On Monday morning, the former Fox News host Jeanine Pirro, now the U.S. attorney for Washington, appeared alongside President Trump to announce a federal takeover of the capital’s police force, pledging to crack down on “young punks” and other criminals.
On Monday evening, Ms. Pirro was back on Fox News with her former colleague Sean Hannity — he introduced her as a “friend of the program” — echoing the same calls for law and order she had made earlier that day and, for years before that, as a co-host of Fox News’s “The Five.”
Right-wing media has embraced Mr. Trump’s crackdown in Washington, dismissing Democrats’ concerns about creeping authoritarianism and any exaggerations about the level of crime in the nation’s capital (Washington’s violent crime rate fell sharply last year, though it remains higher than that of Los Angeles, New York and Chicago.) MAGA influencers like Charlie Kirk have called for a “full military occupation” of other major cities.
Ms. Pirro’s return to her old network home was a small illustration of Fox News’s feedback loop with the second Trump administration, which, like its predecessors in both parties, regularly cites media coverage that validates and amplifies its policy goals. The network has numerous ties to this administration, which includes more than two dozen Fox alumni as members.
Another prominent former host, the onetime “Fox & Friends” personality Pete Hegseth, who is now the defense secretary, also spoke at the president’s news conference on Monday. Hours later, he appeared on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News program.
Mr. Trump has fixated on crime and disorderliness in Washington for more than two years. The day before he was inaugurated in January, Mr. Trump declared that he would make the capital “safe, clean and beautiful again,” and he refocused his efforts after a prominent former member of the Department of Government Efficiency was attacked in an attempted carjacking this month.
In the wake of that incident, Will Cain, a Fox News afternoon host, declared on his program that “Washington, D.C., is less safe than some capital cities in third-world countries,” and displayed charts comparing the city’s crime rate with places like Mexico City. A CNN reporter pointed out that Mr. Trump brandished some of the same charts at his Monday news conference with Ms. Pirro and Mr. Hegseth.
“You might have seen this image today from the president, or you saw it last week here on ‘The Will Cain Show,’” Mr. Cain told viewers on his Monday broadcast.
Mr. Trump has long monitored the nuances of how Fox News covers him. (The president also recently sued Rupert Murdoch, who controls Fox News, over an article in the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal that Mr. Trump deemed defamatory; The Journal defended its reporting.)
As Mr. Hannity wrapped up his Monday interview with Ms. Pirro, he thanked her for her government work and added, “We miss you here at Fox.”
“I miss you, too, Sean,” Ms. Pirro replied.
Michael M. Grynbaum is a media correspondent at The Times. He is the author of “Empire of the Elite,” a cultural history of Condé Nast magazines.
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