Donald Trump made some unexpected news Thursday afternoon, telling reporters that Ed Martin, the hyper-partisan interim U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., was facing too much opposition in the Senate, and the Republican lawyer’s nomination was over. The president quickly added, however, that his second choice would be “great.”
Within hours, multiple news organizations reported that Trump’s Plan B was none other than Fox News host Jeanine Pirro. Many, including me, responded to the reports with the same four-word utterance: “That can’t be right.”
It was right. NBC News reported:
President Donald Trump announced Thursday night that he is appointing Fox News host Jeanine Pirro as interim U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., calling her ‘incredibly well qualified for this position’ and ‘in a class by herself.’ Trump made the announcement on his Truth Social, mentioning Pirro’s previous roles as a prosecutor and a judge, and said she was ‘currently Co-Host of The Five, one of the Highest Rated Shows on Television.’
In modern American history, a great many presidents have appointed a great many federal prosecutors. Not once, however, did a chief executive feel the need to justify the decision by pointing to the appointee’s television ratings — until now.
In fairness, it’s worth emphasizing that Pirro clears a low bar that Martin did not: While Martin had literally no prosecutorial experience, making his selection to lead one of the nation’s most important prosecutorial offices bizarre, Pirro actually did serve as a district attorney in New York. In fact, if someone were to look at her C.V. and exclude her work as an on-air television personality, she might even seem well suited for the position to which Trump has appointed her.
But when Pirro’s on-air work is considered, it makes the president’s choice awfully tough to defend.
It’s unrealistic to try to summarize her rhetorical record in a single blog post, but broadly speaking, there are two key elements of Pirro’s career as a television personality to keep in mind. The first is that she’s as much of a sycophantic Trump loyalist as anyone in conservative media. As The Washington Post noted after the president’s announcement, “Jeanine Pirro has long stood out as one of his most reliable backers, often taking his critics to task in stark and colorful language.”
The affection has been mutual. In 2019, Fox News found it necessary to publicly condemn anti-Muslim statements Pirro made, at which point Trump leapt to her defense.
The other angle of note is that the Republican lawyer’s worldview appears to be rooted in a series of outlandish conspiracy theories. Way back in 2014, Pirro launched into a truly unhinged rant against Barack Obama, suggesting to viewers that the Democratic president was secretly training ISIS radicals, prompting BuzzFeed to publish a memorable headline: “Is This The Craziest Rant A Fox News Host Has Ever Done?”
In the years that followed, Pirro continued to peddle one ludicrous conspiracy theory after another. Indeed, after Trump’s 2020 election defeat, it reached the point that Fox News felt the need to temporarily remove Pirro from the air. According to court filings, one executive who oversaw her show at the time privately explained, “I don’t trust her to be responsible.”
As Media Matters noted, internal Fox communications revealed by court filings also showed that her executive producer described Pirro as a “reckless maniac” who is “nuts,” promotes “conspiracy theories” and “should never be on live television.” As for the extraordinary personnel pipeline between Fox News and the Trump administration, it’s apparently time to update the overall tally. In January, The New York Times published a tally and found 19 “former Fox News hosts, commentators, on-air medical experts, producers and other personnel” who’d landed jobs in the Republican administration. Soon after, Media Matters published a revised total, putting the new number at 20. (The list did not include Attorney General Pam Bondi, who briefly moonlit as a guest host of a Fox News program while she was serving as Florida’s chief law enforcement official.) As March got underway, the president also appointed Fox News personalities Laura Ingraham and Maria Bartiromo to the Kennedy Center board, and as March neared its end, Trump added yet another Fox News contributor to his White House operation, tapping Sara Carter to serve as drug czar. Last month, Trump kept going, appointing Bo Dietl, another Fox vet, to serve on a Department of Homeland Security advisory council. With Pirro joining the ranks, what’s the new total? I suppose it depends on who one is inclined to include or exclude, but by any fair measure, there are now enough Fox News veterans on Team Trump to field a full football team’s offense and defense, with a person or two left on the bench.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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