Look who’s back: Donald Trump’s big return to Fox News

NEW YORK — For several months, Fox News treated Donald Trump like yesterday’s news. In one of the exchanges, from Jan. 4, 2021, Carlson wrote that “we are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights” and “I truly can’t wait.” Trump’s return reverses what some had been calling a “soft ban” by Fox News, which had no on-air interviews with him between Sept. 22, 2022, and Hannity on March 27. The judge presiding over that case said Wednesday he was inclined to order an independent review to determine whether the network had improperly withheld evidence A week ago, Fox News Channel carried in full Trump’s speech from Mar-a-Lago on the day he was indicted by a Manhattan grand jury on charges that he falsified business records to conceal payments made ahead of the 2016 election to silence a porn star who says she and Trump had an extramarital sexual encounter years earlier; Trump denies the two had sex. “We want to make Trump a non-person,” Murdoch wrote, according to documents revealed as part of an elections technology company’s defamation lawsuit against Fox. Other Murdoch-controlled media properties were even harsher: The New York Post headlined its story: “Florida man makes announcement.” Following the midterms, a Wall Street Journal editorial was headlined, “Trump is the Republican Party’s biggest loser.” Yet, as spring neared, Fox warmed again to the former president.