Fox News Is Having an Incredible Reaction to Trump’s Sudden Tariff Reversal

Fox News.

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What a difference a day makes—or rather, what a difference a social media post can make.

President Donald Trump’s surprise post on Truth Social at lunchtime on Wednesday announcing he was temporarily backing down on his threats to impose the most extreme parts of his calamitous tariff plan (albeit while still imposing a rate of 10 percent on most countries, seemingly, and a 125 percent on China, specifically) didn’t just provide a sudden jolt of buoyancy to the stock market, it also lifted the spirits over at America’s de facto state television channel, Fox News. There, talking heads were rushing to praise the administration—even more so than usual.

“The bottom line is Donald Trump is back!” Fox Business anchor David Asman gleefully told viewers, painting the president as some sort of ingenious chess player. Per Asman, Trump was a prudent and heroic figure who had saved the world from an economic emergency (never mind that it was one that the president had himself created). “The common-sense businessman Donald Trump has been weighing all these things,” Asman gushed, “and just when you think the hope is lost, that we’re going to go into a recession, that we’re going to have months, if not years, of down markets, something like this happens!”

Later, Asman even held up his phone to the cameras in order to show the homepage of the almost equally sycophantic Daily Mail. “WE ARE SO BACK!” the headline screamed. “Stock market goes stratospheric for Trump!”

Across the day on Wednesday, Fox anchors had been reporting on the tariff crisis, but still managed to find large blocks of time for other stories that would be catnip for their right-wing audience. Fox & Friends, the network’s morning show, aired segments on so-called sanctuary cities dealing with murderous “illegals,” college campus protesters, and transgender student athletes. When talk did turn to tariffs, it was usually framed in ways that went well beyond giving the administration the benefit of the doubt. “This is why Donald Trump is doing all of this at the very beginning of the administration,” promised Fox & Friends anchor Ainsley Earhardt. “So that we can see the benefits coming up in the next few months before the midterm is over.”

Still, as the crisis had unfolded over the last few days, even Fox News had struggled to carry on as if things were business as usual. Appearing on Fox Business on Wednesday morning, Jamie Dimon, the chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, told anchor Maria Bartiromo that a recession was a “likely outcome”—a clip that was replayed on Fox several times across the day.

And yet, the anchors had been doing their best version of trying to play a string quartet as the Titanic sank. “The worst case scenario has not emerged just yet,” Fox Business reporter Charles Payne told viewers shortly before the surprise announcement in an apparent bid to do the economic equivalent of polishing a turd. An impressive earnings report from Delta Air Lines on Wednesday, as well as a spike in mortgage demands, were all signs that things were calmer than headlines seemed, Payne argued. Just try to ignore that those were all from a pre-Trump tariffs world.

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, who appeared to be somewhat forgetting the decades of post-war growth and economic dominance the U.S. had enjoyed, tried to convince viewers in an interview that America’s status as “the world’s greatest economic power” had ended roughly a century ago “at the dawn of the progressive era. Only Trump’s “boldness” would bring back “a golden age of unlimited prosperity,” she assured them.

“I hate to be the one to point out the obvious,” anchor John Roberts told Rollins, apparently remembering he is ostensibly a journalist, “but the Dow ticker was on screen as you were talking [and it’s] down 6,000 points from where it was before all this started.”

“How much disruption will the American public have to weather before this all begins to straighten out?” Roberts asked sheepishly.

“The answer was about 15 minutes!” Roberts later cheerfully told viewers after Trump’s change of tune.

Prior to the Truth Social post, co-host Sandra Smith’s massive, hooped earrings studded with enough diamonds to blind the sun had seemed somewhat tonally inappropriate to wear as she discussed the decimation of her viewers’ retirement accounts. But after Trump’s missive, they seemed to reflect her suddenly glittery mood. “This is unbelievable to look at … how much the markets are spiking after the president’s announcement,” Smith said, as she anxiously awaited for the Dow to climb back above 40,000.

What the Fox team couldn’t quite decide in the immediate aftermath was whether this had been the president’s plan all along. They recalled that just days ago the White House had vehemently dismissed as “fake news” suggestions that Trump was preparing to pause the tariffs. Whatever the plan had been, Asman told viewers, Trump’s sudden reversal was a boon for Republicans seeking to avoid the crisis he had created. “Politically speaking, this is excellent for Donald Trump,” he raved.

It fell on Charlie Gasparino, a Fox Business senior correspondent, to leave viewers with just a hint of a reality check. “I want to tell you that Donald Trump outsmarted the world. Trust me, I’m an American; I support my president. But that’s not what really happened,” he said. Instead, his reporting suggested the administration had been spooked by the overnight “implosion” of the U.S. bond market, which was a sign, Gasparino said, that investors were losing confidence in the “plumbing” of the American economy. If the U.S. was unable to sell treasuries to people who only wanted to unload them, it was “game over,” Gasparino said. “From what I understand, this is what forced the hand of this 90-day reprieve.”

Soon, in a rather extraordinary scene, Gasparino and Asman were clashing openly on air about what had just happened. “It is the White House who capitulated,” Gasparino insisted. Asman, meanwhile, tried to make a case that Trump had intentionally brought things to the edge before expertly pulling the breaks. “You could look at it that way,” Gasparino retorted, “or you could look at it that the gun was at his head.”

Whatever the thinking, Fox News producers suddenly felt comfortable making one small but symbolic change to their coverage: a live ticker showing the Dow average, which had only been shown on screen Wednesday when the tariffs were being discussed, was soon affixed firmly to chyron on the bottom of the screen. The Dow, like the Fox mood, was suddenly in positive territory.