Senior Trump Adviser Rips Fox News Over Bartiromo Ouster in Splashy Interview: Not ‘Friendly to MAGA!’

Peter Navarro, the senior counselor for trade and manufacturing to President Donald Trump, ripped Fox News over the ouster of longtime anchor Maria Bartiromo, telling Newsmax’s Greg Kelly that the network “has not treated Donald Trump very well.”

Bartiromo’s abrupt exit from Fox News Media was announced Thursday after more than 12 years at the network, amid reports that she shared confidential internal guidance with the White House. The guidance instructed Fox Business staffers not to lend credibility to a July primetime address in which Trump revived fraud claims about the 2020 election and alleged Chinese interference.

Bartiromo had planned to cover the speech and interview Navarro about it, but as Puck’s Dylan Byers later reported, she instead sent Navarro a screenshot of the guidance after management nixed the coverage.

Fox publicly characterized Bartiromo’s departure as a “business decision.”

Emphasizing that it was his “duty to forward [the screenshot] on,” Navarro told Kelly on Tuesday’s edition of Greg Kelly Reports about his anger that Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott, “over at the mothership at Fox, didn’t want to have anything to do” with Trump’s primetime address.

“The bigger story here is, forget about anybody thinking that Fox is a conservative network that’s friendly to MAGA, that’s friendly to Trump,” he continued. “Suzanne Scott is the enforcer. They’ll feed you some red meat over there — the easy stuff, the trans stuff, stuff like that — but when it comes down to MAGA things, Suzanne Scott gets rid of everybody over there who wants to talk about MAGA issues.”

Though Navarro largely focused on Scott in his screed Tuesday night, it’s worth noting that Fox Business Network — on which Bartiromo anchored her daily show — actually falls under the purview of Fox News Media President Jay Wallace, who oversees that property.

Another top executive, Fox Business senior VP of programming Ralph Giordano, was the person who actually issued the guidance on the Trump speech to Bartiromo’s producers — according to a report from Puck.

Navarro went on to reference the late Lou Dobbs, who was fired by the network in 2021, and Tucker Carlson, who was ousted in 2023.

“This was all about talking about Trump issues,” he added about the firings. “You fire people like Tucker Carlson and Lou Dobbs, now Maria Bartiromo. That throws fear into all these other anchors and keeps them in line. It’s like, ‘Don’t talk about kinda Trump stuff,’ right? And we know how that network has not treated Donald Trump very well.”

Navarro’s comments come just hours after he published a Washington Times op-ed, titled “Fox News Muzzles Maria Bartiromo,” largely echoing the claims he made on Newsmax.

Notably, Fox News aired Trump’s July speech in its entirety, unlike ABC News, NBC News, and CNN, which declined to carry the address live on their main television networks.

CBS News joined the speech several minutes after it began before cutting away shortly before it concluded, while MS NOW aired roughly the first 15 minutes.

Watch the clip above on Newsmax.

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