“History Will Judge”: Fox News Anchor Bret Baier on Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth’s War With the Press

Bret Baier and I arrive at Cafe Milano and slip past the heavily armed Secret Service detail idling out front: Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, is having dinner in the back room. “This is kind of my clubhouse,” says the chief political anchor of Fox News as we settle into a corner table. Franco Nuschese, the Georgetown restaurant’s proprietor, comes over to say hello. “I’ve known Franco for a long time, 25 years,” says Baier. He takes friends to dinner here and interviews subjects in the establishment’s dining room. After the Alfalfa Club dinner earlier this year, Milano hosted the after-party, and I ambled out sometime after midnight, faintly proud of my stamina. I learned the next day that Baier held court at one of its back tables until 3 a.m.

Tonight he’s on better behavior, waving off wine and sticking to soda water. “I have an election diet,” he tells me, explaining that he drops around 15 pounds every October of an election year. He recommends the beef tenderloin but orders the branzino for himself.

Tucked into a corner seat at the best table in the room, Baier is in his element. He pats down his hair, which is short and sculpted and appears totally immovable, like the top of a Playmobil figurine. He’s just come off set, and his face remains brushed with the tan makeup that ensures its uniformity and consistency through time and space and episodes of Special Report, the daily news program he has anchored for the last 17 years. The job—that is, serving as the face of the mighty conservative network’s news operation—has grown more challenging over the years as the institution has become increasingly intertwined with Donald Trump’s political movement.

We’re discussing the president’s attacks on the press, which recently culminated in an unprecedented attempt to ban certain news outlets from the White House over their coverage. “We made our feelings clear the second it happened,” Baier tells me. Privately, Baier lobbied Trump to reverse the ban, I’d been told by a source with knowledge of the conversations. Publicly, Fox News joined the rest of the media in pulling its coverage from the White House press pool. “There are die-hard MAGA folks who say that it was the wrong move, but there was no doubt,” he says. “There was never even a split second of thinking about it.”

It isn’t the only measure Fox is taking against the Trump administration: Internally, the network has barred interviews with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News host, following his ejection of journalists from the Pentagon. “I always had a good relationship with him at Fox,” Baier says of Hegseth. “Obviously, I’m not a proponent of what he did with the Pentagon press pool. And I see…[the president] talks about him all the time as central casting.”

I ask whether he would host Hegseth on Special Report. “If I get clearance to, I would,” he says. He’s not getting clearance right now? “No, I mean, I think we made another decision as a news organization once we left the premises and got kicked out, and that was the decision that was made.”

It’s an early taste of the anchorman’s studied posture of neutrality—though Baier does, for a moment, betray a point of view. “I hope he lets the press back in,” he says.

At exactly 5:58 p.m. earlier that Tuesday evening, Baier walks briskly onto a set with a splendid view of the US Capitol and sits down in a chair behind his desk. His face is serious; there are no pleasantries. He doesn’t like the microphone being affixed to his tie by a producer, preferring that it remain in its usual spot on his lapel.

“I hate the tie,” he says.

“I know you hate the tie,” the producer responds.

In his second decade as anchor and executive editor, Baier has perfected the science of Special Report, Fox’s flagship news operation, which airs weekdays at 6 p.m. and is run with a fierce efficiency. There are around three crew members on set at any given time, and another 10 staffers sit in a control room, a whirring hub managing a network of foreign and domestic correspondents who beam in for quick hits.

“Honestly, I hate the tie,” Baier says, fixated. “It screws up the tie.”

The microphone remains on the tie. A producer begins the countdown to live, and at exactly 6 p.m., Baier looks up from his laptop for the first time since sitting down and says amiably into the camera: “Good evening, and welcome to Washington. I’m Bret Baier.”

In the first block of the show, he throws to a correspondent in Paris covering the riots there, then to the State Department, the White House, and Ithaca, New York, for a dispatch on the protests at Cornell University. In 10 minutes, Special Report has covered five stories. In a final segment, a panel featuring three national political reporters weighs in on the upcoming midterms. By the end, this precisely choreographed endeavor produces an hour of television that draws an average of more than 2.5 million viewers each night, which makes Special Report the most watched hard-news program in all of cable.

These days, Baier measures his success against that of the broadcast networks—CBS, ABC, NBC—which he beats in some key markets. But he remembers when his ambitions were considerably more modest. “I went around doing stories and I’d say I was with Fox, and they’d say, ‘Is that the Simpsons network?’” he says. “And so the prospect of us beating a big [broadcast] network that still has much further reach is really pretty amazing.”

Seventeen years and a few dollars later, Baier now divides his time between Washington, where he still spends three to four nights a week, and a large home he recently purchased in Palm Beach, a short drive from Mar-a-Lago. He sold his house in the capital, a mansion in leafy Foxhall inspired by a Loire Valley château, to Howard Lutnick, Trump’s billionaire commerce secretary. “He got a good deal,” Baier says. ($25 million, cash.)

