Trump No Show On Fox

Rush Limbaugh has an interesting take on why Trump shot down the Fox network. It boils down to this: why supply the bullet, load the gun and hand it to someone so they can shoot you?

The Donald

Trump is so far outside the formula that has been established for American politics that people who are inside the formula can't comprehend it. They don't understand why somebody would want to venture so far outside it, because it is what it is, and there's a ladder of success that you have to climb. And somebody challenging it like this in more ways than one, as Trump is doing, has just got everybody experiencing every kind of emotion you can: They're angry, they are flabbergasted, they're shocked, they're stunned -- and all of it because he's leading.

[...]But folks, one other thing about this. If I heard it once last night, I've heard it a thousand times since, that Trump is afraid of Megyn Kelly or afraid of Fox News. That is not what this is. There isn't any fear. What is there is here -- in my opinion -- is a desire to control this and a purposeful decision to not put himself in a circumstance where other people want to make him look bad.

In his mind, that's a dumb thing to do. You don't put yourself in a circumstance where a whole bunch of other people are gonna be able to make you look bad while you're there. If they do it when you're not around, that's another thing, you can counterprogram it, you can do whatever, but you don't have to put yourself in a circumstance where you have to personally deal with it as a sign of disrespect or somebody else trying to notch their belt. It really isn't any more complicated than that.

Now, Trump's out there talking about how they're desperate to have him because high ratings means a lot of advertising revenue. Lower ratings means lower advertising revenue because Fox has to charge less. They were hoping to get $750,000 a minute, I heard, and they may be down to $150,000 a minute if Trump isn't there. I mean, these are samples of the kind of things going around.

The NY Magazine also has something to say about the internal squabble going on at Fox right now over Trump's no show.

 FOX News Roger Ailes

As the war between Fox News and Donald Trump ratchets up, Roger Ailes is fighting off criticism from his senior executives over his handling of the crisis. According to one highly placed source, last night, Ailes sent out the now-famous statement mocking Trump as being scared to meet with the “Ayatollah” and “Putin” if he became president. “That was Roger 100 percent,” the source explained. “A lot of people on the second floor” — where top Fox executives work — “didn’t think it was a good idea.”
Fox executives are also troubled that Ailes’s principal adviser right now is his longtime personal lawyer and Fox & Friends contributor Peter Johnson Jr. “He wrote the statement with Peter,” the source explained. “Peter is running the war room,” another Ailes friend told me. Fox executives are worried that Ailes is relying on an attorney with scant communications experience as the network is reeling from the biggest PR crisis in recent memory.