Donald Trump has reignited his war with Fox News.
“Fox News has been treating me very unfairly & I have therefore decided that I won’t be doing any more Fox shows for the foreseeable future,” he wrote on Twitter.
Trump’s announcement came after a series of recent tweets criticizing the network’s coverage: “I am having a really hard time watching Fox News,” he had tweeted Monday. Trump also claimed that Fox’s “O’Reilly Factor” had been “very negative to me,” and suggested that his guests were all “Trump haters.”
Now the question is whether Trump will show up for his next scheduled appearance on Fox.
Bill O’Reilly said on “Jimmy Kimmel Live” earlier this week that Trump is booked as a guest on his Thursday night program.
Trump had previously threatened to boycott Fox News in the wake of the first Republican primary debate six weeks ago on the grounds that the network’s moderators — particularly Megyn Kelly — had been unfair to him. The two parties reached detente after Fox News Chairman and CEO Roger Ailes called Trump to assure him that he would be treated fairly.
But the truce was an exceedingly fragile one — and now it’s over.
Trump resumed his critique of Kelly on Monday night: “She is the worst – all anti-Trump!” Trump tweeted during her program. “Terrible show.”
Spokespeople from Trump’s office and Fox News did not immediately respond to requests for comment, and Trump has yet to specify exactly what he objects to in the network’s coverage.
On Wednesday, a Fox News source argued that Trump was antagonizing Fox in order to create controversy and draw attention to himself because of his decline in the polls.
For Fox News, the boycott means it will be cut off from the Trump ratings machine, which is proven to boost ratings for any network. By the same token, Trump will miss out on access to the millions of viewers who tune into Fox News every night for coverage of the 2016 race.
Trump, who gave a relatively subdued performance at the Sept. 16 GOP debate, is down 8 points in the latest CNN/ORC national poll. Meanwhile, rivals like Carly Fiorina and Ben Carson have been on the rise, and commanding more and more media attention.