-Donald Trump reappeared on Fox News
for the first time in six months
as he faces an expected indictment
and ratchets up his attacks on Florida governor Ron DeSantis,
and Fox, which has tied itself politically
and financially to Trump,
is clearly torn between the MAGA base they helped create
and which are desperately afraid of losing
and their desire to pivot toward DeSantis,
which doesn't seem to be working.
For more on this, it's time for "A Closer Look."
[ Cheers and applause ]
Donald Trump has once again overtaken the news cycle.
So just in case you've forgotten,
it's worth remembering that he is
and has always been deeply unpopular,
and a large majority of Americans
just want him to go away.
They've said so in three straight national elections
and over and over again in countless polls.
Personally, my solution would be to put him
in a DeLorean with Doc Brown, send him back to the year 1946,
stop his parents from conceiving him,
and then nuke that [bleep] clock tower
so he can't make his way back -- problem solved.
One day we'll just wake up
and he would start magically disappearing
from photos like Marty McFly.
Remember that when he posed with a can of beans?
There are so many pictures where removing Donald Trump
makes it impossible to believe the missing element
is a former president.
I mean, he was in this picture with Kid Rock.
That was a president picture.
He was in this picture with a glowing orb.
That was a president pic--
He was in this picture with the shocked Easter Bunny.
He was -- A president was there.
Trump must have been so mad when he saw they got him
an Easter Bunny with glasses.
[ As Trump ] He's a nerd. I'm not...
taking a picture with a nerd rabbit.
[ Normal voice ] Trump's deep unpopularity
was proven yet again in another poll out this week
where a large majority said
they do not want him re-elected president.
And even worse for Trump, the bad news came from Fox.
-61% of people do not want former President Trump
to be elected again.
-I mean, that's amazing.
61% are already a hard no on Trump.
And it's not like he can say, "Yeah, it's 61% now,
but wait until they get to know me."
We [bleep] know you, dude.
We got to see you do the job we don't want you to have again.
I mean, we can find someone else
to yell at the kid mowing the White House lawn.
Oh, that's another good example.
[ Laughter ]
It was a president.
That was a picture of a president.
But that's the problem for Republicans.
Trump is deeply unpopular with the majority of Americans
while also remaining very popular with the GOP base.
One new poll out this week gave Trump a 26-point national lead
over Florida governor Ron DeSantis
and another show that Trump has actually added to his lead
with a 15-point gain since December,
while DeSantis has dropped 12 points.
And that increase has coincided with Trump
stepping up his attacks on DeSantis on social media,
at his rallies, and on Fox News.
In an interview with Sean Hannity on Monday night,
Trump laid into DeSantis
and claimed his political career would be dead
without Trump's endorsement back in 2018.
-So what happened with Ron is the following.
He came to see me.
He was getting killed. He was being crushed.
Ron came to see me, tears in his eyes.
He said, "I need you to do me a big favor."
First he asked for the meeting, then he asked me for the favor.
I said, "What's the favor?"
"Would you endorse me?"
He said, "I need your endorsement."
I said, "Ron, you're so far behind,
I can't imagine that if you got George Washington's endorsement
combined with the great -- late great Abraham Lincoln,
if you had their endorsements, I don't think you could win,
Ron, but tell me about it, go ahead."
He said, "I'm telling you, I think I could win
if I could get your endorsement."
-Alright, first of all, why is George Washington
just George Washington
but Abraham Lincoln is the late great Abraham?
I'm certain that's the extent of Trump's knowledge
about Abraham Lincoln.
If you asked him to say anything else,
it would just turn into word soup.
[ As Trump ] Abraham Lincoln, he was definitely great,
and he is definitely late, AKA dead.
He died.
He died so tragically
when John Wilkes jumped out of a phone booth...
and said, "Your hat or your life."
But Lincoln, he couldn't take off his hat.
People don't know that.
He couldn't take off his hat because it was a stovepipe
and therefore hot to the touch.
[ Laughter ]
[ Normal voice ] Trump then continued
with his attacks on DeSantis.
-I said, "Let's give it a shot, Ron, okay?"
And he was desperate.
I said, "Okay." I gave him a nice endorsement.
I said, "You write out what you'd like and let me see it."
He wrote it out. I thought it was terrible.
I changed it, made it great. I gave him a great endorsement.
From the moment I pressed that button,
he blew the guy away.
The race was over.
And I said, "Ron, you can beat this guy.
Let's go."
I got him the nomination.
By the way, could have never gotten the nomination.
He would be working in either a pizza parlor place
or a law office right now.
-You know Trump is a New Yorker
because the only two professions he can think of
are pizza parlor and law office.
[ Laughter ]
Although Trump has clearly
never been inside a pizza place himself,
given that he refers to it as a "pizza parlor place."
[ Laughter ]
Sounds like a Russian spy
whose submarine ran aground on Staten Island.
[ Russian accent ] Where is your nearest pizza parlor place?
My stomach is barking like dog mouth,
and I could consume multiple triangle slices.
[ Laughter ]
Triangle is most delicious shape.
[ Laughter ]
[ Normal voice ] So Trump is trashing DeSantis,
which has apparently been helping him in GOP primary polls,
even though he's still incredibly unpopular
with the rest of the electorate.
