Dana Perino is clear about whether she will be getting a call to join the Trump administration. “No, I don’t think so,” she says firmly. She is behind her desk on the Manhattan set of America’s Newsroom, one of the Fox News shows she presents. Normally she is the one asking the questions but the cameras have stopped rolling and this morning is the FT’s turn to be interrogator.
Is she sure she won’t get a call? Three of Perino’s Fox News colleagues are in line for positions in Donald Trump’s new cabinet: Pete Hegseth, a former host at the channel, was confirmed as defence secretary at the weekend; Tulsi Gabbard, a Fox contributor and former Democratic congresswoman turned Republican, has been put forward as director of national intelligence; while Sean Duffy, a host on Fox Business, has received the nod for transportation secretary.
Fox News has had a rocky few years, settling a $787.5mn defamation lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems in 2023, over on-air claims the company helped rig the 2020 election for Joe Biden (an additional $2.7bn defamation suit from another voting system group, Smartmatic, is pending). Yet the network beloved by conservatives remains the most watched cable news channel in the US, routinely trouncing rivals CNN and MSNBC in the ratings. Many of its presenters share a worldview with Trump: Tucker Carlson, a former Perino colleague and bogeyman of liberals everywhere, does not have an official role but is known to have regular conversations with the new US president. National Public Radio recently calculated that for his second term, Trump has given jobs to at least 19 past and present hosts, journalists and commentators from the network, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Corp.
Perino would be a natural choice to join them, given her experience as White House press secretary under George W Bush. In that role, which she held for two years, she sustained an injury to her eye in the melee that followed an Iraqi journalist throwing a shoe at the then president.
But the 52-year-old says there is only one position that would persuade her to return to government. “The only job I would want . . . would be ambassador to Tanzania,” she says, slightly unexpectedly. Africa holds a special place in her heart, she explains: she worked with Bush on the President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (Pepfar) and, together with her husband, has spent time volunteering on its west coast since she left the White House in 2009.
Her internationalist view and belief in the importance of overseas aid is a far cry from Trump’s “America First” isolationism. “I’m not against investment in other places, where it makes sense, if you’re actually getting results and if you have national security interests that can be advanced. Because guess what? If we don’t, China [will].”
Perino, it seems, is cut from a different conservative cloth than the man who now sits in the Oval Office. “I just want everybody to get along,” the Colorado native says at one point (imagine Trump ever saying that). She is less shouty than some of her Fox News colleagues who present evening opinion shows, such as chief Trump cheerleader Sean Hannity.
Fox and Trump have had a turbulent relationship over the years. Despite the network’s biggest stars tending to share a hatred of the Democratic party — even though it now attracts a larger share of the Democrat audience than rivals such as CNN, according to Nielsen — the president has at various times accused the channel of being unfair to him or having an anti-Trump agenda. Which begs the question: given some of his more alarming policies (releasing convicted criminals who attacked the Capitol on January 6, being one) is Trump now to the right of Fox News? “It depends on what the right means now,” Perino says, diplomatically.
The US is in the midst of a “political realignment”, she adds, going on to mention previous eras, such as the 1970s, when southern Democrats drifted away from the party, eventually becoming Reagan Republicans. Today’s Democrats have “let the working class go”, while Trump “is a political phenomenon. I’m certainly a conservative. I’m a registered Republican. Would people that work for him consider me one of them? I don’t know.”
What is Trump’s relationship with Fox like these days? “It might depend on the day.” She adds that his second term certainly will not be boring. “I remember on a Saturday [in his first term] I took a nap for 20 minutes. That was it, and I woke up and three news stories had broken. During the Biden administration you could nap all day.”
Fox News was the first outlet to raise questions about Biden’s age affecting his mental acuity, which earned the channel the ire of Democrats. The great irony is that the Democrats are now beating themselves up over why he did not step down sooner, which would have allowed a proper primary to find the strongest candidate to run in his place.
“It was what you were seeing with your own eyes,” Perino says of Biden’s decline. “It wasn’t speculation. You could just see it when he would interact or when he would talk with the press. It was a problem.”
I wonder if Fox’s reporting on this issue failed to take off in other parts of the press (Fox commentators tend to lump all other outlets together as the “mainstream media”) precisely because it came from the Murdoch-controlled channel and could therefore be dismissed as politically motivated.
But Perino changes tack to the campaign itself. “The other thing that was happening was that every poll said inflation is the number one issue for people, followed by immigration, and then crime. The voters were telling them what was wrong.
“Climate change might be the number one issue for 7 per cent of your voters,” she adds. “If you focus on that solely and ignore these other things, ultimately you’re going to lose.”
Perino then brings up border security. “The White House [would be] saying the border is secure and [Fox would have a] split-screen of people just walking across it. They missed that too. That really affected people.”
The border is now the responsibility of the new administration, which continues to be assembled by Trump. At the time of publication only Marco Rubio’s Senate confirmation as secretary of state has been smooth. Hegseth’s nomination in particular sparked an outcry, with several news outlets publishing stories on alleged excessive drinking and aggressive behaviour: the Wall Street Journal, which, like Fox, is part of the Murdoch empire, recently reported he routinely passed out from alcohol abuse. (Hegseth has denied the allegations.)
Perino says she “never worked with him that closely”, adding the allegations “don’t ring true to anything that I’ve ever experienced. ‘Give Pete a chance’ is something I said that first day [he was nominated]. I know it’s been a lot on his family, just from afar.”
She went through a Senate confirmation process herself in 2010 when Barack Obama nominated her to join the Broadcasting Board of Governors. It was not “very controversial”, she says of the experience, “but it’s still a thing when your whole world is opened up to everybody”.
Since then, Perino’s Fox career has grown and evolved: alongside American Newsroom, which she co-anchors with Bill Hemmer, she is a co-host of the primetime show The Five, the most watched cable news show at 5pm. She has also developed Minute Mentoring, an organisation that helps women build leadership skills and advance their careers. She describes the approach as “like speed dating, but mentoring”.
She mentions a piece of advice she has given. “I tell people, you’re only allowed to have one drink at your office Christmas party. I don’t care if you think you can handle four, you can’t. One drink, that’s it.” Why? “You don’t want to make a fool of yourself. You want to have a good showing in front of your boss at all times.” Maybe Hegseth could have done with this advice, I suggest. “I don’t know,” she says sharply. “I’ve never seen him drinking.”
Our time is almost up and before we part I want to know again where an internationalist conservative, who believes we have more common ground than we might think, fits in the new Trump era. “I try to show people that we actually don’t disagree that much,” says Perino, referring again to the great political realignment wrought by the election result. There are some Trump policies that have merit, she adds, pointing to the need to drive more spending by Nato members and her view that the Department of Education needs reform to deliver better outcomes for children. But it does not sound like she has become a full-blown Maga member just yet.
She is ready for Trump 2.0 — and Fox News, she says, is the perfect perch. “I think the great thing for me is I can just be myself.”
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