campaign promises amid lots of cheering, as you heard,” said Fox host Arthel Neville. “Many untruths; the 2020 election was not rigged, it was not stolen.”

The live react could be part of a turning tide for Fox, which earlier this year settled a historic lawsuit for failing to dispute similar election lies, paying a whopping $787.5 million to Dominion Voting Systems. The network is still in the throes of another, $2.7 billion lawsuit by Smartmatic, another voting machine company allegedly defamed by Fox’s conduct.

Still, it’s not the first time Trump and Neville have clashed—in 2019, the former president tweeted that Neville and fellow hosts Leland Vittert and Shepard Smith should quit Fox in favor of CNN.

That wasn’t the only headline Trump was after on Saturday. In the same tour, Trump claimed that he invented the term “caravan” and unironically claimed that he was God-chosen in the 2020 election.

“I think if you had a real election and Jesus came down and God came down and said, ‘I’m gonna be the scorekeeper here,’ I think we’d win [in California], I think we’d win in Illinois, and I think we’d win in New York,” Trump said.