The tone was triumphant early Wednesday morning on “Fox and Friends,” in the hours after the Fox News network called the presidential race for Donald J. Trump.
Ainsley Earhardt, one of the show’s hosts, declared: “This is the end of the legacy media,” claiming that other news outlets had tried to tell Americans how to vote and had failed.
“Middle America loves God, they love country, they don’t want a handout,” she said. “They want to work hard and have their dollar go as far as it did four years ago.” Ms. Earhardt later said of Mr. Trump: “God saved his life for a reason.”
Bill Melugin, a Fox News correspondent, reporting from a celebration held by Mr. Trump, said that his “phone was blowing up last night” with messages from immigration officers and border patrol agents who were “locked and loaded and ready to go.” The hosts repeatedly pushed the idea that President Biden’s staying in the race into the summer was a major cause for the loss.
The show also checked in with joyful Trump voters at a pancake house in Maggie Valley, N.C., and a restaurant in Tyrone, Penn., where voters praised Mr. Trump’s authenticity. One said that she believed a Trump presidency would have sent resources more quickly to the state after Hurricane Helene. Another said he planned to celebrate by watching the daytime talk show “The View” on ABC, and presumably gloating over the downbeat reactions of the hosts.
A much more somber set on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” began a postmortem of Vice President Kamala Harris’s failed run. The NBC News Decision Desk had made their race call at 5:31 a.m.
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