Fox News hires a Trump family member to host a Saturday night show

A new pro-Trump mouthpiece is set to join Fox News as a host later this month: His son Eric’s wife and former Republican National Committee co-chair, Lara Trump.

The network announced Wednesday that beginning February 22, she will host a new Saturday night show called “My View with Lara Trump,” airing from 9 to 10 p.m. EST. The news release announcing the new hire makes clear that—as my colleague Mark Follman put it—the network is essentially state media at this point. The release states, “‘My View with Lara Trump’ will focus on the return of common sense to all corners of American life as the country ushers in a new era of practicality.”

“Common sense” has also been the go-to term used by the Trump White House to describe everything from erasing LGBTQ and people of color from public life and American history, letting an unelected billionaire overhaul government, and contextualizing his racist explanation for the catastrophic American Airlines collision with an Army helicopter that left 67 dead. Fox promises the new show will bring “big picture analysis and interviews with thought leaders” to the air each week.

“As I cover the success of The Golden Age of America,” a statement from Lara Trump said, using another baseless Trump White House term, “I look forward to where this time will lead our country and where this opportunity will lead me in the future.”

Trump, however, is not without television experience. As the Fox announcement points out, Lara Trump started her career as a producer for “Inside Edition” on CBS. (Though, as my colleague Stephanie Mencimer noted in a profile of her last year, she seemed to have little qualifications for the job at the time—which, despite her obsession with “meritocracy,” seems to be a common theme in her meteoric ascent from cake baker to RNC co-chair.) From 2021 to 2022, Lara Trump also was a contributor to Fox, the network says. As the RNC co-chair, throughout the most recent election cycle, she appeared frequently on right-wing television to campaign for her father-in-law.

All of which explains why her hiring undermines whatever journalistic bona fides Fox may still claim to have, especially after its stunning settlement in the $1.6 billion defamation case that Dominion Voting Systems brought against the network (Fox ultimately paid about half that amount). That case revealed that the network’s hosts played a major role in boosting President Trump’s lie about the 2020 election being stolen, even as some reporters were aware that it was bogus, as my colleague David Corn reported at the time.

“You really can’t think of the network as independent from the White House in any way right now,” Matthew Gertz, a senior fellow at the nonprofit progressive research center Media Matters, wrote in a post on X on Wednesday following the announcement about Lara Trump. “Rupert Murdoch finds a way to put money directly into the pockets of the sitting president’s relative,” Gertz added.

Spokespeople for Fox didn’t immediately respond to questions about how, if at all, the network would maintain editorial independence from the White House in light of the hire and whether there was any expectation that Lara Trump would be able to maintain any critical distance from the Trump administration.

Following Trump’s victory, there were some questions about Lara Trump’s future role after the RNC—even speculation that Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) might name her to replace Marco Rubio in the Senate as he joined the administration as secretary of state. In December, she announced that she was taking herself out of the running from consideration to succeed Rubio; her Fox gig was presumably the reason she bowed out. (DeSantis wound up picking state Attorney General Ashley Moody to fill the seat last month.) But Lara Trump’s new job doesn’t mean that a future high-level political appointment is off the table. After all, being a Fox host was apparently adequate qualification for weekend news anchor Pete Hegseth to run the Defense Department.