Baier’s rise to television stardom began by violent chance. He was an industrious correspondent in Fox’s Atlanta bureau when the first plane hit the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, and he was called to the network’s New York City headquarters to help cover the attack. “We started driving, and then the third plane hit the Pentagon,” he says. “They rerouted us.” He drove from Georgia to Arlington, Virginia. “I started doing live shots for Fox affiliates outside the burning Pentagon that night, and I never left.” He was soon named Fox’s Pentagon correspondent, traveling frequently to Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2009 he took over Special Report from his mentor, Brit Hume, who offered three simple pieces of advice to the young newsman: “The show is not about you, the show is not about you, and let the news drive the show.”

Back then, Baier faced stiff competition within the network from straight-news anchors like Chris Wallace and Shepard Smith. But Trump’s rise to power ushered in changes at Fox News, which has seen the news hours on its schedule shrink, replaced by opinion shows, which tend to draw stronger ratings. “The landscape changed,” Baier says. “There’s a lot more opinion programming overall in the cable universe.” In this uncertain new world, Baier has established himself as the face of Fox’s news operation, the man called upon to moderate presidential debates and interview world leaders.

When it comes to foreign heads of state, it can sometimes feel like Special Report is their first stop in Washington. “I’d like to say it’s because the booking is really good,” Baier says with a laugh. “When you have big foreign leaders appear one after another, they line up like planes at Dulles.” There’s also the matter of who’s watching. “I hear they also want to talk to a viewer, a particular one who watches Special Report,” Baier adds. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, amid a yearslong bid to convince Trump to support his cause, has appeared seven times.

Special Report’s most important viewer has a fraught relationship with the show and its host. Trump has lashed out at Baier before, calling him “nasty” after the Fox anchor pointed out in an interview that Trump lost the 2020 election. But Baier maintains a good relationship with the president, who often calls to talk off the record, sometimes to complain. Baier recalls one example, deploying a perfect Trump impression: “‘Bret, I tell you what, you’re a six. You’re not a seven or an eight. You’re a six.’” Baier says he replied, “I’ll take six. I’m pretty close to five. I’m doing good.”

During a book party that Baier hosted for Sylvester Stallone earlier this month, he pulled his phone out and said there was someone who wanted to talk to the actor. It was Trump, who had called to offer well-wishes. The anchor and the president have also golfed together, which critics say betrays a coziness between the scandal-plagued president and the newsman. “Look, if you had three hours with the leader of the free world where you could pick his brain off the record while you’re playing a sport,” Baier says, “I would take that with any president.”

Yet Baier’s critics question his claim to impartiality—citing, beyond the network’s overall reputation, a few high-profile incidents. In 2016 he issued a correction and an apology after inaccurately reporting, days before the election, that Hillary Clinton would be indicted. And during the 2024 campaign, Baier interrogated Vice President Kamala Harris in a manner some viewers found aggressive, with the host interrupting her at points—though Baier would later contend that Harris came into the interview looking for a fight.

Throughout dinner, we’re interrupted by patrons ranging from Bessent—who stops by and offers a warm greeting—to a number of people who arrive in succession and appear to be gushing fans of the anchor, though Baier recognizes all of them by name.

Like any anchor, Baier is determined to give little away, and he carries a politico’s devotion to staying on message. When he’s questioned about the other activities of the network that employs him, he says he maintains “horse blinders” on his show. This is not entirely true, of course. He follows the controversies and outrages and scandals provoked (and stoked) by the rest of the network and has privately expressed frustrations with some of its coverage, according to one person who knows him personally. In 2020, as some Fox hosts promoted Trump’s false claims about the election, Baier fumed about the coverage on Maria Bartiromo’s show, according to internal communications revealed as part of a lawsuit at the time. He does not share any of this with me.

“Friends with Maria,” he says when I ask about her abrupt ouster from the network over the summer. “Great lady. Didn’t have any specifics when it all went down. Still really don’t have the whole picture”—and then we’re interrupted by the Trump adviser Jason Miller, who has come over to say hello.

When I continue my questioning about his Fox colleagues and reach Mark Levin, the cantankerous windbag who recently defended Trump’s media ban even as the rest of the network fought against it, Baier demurs again. “Again, my day is with literally horse blinders on from six to seven,” he says.

“But you don’t really have horse blinders on,” I note. “You watch this stuff.”

“I don’t actually watch it,” he says. “But obviously I see clips and I hear it. Does it bother me? No, because you know what? There’s an opinion page and a news page. They’re opinion folks. They do a great job at what they do. We’re rowing the same way for the company, but it’s a different job.”

This zone defense has been honed through years of sitting with journalists like me, answering questions like this. “Do you ask this question to NBC when they go crazy on their opinion programs?” he asks. I assure him that I would. “Fox is under the spotlight a lot, and always has been,” he continues. “I get asked about opinion folks all the time, and I’m fine with it. I don’t see a lot of stories that scrutinize what the opinion people on other channels are saying.”

