Fox News host Bret Baier was truly desperate to pacify then-President Donald Trump on election night after Fox called Arizona for Joe Biden, according to a new book by New Yorker journalist Susan Glasser and New York Times reporter Peter Baker.
Per Insider’s excerpt of the book titled “The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021,” Baier sent an email to Fox News President Jay Wallace panicking about the tantrum Trump was throwing after the network’s Decision Desk declared that Arizona had gone to Biden.
“The Trump campaign was really pissed,” Baier reportedly wrote. “This situation is getting uncomfortable. Really uncomfortable. I keep having to defend this on air.”
The Fox host even went as far as accusing his colleagues at the Decision Desk of “holding on” to their (accurate) call “for pride,” according to the book.
“It’s hurting us. The sooner we pull it — even if it gives us major egg — and we put it back in his column the better we are in my opinion,” Baier wrote.
Fox, which was the first major network to call Arizona for Biden, ultimately did not take Baier’s suggestion to literally make stuff up about the election results.
The revelation of Baier’s shocking proposal makes a big crack in his image as one of Fox’s few reporters who aren’t in MAGAworld’s pocket. Baier has openly tried to distance himself from the network’s hardline Trump allies, i.e. Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity.
Baier defended his email on Tuesday, saying Glasser and Baker’s book was missing “the full context” of the message.
“I never said the Trump campaign ‘was really pissed’ – that was from an external email that I referenced within my note,” Baier said in a statement. “This was an email sent AFTER election night.”
“In the immediate days following the election, the vote margins in Arizona narrowed significantly and I communicated these changes to our team along with what people on the ground were saying and predicting district by district,” he added. “I wanted to analyze at what point (what vote margin) would we have to consider pulling the call for Biden.”
A Fox spokesperson told TPM in an emailed statement that the network “made an election night call of historic magnitude and was first to do so.”“We stood by the call in the days that followed, it was proven correct, and other news organizations eventually joined us,” the spokesperson said.
