Last year, on the night before the election, the former Fox News host Megyn Kelly did something she had never done before — something that is forbidden for most journalists: She got onstage at Donald Trump’s final campaign rally and endorsed him.
Kelly built her career in the mainstream media. After a stint as a lawyer at Jones Day, she spent nearly 15 years at Fox, where she earned a reputation as one of the channel’s sharpest interviewers, before she moved, briefly, to NBC to try her hand at softer-focus morning TV. (It did not work out.) But that Trump-endorsement speech was the clearest sign yet that Kelly has moved on to her next chapter, and not just because it was an embrace of a man who once relentlessly attacked her: Over the past few years, she has found a new lane for herself in podcasting and on YouTube, where she has nearly 3.5 million subscribers. Her daily talk show, “The Megyn Kelly Show,” fits squarely into the MAGA-loving media universe. (Kelly also recently announced an expansion: She’s starting her own podcast network.)
As that universe’s influence continues to grow, and as the left continues to fret over its lack of a similar sphere, I was interested to talk to Kelly about her professional evolution (including some very high-profile incidents during her Fox and NBC years), whether she still considers herself a journalist, her volatile relationship with President Trump and what she thinks some people, myself included, don’t understand about how the media has changed.
In 2015, when you were a host at Fox News, there was the very famous Republican primary debate. You had a question for Donald Trump in which you asked him to explain why he had called women fat pigs, dogs, slobs and disgusting animals, and then he retaliated against you. His attacks were relentless that year. In hindsight, why do you think he came after you? Initially he was annoyed. I think it was sincere anger that night. He did not appreciate that question. And I think he thought we were friends, so he was even more annoyed by it. He felt betrayed.
Why did he think you were friends? We’d been friendly, just through Fox. He had invited me to a couple of the “Apprentice” extravaganzas. I’d interviewed him quite a few times on Fox, in my younger years. There was a very funny exchange, I think in 2010, where he let me feel his hair to see whether it was real. I think he thought I was a fan, and I think he thought I should be a fan — that I was at Fox and I looked like somebody who he would typically do well with, and he put me in this category of “She’s on my team.”
And while I had nothing against him, and I wasn’t not on his team prior to that moment, as soon as they throw their hat in the political ring, when you’re a straight news journalist, it becomes somewhat adversarial. So the week before that debate, I had been discussing the Michael Cohen statement that you can’t rape your wife. Michael Cohen [a lawyer for Trump at the time] had said this in defense of Trump, who had been accused by his first wife, Ivana, of having raped her in the course of their first marriage or divorce in some explosive argument, an allegation she later recanted, and I was knocking Michael Cohen for the ridiculous assertion that one cannot rape one’s wife.
Well, he did not like that. Trump was watching, and he called me and he told me something to the effect of, he didn’t want to see any more segments like that on “The Kelly File,” and I told him he doesn’t control the editorial on “The Kelly File,” and he screamed at me and hung up on me. This is a week before the debate, and then he kept calling Fox executives and complaining about me. I think his Spidey senses were up that maybe I’m not in the friend camp anymore and maybe something could happen in this debate that might not be good for him, and he was just really, really focused on me.
Here’s the second thing. In the beginning, I think he was genuinely angry, but I think it quickly turned to: He liked it as a story line. He wasn’t wrong that it was good for him to show the world, and in particular Republican voters who felt disaffected or abandoned by the party, that there were no sacred cows for Trump, even in the Republican Party, even at Fox News, even in the prime time with Roger Ailes’s chosen favorite anchors. No one. That he would fight anyone.
You’ve talked a lot about what a terrible year that was and having to go with armed guards and having his supporters come after you. Do you have residue from that period? No. It was such an annoying nine months. I did not want to take an armed guard to Disney World. I did not want this to go on and on. I knew it wasn’t good for me as a journalist, as a Fox News host or as a person to have this level of acrimony constantly aimed at me, and I desperately wanted him to just lay off. So it was just a stressful time when you’re waiting for somebody who’s very angry with you and toying with you to get focused on something else.
