Laura Ingraham might get a big new gig after all — just not as the White House press secretary or communications director.
The conservative talk radio host, Dartmouth College graduate and founder of the LifeZette news site is reportedly negotiating to host a prime-time show on Fox News, where she already is a frequent contributor. CNN’s Brian Stelter reported late Monday that Ingraham is “in line” for her own show, after Matt Drudge hinted at such a deal in a vague tweet earlier in the day.
Ingraham, who initially expressed interest in the White House press secretary job last fall, appeared disillusioned by June, when she said on Fox & Friends that “I’m not sure the press secretary thing is something I’m dying to do.” On the same show earlier this month, she sounded more open to replacing Anthony Scaramucci as White House communications director.
Ingraham appeared on Fox &Friends Tuesday morning, but neither she nor that program’s hosts brought up the reports.
For President Trump, an hour of Ingraham’s boosterism every weeknight would be a fantastic development. She is more valuable to him on TV than she would be in the White House, anyway.
Ingraham is equally adept at defending Trump and attacking the mainstream press — talents that surely would serve her well as a top communications aide. But the platform she would have at Fox News is hard to beat. (The money would be hard to beat, too. While top White House aides make $179,700 per year, big-name cable news hosts often earn seven- or even eight-figure salaries.)
My guess is that Ingraham would take over a 9 p.m. time slot in desperate need of stability — and a host who can consistently beat MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow. Ingraham’s show would be the fourth to hold the 9 o’clock spot in less than a year.
Megyn Kelly averaged 2.7 million viewers as the host in 2016. Tucker Carlson averaged 3.3 million in the first quarter of this year, before moving up to 8 p.m. when Bill O’Reilly was fired. Both Kelly and Carlson ranked second in cable news viewership, behind O’Reilly. But The Five, featuring an ensemble cast, slipped to fourth place in the second quarter, two spots behind Maddow, with 2.5 million viewers.
With Eric Bolling’s 5 p.m. show seemingly in limbo, as he serves an indefinite suspension for allegedly sending lewd photos to female colleagues, it would make sense for Fox News to move The Five back to 5 and turn over the 9 p.m. hour to Ingraham. She would inherit a time slot that has averaged 2.8 million nightly viewers over the past six quarters and instantly become one of the most important on-air figures in cable news.
It is theoretically possible that Ingraham could have drawn larger audiences as White House press secretary. At the peak of the Sean Spicer cultural phenomenon, he was attracting more than 4 million viewers to media briefings, across the three major cable news networks.
But there is only one Sean Spicer, and some of those viewers were surely hate-watching rather than nodding in agreement. The clearest sign that the White House did not always consider Spicer’s big ratings a good thing is that it scaled back on his appearances before he resigned last month.
“I have said consistently, given everything the country has afforded me, all the opportunities I’ve gotten — I know it sounds schmaltzy, but it’s what I really believe — if I believe I can really make a difference in the agenda that I believe in, which is the president’s agenda, then I would of course consider it,” Ingraham said.
Ingraham actually might have a better chance of curbing Trump’s worst impulses from a Fox News studio than she would have from the West Wing. While he routinely ignores his advisers’ recommendations, as he did when drafting Donald Trump Jr.’s misleading statement to The New York Times last month, for example, the president sometimes takes to heart what he sees on Fox News.
In the 24 hours before I wrote this, Trump retweeted or promoted Fox News coverage from his Twitter account three times.
Callum Borchers covers politics and media for The Washington Post.