Maddow Blog | Why Trump’s odd complaints about Fox News’ election ads matter

At a campaign rally in Pennsylvania last week, Donald Trump went on an impromptu riff about one of his favorite subjects: Fox News.

“You ever notice on Fox, they put me on — I do a great job — and then they follow me with a horrible commercial,” the former president said. “Roger Ailes never allowed bad commercials. What’s the purpose of me doing a nice show, and then they put nine horrible commercials on, which are all lies?” he added.

Wrapping up his thought, the Republican concluded, “Fox should put just the good people on, the people that want to make America great again.”

This comes up with surprising frequency. This past weekend, for example, Trump complained that the network aired a speech from Vice President Kamala Harris. The Hill reported:

Fox, the GOP candidate told a Wisconsin audience, “shouldn’t be allowed” to show the Democratic candidate’s remarks.

A day later, he used his social media platform to argue that Fox News “shouldn’t allow negative Ads.” Though he didn’t elaborate, I have a hunch he wasn’t referring to attack ads aired by his own campaign. Trump added soon after that Fox should stop “constantly putting on Liberal Democrats” who end up “nullifying” conservative guests.

If all of this sounds at all familiar, it’s because he made similar comments during his White House tenure. In May 2019, the then-president whined online that Fox was going too far “in covering the Dems,” referring to Democratic presidential candidates. Trump added that Fox News executives should instead prioritize “the people who got them there.”

A Washington Post analysis added soon after that it was a remarkable sentiment because it was “an explicit expression of his expectation that Fox News will at least play down coverage of Democratic issues and candidates, if not shut them out entirely.”

Quite right. As we discussed at the time, Trump was making clear that he saw Fox News, not as a news organization, but as a Republican entity, which exists to advance a Republican cause.

Indeed, the same week, the then-president insisted that if the network was “putting more Democrats on than you have Republicans,” then Fox News was necessarily straying from what Trump saw as its proper mission.

The Post’s analysis added that Trump not only saw a “symbiosis” between the network and his political operation, the president also “expects Fox News to box out anti-Trump voices in the name of staying true to a group he views as their shared base.”

That was five years ago — and the Republican is still making the case that the network “shouldn’t be allowed“ to broadcast Democratic speeches that he doesn’t like.

Complicating matters, Trump isn’t making any effort to hide these sentiments. It’d be one thing if he whined to Sean Hannity during one of their private chats, but the GOP candidate is taking his complaints to the public, apparently in the hopes of pressuring Fox News into compliance with his electoral plans.

I can’t say whether the network and its employees consider Trump’s rhetoric insulting, but they probably should.

This post updates our related earlier coverage.

This article was originally published on MSNBC.com