Fox News Suddenly Starts Panicking About Trump’s Economy: “Weakening!”

Fox News figures are willing to propagandize on President Trump’s behalf on pretty much every horror that he throws our way. Do Fox personalities back Trump when he sells out our allies in tandem with murderous tyrant Vladimir Putin? Yes, indeed. Do they support Trump when he tries to purge federal workers by the thousands to corruptly replace them with loyalists? Enthusiastically. Do they stick with Trump when he declares himself above the law, explicitly using the language of world-historical dictators to do so? Without reservations.

But it turns out there are limits. One topic Fox personalities are not quite as willing to run interference for Trump on is the economy. And with signs mounting that Trump’s economy is hitting the skids, they are beginning to sound the alarm.

It’s the latest indication that Trump’s political project is suddenly looking quite fragile. And it’s a sign that more dissent is coming.

On Fox News on Friday morning, host Maria Bartiromo practically shouted that “the jobs picture is weakening!” She tried to spin this somewhat positively, insisting investors are rallying because the weakening job market means the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates. But Bartiromo was blunt about the latest jobs report, which she pronounced “weaker than expected.”

That jobs report found that the economy created 151,000 jobs in February, which was slightly under expectations. This left some economists seeing a continued softening in the labor market and some news organizations discerning a “slowdown.”

Beyond this, the overall picture is darkening even more: This jobs report does not fully register the federal job losses unleashed by Elon Musk’s cuts via the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, which are expected to show up any day now. Trump’s tariffs are deeply spooking investors, and his sudden, temporary cancellation of many tariffs intended for Canadian and Mexican exports is only increasing the agitation. As a scalding New York Times assessment of Trump’s economy put it, the “sudden deterioration in the outlook is striking, because it is almost entirely the result of Mr. Trump’s policies.”

Yet what’s also striking is that Fox News figures are willing to go here—sort of, at least.

“I think the boom times are over,” Fox anchor Charles Payne declared Friday, implicitly admitting that the economy under Trump’s predecessor was a lot better. Payne pointed to declines in consumer spending, which he pronounced “scary.”

“We are sliding towards a recession,” Newt Gingrich fretted on Fox News the other day. Gingrich blamed former President Joe Biden for this, naturally, but the admission stands: Trump, you’ll recall, promised that economic nirvana would arrive on day one. Meanwhile, Fox host Larry Kudlow recently suggested that it’s time for Trump to clearly explain to the public how his program will facilitate growth.

Then there’s this striking exchange, flagged by indefatigable independent journalist Aaron Rupar, in which Bartiromo urged Trump to provide certainty about the future of his tariffs, so businesses can plan accordingly. “CEOs want to see predictability,” she said:

Bartiromo was plainly worried that Trump is not getting the message that the tariffs—and his erratic flip-flopping on them—are on the verge of spelling disaster. So she served up an easy opportunity for Trump to project calm. But Trump explicitly declined to take it. Instead of hinting at future certainty, Trump said: “The tariffs could go up as time goes by.”

“That’s not clarity,” a disappointed Bartiromo replied.

A big part of the dynamic here is surely that Fox News is, at its core, allied with the corporate, plutocratic wing of the GOP. Tariffs are such an obvious affront to those interests that Fox figures will struggle to sugarcoat them. This is why you see the Wall Street Journal editorial board brutally attacking the tariffs. And it’s why you see Bartiromo practically pleading with Trump to reassure the plutocrats about them. She’s basically channeling those interests.

Trump’s tariffs, of course, are also taxes on consumers that are likely to harm ordinary Americans across the board. Yet here again, this is something Fox is actually telling its viewers. In a striking segment, Fox recently featured an interview with a car dealer in Pennsylvania who fears Trump’s tariffs will drive up prices. “We’re afraid,” he said. “It’s going to have a gigantic impact on our business.”

Trump’s overall political project is heavily dependent on an enormous network of propagandists and other pliant institutional players to sustain itself. Take Musk’s DOGE: Again and again, DOGE’s revelations of “waste” and “fraud” have themselves proven fraudulent to the point of buffoonery. It requires an immense roar of propaganda from right-wing media and dozens of GOP lawmakers, all declaring falsely that DOGE really is finding all kinds of smoking guns, to keep alive the fiction that it’s producing dramatic results.

This is why Fox turning on Trump’s economy could be so debilitating over time. Perceptions of Trump’s economic prowess are the scaffolding that holds up the rest of the edifice. If the public continues to sour on his economic performance, the deep cuts to government will look less about efficiency and instead appear maliciously, dangerously incompetent. The mass deportations will look less like the protecting of U.S. workers from unskilled foreign labor competition and more like unchecked ethnonationalist cruelty. And Trump’s celebrations of his own impunity won’t come across as the mere rhetorical trash-talking of the strongman who was needed to whip the economy into line. Instead, they’ll sound like what they truly are—the rantings of a genuine wannabe dictator.

It’s no accident that Trump is reining in Musk’s DOGE right at this moment. Trump declared Thursday that cuts will be done with a “scalpel,” not a “hatchet,” and claimed agency heads, not Musk, will have the final say. This isn’t just Trump realizing that decimating government services like Social Security will be unpopular. He also grasps that with economic sentiment turning against him, the idea that Musk is magically removing mere “waste,” liberating the economy to roar forth, becomes a much tougher sell.