Thread: Donald Trump Has An Ace To Play Against Fox News

The GOP front-runner has information that could damage the cable news network if it were to be made public

04/03/2016 11:22 pm ET | Updated 2 hours ago
Christina Wilkie

When Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump launched a crusade against Fox News and its star anchor, Megyn Kelly, last summer, many political insiders saw the move as the beginning of the end of Trump’s upstart campaign.

Why would anyone seeking the Republican presidential nomination attack a network that reaches huge swaths of the Republican primary electorate?

One answer is that Trump was angry with Kelly and Fox News after the anchor asked him a tough question during a Republican presidential debate in August.

But in a newly published article Sunday in New York Magazine, author and journalist Gabriel Sherman reveals how Trump came to possess ultra-insider information about Fox News and its founder, Roger Ailes, that could be damaging if it were ever to be made public.

It’s this leverage, Sherman writes, that has so far discouraged Fox News from launching an all-out war on Trump.

Below is an excerpt from Sherman’s piece:

It was also thanks to some information he had gathered that Trump was able to do something that no other Republican has done before: take on Fox News. An odd bit of coincidence had given him a card to play against Fox founder Roger Ailes. In 2014, I published a biography of Ailes, which upset the famously paranoid executive. Several months before it landed in stores, Ailes fired his longtime PR adviser Brian Lewis, accusing him of being a source. During Lewis’s severance negotiations, Lewis hired Judd Burstein, a powerhouse litigator, and claimed he had “bombs” that would destroy Ailes and Fox News. That’s when Trump got involved.

“When Roger was having problems, he didn’t call 97 people, he called me,” Trump said. Burstein, it turned out, had worked for Trump briefly in the ’90s, and Ailes asked Trump to mediate. Trump ran the negotiations out of his office at Trump Tower. “Roger [Ailes] had lawyers, very expensive lawyers, and they couldn’t do anything. I solved the problem.” Fox paid Lewis millions to go away quietly, and Trump, I’m told, learned everything Lewis had planned to leak. If Ailes ever truly went to war against Trump, Trump would have the arsenal to launch a retaliatory strike.

Sherman’s reporting may also help to explain why Trump was so willing to drop out of a major Fox News debate in Iowa in January, a decision that might have hobbled the campaign of a typical GOP candidate.

In March, Trump participated in a Fox News debate in Detroit, where he flagrantly violated the debate rules by consulting with his campaign manager during a commercial break. Fox did not penalize the Trump campaign.

A spokeswoman for the Trump campaign declined to comment on Sherman’s report.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/...b083f5c607fedd

Not sure how something like this (that may even have a confidentiality clause for the mediator) would help Trumps' campaign.

I think the value of the story is that of all the people in the world to call for help in solving a business problem, Roger Ailes called Trump for help and Trump helped him. This is the true narrative on Trump. He's always there to help a friend. He's loyal and fair. He helps all types of people. He helped Nikki Haley with contributions, and she opposes him. He helped Mitt Romney with an endorsement and donations, and Mitt turns on him. He's helped all types of people. We hear about someone he's helped every week or so, from the family who was about to lose their family farm, to the couple who stopped and helped him when his car broke down, to a former Miss Wisconsin, to Jim Herman who just won the Shell Open, to so many others.

Donald Trump is a great person who helps people, even people like Roger Ailes.