In 2016, you and other female Fox employees accused Roger Ailes of sexual harassment, and again, this is a pretty well-documented time in your life — there was a movie about it. Ultimately you were instrumental in getting him fired. Did you feel at Fox that people were angry at you because of what you’d done? Very much so, yes. They weren’t really angry about the Trump stuff — they were angry about me not supporting Roger, and they never got past it. In a way, I feel like my career there ended when I called Lachlan Murdoch to tell him the truth about how my relationship with Roger was when I was a first-year reporter at Fox. You have to understand, it’s almost cultlike over there. At least, it was back then, and he was the cult leader, and you don’t turn on the cult leader. So much more so than with the Trump thing, which I think everybody understood Trump, what he was doing, and there were some who took it personally — Hannity and I fought publicly over what he perceived as my nonsupport of Trump, but for the most part, no one cared about that. It was the Roger thing that turned my relationships at Fox and just made it an impossible place for me to stay.
What was that call with Lachlan like, when you called him up and told him? When you asked me that question, I got a chill through my body. That’s how big that moment was for me. It’s one of the hardest, most complicated things I’ve ever done, because I really cared about Roger, and we had gotten past his harassment of me, which, for the record, never led anywhere. I did not submit to any of his advances. I had forgiven him, and he had done so much for me, and I did not want to hurt him. And I didn’t like Gretchen Carlson, who was kind of looking for help in a way. The whole question was, can he be this thing who she has alleged he is? And I was really not inclined to help her and stick a knife in him.
There was a long period where I wasn’t saying anything about it, and people were saying, what’s she going to do, and I was under a lot of pressure from Roger’s team and Roger and his wife to come out and say he’s not this thing, and he’s incapable of being this thing, which is what everyone was saying. And I knew I did not have it in me to lie. The real question was whether I should just stay silent and keep it to myself, and I wrote about this in my book. It’s a true story. I was on the porch swing at the place we go to at the Jersey Shore, and I was looking at a picture of my daughter, who had fallen off the jungle gym. She had something like 11 stitches in her head, but she got back up to the same jungle gym she had fallen off of, and I saw that picture and I said, I have got to call Lachlan Murdoch. It still makes me emotional, because it was something that I think changed lives in a lot of ways, including my own in a way that was not positive, mostly. In some ways positive, but mostly negative.
What changed? Well, it blew up almost every friendship I had at Fox. I loved most of those people and didn’t quite realize how strong the backlash would be. Virtually everyone. Maybe a couple of close friends stood by me and were 100 percent with me, but it just was a before-and-after moment there.
I don’t want to spend too much time here, because I do want to get to today, but in 2017, you went to NBC to host a daytime show. That time at NBC ended disastrously because of your comments about blackface and Halloween, ostensibly. Correct. Bravo, which is owned by NBC, had a Real Housewife in blackface Halloween costume, she dressed up like Diana Ross and tinted her skin, and there was a push to get her in trouble, and so we had a discussion on my show where I asked, when did that become unacceptable? Because when I grew up in the ’70s and ’80s — people used to do it, and it was considered OK. At the time, I knew that had been my experience. I just didn’t know that NBC had been airing shows with people doing it, like “Scrubs.” There were so many examples, but I didn’t have it at the ready because I wasn’t expecting a huge controversy over it.
Really? Everyone understands that blackface is racist. Now they do, but when did it go from something that people used to do, with impunity — hello? Justin Trudeau — to something that will get you canceled? We talked about the two joint traumas during the late Fox years. For me personally, NBC — it dwarfed those. So by the time that ended, I was like, this industry is a disgusting, toxic stew of hatred and darkness, and why would I want to go back into it?
This was the moment when you decided, “The mainstream media is not for me”? I was on my couch, figuratively, all of 2019 and the beginning of 2020, and the country was losing its mind. That was peak wokeism, where when it came to race, when it came to gender, when it came to L.G.B.T.Q., it was like we were going nuts. And I am not a woke person. It’s one of my core missions in life to defeat wokeism. There was no way I could go work for another broadcast news outlet that was going to be like NBC. I definitely couldn’t go back to Fox, so it was like, what could I possibly do? And that’s when Ben Shapiro called me, who, I think he would tell you, I helped him make his name. I put him on “The Kelly File” regularly and helped make him a star, and he saw me down and out and he said, M.K., this is a real lane for you.
Looking at the early days of your new show, it was very much like you were an anchor on television, and now you look a lot looser. Yes. I feel looser, in the anchor sense. [Laughs] If you really want to make it as an individual in this lane without a platform supporting you, where they’re tuning in because it’s Fox News and you just follow the person before you who they really liked, there has to be a connection between your audience and you. Otherwise, what’s the point? So I did start to share more of my opinions, and frankly, I started to form more of my own opinions.