And that's the inherent problem for Fox News.
They helped create this monster,
and now, seeing that it's been a catastrophic failure,
they've been trying to tiptoe away from Trump.
But their viewers, the Trump base, won't have it.
It's like the story of Frankenstein's monster,
except in this version,
the villagers [bleep] love the monster.
"Hey, you're the monster. Dude, I love your work.
Would you sign my pitchfork?"
That's why Fox originally tried to ditch Trump
after the 2020 election and subsequent coup attempt
but then turned around and embraced
his insane conspiracy theories,
even though they knew they were insane and said so in private.
Rupert Murdoch wrote in an e-mail
after the insurrection that Fox host Sean Hannity
had been "privately disgusted by Trump for weeks,
but was scared to lose viewers."
And after the election, Hannity sent a text that said...
They were so scared.
I can only imagine
what Hannity was doing when he sent that text.
He was probably lying on the floor
watching election returns with...
-Tears in his eyes.
-But that's the modern conservative movement
in a microcosm right there.
Donald Trump's twisted relationship
with the most powerful right-wing propaganda outlet
in the country, Fox News, has been a decade-long soap opera
that the rest of us have sadly had to live with,
despite the fact that everyone involved sucks.
It's very much an "Alien vs. Predator" situation
where sometimes the alien and the predator are friends,
sometimes the alien and the predator bicker,
but mostly the alien has a huge MAGA fan base --
make aliens great again -- that the Predator News network
is desperately afraid of losing, and the alien knows that.
So anytime he doesn't like the coverage he's getting
from the Predator channel, he does a rally
where he complains about their anti-alien bias.
That explains why when I turned into Trump's rally on Saturday,
he sounded like this.
[ Alien screeching ]
[ Laughter ]
Fox has put themselves in a situation
where they've tied their financial and political success
to Trump and his base, a base they helped create.
But now that Trump is under multiple criminal investigations
and has tanked the GOP
in those three successive national elections,
Fox is gently trying to nudge their audience toward DeSantis
without pissing them off.
For example, after Trump attacked DeSantis,
Fox host Brian Kilmeade
criticized Trump the next morning.
-With Ron DeSantis, he sees a threat,
but I think that his best offense as the front-runner
would be don't punch down.
-All Donald Trump knows is punching down.
Telling Trump not to punch down would be like
telling Don Rickles not to antagonize the audience.
Sorry, the late great Don Rickles.
One half of the comedy duo Rickles and Lincoln.
[ Laughter ]
Then there was Fox personality Jason Chaffetz,
who didn't like how much Trump whined during the interview.
-Jason, you said overall, you thought President Trump
did a very poor job in the interview.
Why?
-I thought Sean Hannity did a good job,
but I watched that and I thought,
"Where is Donald Trump?"
I voted for Donald Trump twice.
I have defended him countless times.
I thought he was horrific.
I think that was the worst interview
I've seen the president do.
He was whining. He was complaining.
He played the victim card time and time again.
And then after that, he complained
that, you know, somebody he had endorsed
was now running against him.
And I thought he was absolutely horrific.
He's the former president of the United States.
Act like it. He didn't in that interview.
-I'm sorry. Which Donald Trump were you expecting?
The Donald Trump who whines, complains,
and plays the victim card
or the Donald Trump who doesn't [bleep] exist
because there's only the first one?
He's got two shticks, punching down and playing the victim.
That's it. That's the whole deal.
And as much as the rest of us hate it, for Republican voters,
that's not a negative for Trump.
That's why he's the GOP front-runner.
Either these guys still don't get it
or they're just pretending not to get it
because they don't want to admit that they've devoted their lives
to a morally and ideologically bankrupt political movement
whose main goals are cutting taxes,
making it easier for people to get guns,
and losing their [bleep] over the fact
that the green M&M doesn't give them a boner anymore.
The only genuine belief Donald Trump has,
as far as I can tell, is that democracy is for losers
and some form of dictatorship would be much better.
He basically came out and said as much
in the second part of his interview
with Hannity last night.
Trump praised China's totalitarian regime
when he was asked if presidential candidates
should have to take a cognitive test.
-I'd like to see it for anybody running for president.
I think somebody running for president
taking a cognitive test -- You know, they do it in China.
But it's done a different way.
They have a caste system.
And the smartest person gets to the top.
-First of all, that's definitely not how a caste system works.
[ Laughter ]
Even when he's saying he should get the job
because he's smarter, he's dumb as [bleep]
No one who's actually smart has to explain a caste system
by doing this with their hands.
He looks like he's playing
one of those rhyming games for children.
[ As Trump ] Here's the church, here's the steeple,
here's the caste system with all the smartest people.
That's how it works, Sean.
[ Normal voice ] Fox and the conservative movement created a monster,
and now they're trying to free themselves from it.
But so far, it's not working.
Trump is the star of a political movement
that they built, a movement built on victimhood,
persecution, and wanting to have sex with M&M's.
And as we all know,
when it comes to having sex with an M&M...
-The smartest person gets to the top.
[ Laughter ]
-During the commercial, let's all think about that.
[ Laughter ] This has been "A Closer Look."
[ Cheers and applause ]