The Lou Dobbs era at Fox News has ended.
On Friday night, it was announced that the ultra-sycophantic Trump supporter’s Fox Business show had been canceled, and that he would not appear on any Fox News Media programming again. The cancellation comes just a day after voting software company Smartmatic filed a $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News and three of the network’s hosts, including Dobbs. Smartmatic alleges that its business has been irretrievably damaged by the baseless voter fraud conspiracies and disinformation that Dobbs and others amplified about the company on-air.
Fox has vowed to fight the lawsuit. “We are proud of our 2020 election coverage and will vigorously defend against this meritless lawsuit in court,” the network said in a statement.
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The network maintains that the cancellation is not related to the multi-billion dollar suit and is instead the end result of ongoing discussions regarding programming changes across the company’s properties. Over at Fox Business, for example, the network recently hired former Trump White House adviser Larry Kudlow to host a new weekday afternoon show.
“As we said in October, Fox News Media regularly considers programming changes and plans have been in place to launch new formats as appropriate post-election, including on Fox Business,” a Fox spokesperson said in a statement. “This is part of those planned changes. A new 5 p.m. program will be announced in the near future.”
Regardless of whether Dobbs getting the boot is related to his penchant for conspiracy-peddling, we here at The Daily Beast wanted to commemorate this moment with a look at some of his most unhinged and obsequious moments.
Dobbs Praises Trump for Weekends
Throughout former President Donald Trump’s tenure, nobody—not even at Fox—could top Dobbs when it came to heaping praise upon the 45th president. Perhaps the best example of this occurred in Sept. 2019, when Dobbs ended a Friday broadcast with a “Dear Leader” signoff that would have made the North Korean Pink Lady blush.
“Have a great weekend,” Dobbs beamed, adding: “The president makes such a thing possible for us all.”
Dobbs literally crediting Trump for inventing weekends came just days after he attempted to refute reports of turmoil and in-fighting at the Trump administration, gleefully exclaiming: “There’s sunshine beaming throughout the place, and on almost every face. It’s winner central at the White House and the president is at the top of his game.”
(To be fair, on very rare occasions, Dobbs did find it in him to mildly criticize Trump. But mostly for things like not being anti-immigrant enough for the xenophobic host.)
“We Have a Devil of a Time Finding Actual Proof”
As stated above, Fox is currently in legal hot water partly because of Dobbs’ insistence on pushing the “Big Lie” that the presidential election was “stolen” from Trump. Weeks after Fox forced Dobbs to run a stunning fact-check on-air debunking the lies he’d made about voting machines defrauding the election, the Fox Business host wouldn’t let go the hope that Trump could still overturn the election. Sadly, he said, the lack of evidence of any actual fraud was getting in the way.
“We’re eight weeks from the election, and we still don’t have verifiable, tangible support for the crimes that everyone knows were committed — that is, defrauding other citizens who voted with fraudulent votes,” he grumbled. “We know that’s the case in Nevada, we know it’s the case in Pennsylvania and a number of other states, but we have had a devil of a time finding actual proof. Why?”
Two days later, thousands of MAGA supporters incited by Trump violently stormed the U.S. Capitol in an effort to prevent Congress from certifying President Joe Biden’s election victory.
Bill Barr Is Part of the ‘Deep State’
There was one rule above all with Dobbs: If you don’t have Trump’s back 100 percent of the time, you are the enemy.
Weeks after Trump’s decisive election loss, and after dozens of his futile election challenges had been laughed out of court, then Attorney General Bill Barr publicly said the Justice Department had found no evidence of widespread voter fraud that could change the election results. This, as you could imagine, did NOT sit well with Dobbs, who immediately accused Trump’s attorney general of being part of the “Deep State.”
“For the attorney general of the United States to make that statement, he is either a liar or a fool or both,” he further exclaimed. “He may be, um, perhaps compromised. He may be simply unprincipled. Or he may be personally distraught or ill!”
Dobbs’ Anti-Semitic Attacks on George Soros
Throughout his time at Fox, Dobbs and his guests regularly took aim at liberal philanthropist George Soros with barely veiled anti-Semitic tropes and outright bigotry. In 2018, for instance, the network banned Judicial Watch’s Chris Farrell from its airwaves after he told Dobbs that migrant caravans from Central America were funded by the “Soros-occupied State Department.”
Trumpist attorney Joe diGenova also found himself persona non grata at Fox over comments he made about Soros on Dobbs’ show in Nov. 2019, accusing the Jewish financier of controlling “a very large part of the career foreign service of the United States State Department.”
Dobbs himself, meanwhile, employed the insidious “puppet masters” and “tentacles” tropes to smear Soros in Sept. 2019, drawing the ire of the Anti-Defamation League.
“To see his tentacles reach out into various non-government organizations and nonprofits that are working with everything from the Koch Brothers to the Southern Poverty Law Center,” Dobbs sneered. “It is stunning to see how pervasive and how successful he has been with his strategy.”
Dobbs Warns There Will Not Be a ‘Quiet Surrender’
In a moment that seems chilling in retrospect, the Trump sycophant raised the temperature to a near boiling point last December as he continued to demand that Biden’s free and fair election, which the president won by over 7 million votes, be tossed aside so Trump could stay in office.
“This is fraud, this is a politically corrupt Justice Department in Washington, D.C., a politically corrupt FBI, and I don’t know whether he’s a dullard, a fool or a liar, but the attorney general of this country is not enforcing the law,” Dobbs seethed on Dec. 2. “And I don't know what he thinks he’s presiding over, but it will not, I guarantee William Barr this, it will not be a quiet surrender of this constitutional republic. Not in Michigan, not anywhere in this country!”
Many Trump supporters did not quietly surrender the election a month later.
Dobbs Trashes Own Network to Side With Trump
In Dobbs’ eyes, all that mattered was Trump. Nothing else. Not even the company that signed his paychecks and gave him airtime.
After Fox News corroborated The Atlantic’s reporting last summer about Trump denigrating fallen military heroes by calling them “losers” and “suckers,” Dobbs blasted the network while siding with the then-president.
“And the Washington Post, CNN, even Fox News claimed to have corroborated parts of the report, despite every news organization having not a single named source, nor any evidence whatsoever,” he growled. “What those unnamed sources did claim doesn’t stand up against the 21 Trump administration officials who are now on the record refuting the Atlantic’s horrible, horrible lies.”
And it would appear that Trump, at the very least, was extremely grateful for all the fawning praise and subservient bootlicking Dobbs gave him over the years. After word of Dobbs’ cancellation hit, Trump released a statement applauding his most loyal toady.
“Lou Dobbs is and was great. Nobody loves America more than Lou. He had a large and loyal following that will be watching closely for his next move, and that following includes me,” Trump said on Friday night.