Tell me about that. One of the reasons I think I did well at Fox in the news division was I didn’t really feel a need to choose a side. I just felt a need to learn everything I could about both of the sides and then mediate a good debate. It wasn’t really until I got on this show that it was a different job. The audience wanted to know my opinion, so on a lot of subjects, I had to really start thinking about them. Even today, we’re having a debate about tariffs. I don’t know how I feel about tariffs! I’ve never really given it a lot of thought. So I’m working on my opinion on tariffs. But there have been a million subjects like that over the past four or five years where I really just had to question where I stand.
One of the things you did, which is a red line for most journalists, is that you showed up at one of Donald Trump’s rallies right before the election, and you formally endorsed him. Once you endorse a politician onstage at a rally, I don’t think you can reasonably be called independent anymore, or do you see it differently? I think I can. I don’t agree with that because I can still hit Trump, and do. There’s no question that I owned my bias on Trump and crossed a line that I had never crossed before, and never would have crossed when I was still straight news, ever. It’s just this weird new hybrid lane I’m in that even made it a possibility in my mind, that I even allowed myself to consider saying yes to the invitation, and it was another before-and-after moment, because for sure, you’re crossing a line, but I had crossed it prior to then. I had crossed it the day Biden handed down his Title IX revisions, and I was so angry about what he did that I went on my show that day and said, I am voting for Donald Trump. I had never done that. [In that April 2024 episode, Kelly said that she had voted for Trump in 2020 and that she would not vote for Biden in 2024, but was open to Trump or Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]
But then going and actively campaigning, standing onstage and giving him a hug and a kiss — Yes, that’s different.
I think a lot of people saw you endorsing Trump as caving — as essentially going to where the power is. I don’t think it was me caving. It was me rising. It was me answering something I truly felt called to do. I’m thrilled Trump won. I shudder to think of what the country would be right now if Kamala Harris had won, and in the end, I had no qualms about going out there for him whatsoever. I accept and agree with you that they’re different gradations. It is a different level.
You know the symbolism of it: Someone who so famously had been at odds with him, that he had done so much to, to publicly stand up and embrace him — that was significant to a lot of people. I hope so. That was my goal in helping him, especially with women. I wanted to look them in the eyes, figuratively, and say: Trust me. You know I’m pro-woman, and you know I’ve expressed doubts about him in the past, about some of the choices he’s made when it came to dealing with women, but there is no other choice for women in this election. I knew, given the relationship with him, that I would be a different kind of endorser that actually might potentially make a difference for him with a certain set of people who were looking for permission to vote for him because they’d been told universally that he was bad, that he was Hitler, that he was a rapist, that all these things that people had been saying, and I felt the obligation to go tell them how I really feel about him and why I feel that way.
I understand the fervor with which you embrace some of his policies, but what you were talking about there was the person himself, the things that he has been credibly accused of, and what you yourself experienced. I don’t agree with you on the credibly accused. But with respect to my own situation, you have to zoom out and look at what was happening at the time, which was not easy for me when I was going through it. Trump was trying to win a presidential election, and so as I pointed out earlier, it was useful for him to have me as a foil. Look, you have to separate when you’re in this business, you the person and you the professional. Megyn Kelly the woman and Megyn Kelly the brand, and they were attacking Megyn Kelly the brand, which is fair game. I had thrown a very tough ball right at Trump’s face in that debate.
You really think it’s fair game that you as a journalist ask a fair question based on things that he said, and he put you through that for a whole year? I’ve been very public about thinking he went too far. That’s how I felt at the time, and if I could go back and undo it, I would. But I have a better perspective on why it happened now. It was actually an important piece of his rise within the Republican Party in the primary, and it just showed people what a fighter he was. The same guy who got up bloodied in Butler, Pennsylvania, was the guy who was like a dog with a bone with me, who wouldn’t let it go. He’s got this fighter instinct and if you cross him or if you do something he finds unjust, he will stay on you until he’s satisfied the thing’s been resolved to his satisfaction.
I just want to understand something clearly. Donald Trump was found liable for sexual abuse in a civil court. He’s been accused by many women. You don’t believe any of that? I think the most serious thing I’ve heard about him has been the E. Jean Carroll allegation, that he sexually assaulted her in a Bergdorf dressing room, and I don’t believe one word of that. Not one word.
There are other women who have said — Oh, I know. I have interviewed some of them. The things I heard included things like he got handsy on an airplane. Now, I don’t know whether that happened or it didn’t, but do I find that a deal-breaker for a possible politician? Not really. At least I reported on their stories and did them the courtesy of bringing them to air in front of millions of people and let the audience make up its mind. My problem is more with these Democrats who will bury these allegations against their candidates or their candidates’ spouses and then play holier than thou when they’re looking at Donald Trump.
