Trump ends Fox News boycott, will appear on Tuesday’s ‘O’Reilly Factor’
Trump talks about his tax plan during a news conference in New York Monday (Photo: Julie Jacobson/AP)
Less than a week after Donald Trump announced he would not be appearing on Fox News for the “foreseeable future” because Fox News had been treating him “unfairly,” Donald Trump will be appearing on Fox News.
The network announced that the Republican frontrunner will appear on “The O’Reilly Factor” on Tuesday, six days after a defiant Trump announced the boycott against Fox — the second in his 100-day-old presidential campaign. In August, Trump took issue with moderator Megyn Kelly’s line of questioning during the first GOP primetime debate, saying Kelly had “blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever” — a comment that many took as a reference to her menstrual cycle and drew considerable outrage.
That feud was short-lived, too. Three days after Trump’s comments about Kelly, Trump tweeted that Fox News chief Roger Ailes called to assure him that he would be treated fairly. “His word is always good!” the real estate mogul proclaimed.
According to Politico, Trump is scheduled to meet with Ailes and Fox News senior executives this week.
On Monday, as Trump was unveiling his tax plan, Kelly told an Advertising Week panel, “I don’t want to talk about Donald Trump any more, truly.”
She may not have a choice.
Donald Trump (Photo: Damon Winter/The New York Times)
In an upcoming New York Times Magazine cover story (“Donald Trump Is Not Going Anywhere”) Trump says he has “no idea” how his foray into politics will end.
“But I’m here now,” Trump said. “And it’s beautiful.”
The billionaire mogul also dismissed the notion that his presidential bid is a thinly veiled publicity tour for Trump’s signature business interests.
“Some people think this will be good for my brand,” Trump told the magazine. “I think it’s irrelevant for my brand.”
But Trump is certainly keeping a close eye on how his personal brand is doing on cable news. On the flight to Simi Valley, Calif., for the second Republican presidential debate, Trump was channel-surfing in search of … Trump:
He kept flipping between Fox News, CNN and MSNBC, sampling the commentary in tiny snippets. Whenever a new talking head came on screen, Trump offered a scouting report based on the overriding factor of how he or she had treated him. “This guy’s been great to me,” he said when Bill O’Reilly of Fox appeared (less so O’Reilly’s guest, Brit Hume, also of Fox). Kevin Madden of CNN, a Republican strategist, was a “pure Romney guy,” while Ana Navarro, a Republican media consultant and Jeb Bush supporter, was “so bad, so pathetic, awful — I don’t know why she’s on television.” Click to Fox News. Jeb Bush was saying something in Spanish. Click to MSNBC. Hillary Clinton was saying she wished Trump would start “respecting women” rather than “cherishing women.” (“She speaks so poorly, I think she’s in trouble,” Trump said.) Click to CNN. It showed a graphic reporting that 70 percent of Latinos had a negative view of Trump. Click to Fox News. Trump asked for another plate of au gratin.
“I wasn’t treated fairly by CNN,” Trump told New York magazine after the second debate.
Being treated “fairly” is something that is clearly important to the Donald, as Mark Leibovich, who wrote the Times magazine profile, found out:
He kept browbeating me to “write fairly” about him, meaning that I should do a full and proper rendering of the Trump Phenomenon — the full degree to which it is, as he so often says, yooooge. Otherwise it would be “disgusting,” as it was recently when a reporter described a “smattering of applause” that he received at an event in Iowa, when in fact it was much more than a “smattering” — trust him. “I don’t do smatterings,“ he said, spitting out the word.
But fair doesn’t mean “nice,” Kelly said.
“He’s not a politician,” Kelly pointed out Monday. “He said [after the debate] that he was expecting us to be nice to him, and we weren’t nice. … That wasn’t exactly the bargain. It’s not a cocktail party, a presidential debate.”
