With President Donald Trump seemingly on the precipice of defeat, Fox News host Greg Gutfeld on Wednesday afternoon appeared to enter both the bargaining and acceptance stages of grief, resigning himself to the president’s fate by suggesting Trump should run again in 2024.
Prior to Wednesday’s broadcast of The Five, the network called Michigan for Biden following a huge count of heavily Democratic mail-in votes, leaving the ex-veep only six electoral votes shy of clinching the White House, per the Fox News Decision Desk projections.
Throughout the broadcast, Gutfeld and fellow pro-Trump host Jesse Watters openly questioned their own network’s previous evening decision to call Arizona for Biden, repeatedly gaming out a Trump path to 270 that included the Grand Canyon State—despite his network’s own decision on the state. (As of Wednesday evening, AP and Fox were still the only two outlets to have called Arizona for Biden. Most other outlets still considered it too close to call.)
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Gutfeld, meanwhile, more subtly criticized the Fox News Decision Desk for making the Arizona call that had enraged Team Trump. “This isn’t about networks. it’s about an election,” he grumbled. “So this race to be first and getting the greatest ratings is awesome, but at what expense?”
Later in the show, however, Gutfeld appeared to accept that Biden might very well be victorious, entering the acceptance stage of grief in real-time to game out the ways in which a Trump loss could be beneficial.
“I’m generally very optimistic,” he said. “You have to take the long view. The Senate will keep Joe in check.”
After Watters interjected to ask if he now assumed the ex-veep will win, Gutfeld pointed to the electoral vote total to say Biden was in a “good position.” And then: “But even more interesting, if you think Trump is going away, this is just a second act,” the Fox host declared. “2020 is the second act. 2024 is the third act.”
Powering through the groans and laughter of his colleagues, Gutfeld continued: “Trump presidency was a first, Trump as an ex-president is another first. And that’s going to impact all of us in media, people who were on networks. We are going to have dueling presidents. He’s not going to fade away. He’s going to be campaigning, he’s going to be doing the rallies. He understands this country and how people feel. He is not not going away. And I think that the country is less divided than we think we are because he did great among minorities.”