Do you still see yourself as a journalist? Yeah, I’m still a journalist. I break news all the time, and when I sit with Trump or anyone else in the administration, I ask tough questions. As recently as September of ’23, I interviewed Trump, and he got so mad at me, he didn’t talk to me for six or seven months. Look, it’s a tough job to do. You have to be able to hit the people you admire, and I do. Right before the election I ripped on Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally as too bro-tastic and got specific about why. If you haven’t sold your soul, you have to be willing to criticize the people you admire on your, quote, side, and my owning my bias by going out there onstage with Donald Trump and saying, “I’m voting for him, and you should, too” is a bonus when it comes to my credibility. Now everyone has zero doubt about where I stand, and they can filter everything I say through the appropriate lens. What typically happens in journalism is they say they have no bias, and then they just work it out in the printed word or on their shows without owning it, but the audience knows it, and it creates a distrust and a divide.
When it comes to Trump and me: My own personal opinion is that most of the allegations against him are much more complicated than the mainstream media would have you believe. I don’t think Donald Trump is a rapist or a sexual assaulter. I do think he’s taken inappropriate liberties with women and gotten handsy with them in a way he’s owned himself years ago when he was a celebrity, and it is what it is. That’s the past. But it’s just about so much more than that.
We are talking about how many people are dying at the southern border because of the invasion that we’ve suffered under Joe Biden. We’re talking about Laken Riley, whose killer was let in under Biden. We put him on a taxpayer flight down to Georgia where he murdered her. I don’t give a [expletive] about Trump getting handsy with someone 20 years ago. I want someone who will close the border, which he has. I want someone who will keep boys out of my daughters’ sports, which he has. I want someone who will stand up to the insane D.E.I. policies so that white kids will stop hearing in school that they’re born with some original sin from which they cannot recover, which he has.
Do you think you could be at Fox now in the way that you were before? Can I rein back in the opinion me and do what I used to do? I could, but I don’t have any interest in that, and I don’t think that’s the model for the future either.
Tell me what you mean by that. I just think that mode of journalism is dying, if not dead. I think the future involves direct relationships between individual journalists and their audience, or personalities. They don’t all have to consider themselves journalists.
What’s left if that happens? The way that the algorithms work now is that, I agree with you, they elevate individuals, that you have a personal relationship with them — but then you’re given more of the same thing that you want, right? If I like Megyn Kelly, I might get Megyn Kelly-adjacent materials, and so however great Megyn Kelly may or may not be, that is a very narrow slice of what’s out there. The reality right now, or the way it’s been for the past three decades prior to the last couple of years, is everyone is siloed, and they’re all getting only leftist information. There’s the people who watch Fox and then everybody else. There is a monopoly on opinion and political bias, mostly by the left in media, and a couple have popped up that have done all right. Fox, they do very well. The Wall Street Journal’s doing OK, and that’s it. You’ve had talk radio, which was the only place conservatives could go to hear their ideas debated in a way that wasn’t disdainful, and now that lane has been broadened out to more radio and digital, where you have more conservative personalities dominating.
Dominating! Because necessity is the mother of all invention. Because there are more conservatives in the country now than there are liberals. The country is more right-leaning than it is left. Why wouldn’t they be the dominant forces in media, in mainstream so-called media? Because there’s a monopoly. There’s control over sports. There’s control over corporate America, there’s control over media, and Republicans had had this one strain, and Fox News has been very important, but they needed to invent a new area of thought, because even Fox wasn’t enough and actually didn’t represent all Republican voices, so I do think that now that this other thing has been invented, the old thing is a dinosaur. It’s dying a slow and painful death.
Part of it is tragic, because we do need reporters. We need news gatherers. I am not somebody who says The Times should go out of business. I still subscribe to The Times. I also subscribe to The Journal, and I subscribe to The New York Post. I think it’s important to have news gatherers out there getting news, and people like me cannot exist without that. I need content, I need news to talk about and report on, but the model for how that news is presented is deeply, deeply flawed, and it led to me, and it’s going to lead to a much different future for those organizations.
