Fox News didn’t just cheer on President Donald Trump’s war with Iran. It helped goad him into it, according to a blistering column from political analyst Sabrina Haake.
Writing in her latest Substack, The Haake Take, the longtime federal trial attorney argues that the network and its hawkish hosts pushed Trump toward military force in Iran through what critics call a “doom loop,” a self-reinforcing cycle in which the White House and the network feed each other’s appetite for conflict and spectacle.
Haake traces the pressure campaign back to June 2025, when she says Fox personalities openly agitated for war. She points to radio host Mark Levin, who she writes “reportedly” helped push that summer’s U.S. strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities by convincing Trump over lunch that Tehran was just days from a bomb. When a fragile ceasefire took hold in April 2026, Haake writes, Fox voices like Brian Kilmeade and analyst Jack Keane demanded it be broken so Trump could “finish the job.”
Her column catalogs a striking list of on-air demands. According to Haake, hosts including Sean Hannity, Kilmeade and Jesse Watters floated flooding Iran with small arms to spark an uprising, while Kilmeade pushed relentless strikes to “open up the strait,” “grab the uranium” and “target bad actors,” which she casts as an embrace of assassination. Others, she writes, hosted retired Gen. Keith Kellogg as he called for “putting boots on the ground” and seizing Iranian territory.
“This was not commentary or news,” Haake writes. “It was Fox television personalities directly shaping foreign policy at the highest level.”
What makes the dynamic dangerous, she argues, is how blurred the line between the network and the government has become. Haake notes Trump has appointed more than two dozen former Fox hosts to administration jobs, and that the network showers him with praise, with Hannity calling the Iran strikes one of “the greatest military victories” in history and others insisting Trump deserved “six Nobel Peace Prizes” and a place on Mount Rushmore.
In her telling, the war Fox helped sell was a disaster. Trump’s much-touted deal, she writes, includes no permanent, binding nuclear dismantlement, defers its core terms for 60 days, and would hand Iran as much as $300 billion, with its “biggest achievement” being the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, a return to the prewar status quo. She cites the New York Times Editorial Board’s assessment that Trump “made a terrible mistake starting this war” and that the U.S. is “emerging weaker.”
Haake closes by demanding accountability for the network. Noting that Fox paid nearly $1 billion to settle claims it lied about the 2020 election, she wonders bitterly what it will owe “the families of 13 soldiers who died” in a war she says served the network’s ratings.
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