The Trump era is different, of course. The false information the president demands his supporters endorse is of a magnitude not seen in modern times—a reality well-known to Fox given the costly defamation lawsuits the network faced over Trump’s election lies. Amid the 2020 chaos, Baier fact-checked false claims about the election on his show. But as the network faced a viewer revolt over its election desk’s call that Joe Biden won the state of Arizona, he reportedly suggested that the network “pull” the call and “put it back in [Trump’s] column.” (In a statement at the time, Baier said his comments were taken out of context. Some analysts, including Nate Silver, had argued Fox should retract their call—which ended up being correct.) Baier’s sign-off on Special Report is “Fair, balanced, and unafraid,” but that motto sounds more strained than ever in a time with rampant misinformation and growing audience pressures, not to mention a press corps treated with hostility and distance.

When Baier introduced the report on the riots in France this month, he accurately described them as student protests against poor conditions in public schools. But he also said that Trump “is blaming Islam and unchecked immigration” for the unrest. What the audience did not hear is that there is no basis whatsoever for the president’s claim. Is there not some obligation for the newsman to inform his viewers, I ask him, when one side of the story he’s relaying is false?

Baier says that he often does push back on false information from Republicans. In recent interviews, he pressed Trump on his past claim that the Iran war would be “fairly quick” and Bessent on the president’s dreadful approval ratings. He describes his role these days as that of a hockey goalie, blocking whatever bad information he can from reaching the back of the net. But the balance doctrine also creates an uncomfortable obligation to host Trump’s breathless defenders on Special Report.

Take the case of Mollie Hemingway, a pundit who once blasted Trump as a “demagogue” but now plays the part of Trump booster on Baier’s show, amplifying his conspiracy theories about elections and more. (She went so far as to write a book about the 2020 election called Rigged.) Is there any point at which Baier considers whether someone like Hemingway should continue to be on air? He pauses for a while.

“I’m still the goalie,” he says. “If Mollie said something that was egregious on the panel, I would step in and confront. But to hear where the Trump administration stands or what they’re thinking, I think is actually valuable in the discussion.” Special Report often pairs these pro-Trump voices with liberal pundits like Jessica Tarlov and Leslie Marshall, and its Common Ground segment brings together lawmakers from both sides of the aisle.

But the view that Trump’s side should be thoroughly represented shapes much of what airs on Special Report. That might come down to earnest belief, or survival instinct. (The newsmen who faced the wrath of the Fox audience after expressing too much skepticism of Trump could fill Cafe Milano.) “I think history will judge whether he’s been, in the big picture, this great figure or whether he has been what some would describe as a divisive figure,” Baier says. “But Donald Trump will be a consequential president in history’s mind. And how you read it will be what point of view you come from.”

One wonders how Baier would judge the history we’re living through. He’s written nine books, all New York Times bestsellers, including six about American presidents. His latest, The Case for America, is a paean to the founding ideals of the country. In the introduction, Baier outlines several “bedrock principles” that defined the founding of the United States: freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, and the peaceful transfer of power. I point out that Trump in many ways represents the antithesis of those principles—between the 2020 election crisis, his attempted “Muslim ban,” his crackdown on the press, the legal harassment of his critics… There’s too much to list over a two-course dinner. Did that come to mind as he was writing the book?

“It wasn’t specifically written like that,” Baier says. “But it was specific to look back at what’s important to the founders and what they believe. So if you take that away from that, that’s fine.” He adds: “I think there are a lot of Trump people who would push back at some of your characterizations about lack of freedom for religion.”

Did Trump not run on banning Muslims from the United States?

“It didn’t last long,” Baier says, apparently reassured by the judicial limitations placed on Trump’s crusade. I ask about the threats to the American project that his book warns against—extremism, venality, hyperpartisan coarseness. Is Trump not the primary culprit driving those trends? Earlier in the day, I point out, the president called Annie Andrews, the Democratic US Senate candidate in South Carolina, “Trannie Andrews.”

Baier pauses. “Some of the rhetoric is quite something,” he says. “But it’s all part of the story. Clearly, Donald Trump hasn’t done the ‘common ground’ part of my book as well as anybody else. But he got elected by the population in this country, and so he’s the president of the United States.”

What does that afford him? A pass on some of this?

“Not a pass. We definitely have to cover it and have on the critics of how he operates, but also listen to the administration’s side, because what Donald Trump says is one thing, and things that he does are another thing.”

Earlier that evening, as a black car carries us from the Fox bureau to Milano, Baier is reminiscing about his long career in Washington. We pass the Kennedy Center, an institution he once frequented as a crystal-clinking veteran of the capital’s cocktail party circuit, and I ask what he makes of Trump’s hostile takeover and subsequent destruction of the arts center.