As someone who supports the president, what do you make of the various ways that he attacks the press? I’m in favor of it. I share his feelings. Just like most people on the right, I have a healthy amount of loathing for a large portion of the media, and they are fake news. And Trump did a very effective job of pointing that out, and he had to because they were all against him. So what was his choice other than to try to demonize them as a group? And rather than proving him wrong, they leaned in, and tried extra hard to really convince people of what he was saying. That’s what happened, especially over Trump 1.0.
President Trump has chosen a lot of people who are in the media, especially from Fox, for his administration. The secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, whom you worked with, the deputy director of the F.B.I., Dan Bongino. As someone who spent so much time in that world, I’m curious what you make of that. I’m excited about it. Pete Hegseth is an interesting one. He’s a good example of what I was saying about how we have an approach that, irrespective of who I voted for, we try to make it relentlessly factual. When the allegations against him that he allegedly raped somebody came out, we sat on the show and went line by line through the police report. And it was brutal. And we did not care that he was a Trump appointee. We did not care that he was a former friend and colleague of mine at Fox. We read every single allegation against him and went through it with the audience, with an open mind. Good luck finding somebody else who did that. It didn’t happen.
Well, you interviewed him, and it was a fair interview, a tough interview. But you opened it by saying that he was a friend. You said, “I’ve been really dismayed by the amount of pile-on that he’s been suffering, and I’ve been outraged by the unfairness of the media’s coverage of the allegations.” That’s a direct quote. So, I’m curious what you’re doing in that interview, because you’re setting up the interview in a particular way. I’m glad you asked that, because I feel like part of our discussion is getting at something: Our wires are crossing. Your wires and my wires are crossing. You’re looking at me and saying, it’s not behaving like a typical journalist and it is still calling itself a journalist. And I’m trying to say to you, yes, I’m still a journalist.
I’m trying to understand it. I know. I’m not saying you’re judging me. But I’m trying to say to you: Yes, I’m still a journalist, but I’m in this new ecosystem where the old rules don’t apply. I’m in this world with, yes, Charlie Kirk and Dan Bongino and Ben Shapiro, but my world is also Joe Rogan and Theo Von. It’s a very large world, and how the consumer receives it is by going on YouTube.com on their television screen or going to the vertical integrations on Instagram or TikTok and just taking in content. What’s the content that you want to receive? I’m on the list of content creators, and so the fact that I’m also a journalist who breaks news and reports on news is an extra. But what’s most important in my business now is authenticity.
What do you make of Gov. Gavin Newsom of California starting his podcast? He had Charlie Kirk on as his first guest. He’s basically saying, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. I think he’s very smart to do it. It’s the right move, and he’ll probably be pretty good at it, because he’s been a public speaker for a living, and he could really benefit, as I think most people on the left could, from having his ideas tested. The right is very good at having these debates, because they have to have them everywhere, and they have for all of their lives. And the left is less good because they’ve just had their worldview reinforced over and over. And in this arena, it’s times 10, because that’s all we do: Debate all day, test our ideas, kick them around, get embarrassed, try to correct it, do better the next time, learn, grow, throw out yesterday’s wrongness so you can be more right tomorrow. So he’s late to the party, but he’s right to join it.
I think you’re right that there is some way in which we are discussing something different. I guess what I’m trying to understand is: What are the rules of this new world that you are inhabiting? Are you making them up as you go, or do you adhere to some of those old values that you used to embrace? The only way one succeeds in this medium is by violating all those rules that we used to have in journalism, where you don’t really talk about yourself at all. You don’t talk about your opinions. You might have a bias. Your only goal is to hide it, not to own it and then get past it with the audience. It’s just a whole new world. And it’s OK. We used to be much more openly partisan in our journalism and our media 100-plus years ago, and we survived that just fine, and we will survive this just fine too. What the audience wants from me is my authentic self and no filter. What they can smell from a mile away is a phony. So they have no problem with me endorsing Trump, even if they don’t like Trump. What they would have a problem with is me pretending I don’t have a horse in the race, and going out and trying to deliver the news as though I’m completely objective and I’m just as open-minded to Kamala as I am to Donald Trump.
Were you ever approached to get into the Trump administration? No comment. Let’s just say, I’m happy doing what I’m doing.
Oh! What did they approach you for? Assumes facts not in evidence. But, look, if I thought I could be really helpful to the president, it’s not that I would never consider it. But, Lulu, I finally have my life exactly as I want it, and I have no desire to upend it in any way right now.
This interview has been edited and condensed from two conversations. Listen to and follow “The Interview” on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, iHeartRadio, Amazon Music or the New York Times Audio app.
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