Say what you will about Bill O’Reilly, but his brand of conservative populism provided the foundation upon which Fox News was built, and in many ways anticipated and helped shape the views and resentments that lifted Donald Trump into the White House.
Given that, O’Reilly might be one of the best weathervanes to understand which way the winds are blowing in the MAGA movement, amid feuds among media figures — many of whom directly or near-directly inherited O’Reilly’s mantle — split on issues like Iran, Ukraine, immigration policy, and most recently, those Jeffrey Epstein files, or lack thereof.
“It’s just anarchy across the board,” O’Reilly told TheWrap in an exclusive interview Tuesday, speaking of the right-wing coalition. “You have varying degrees of conservative people. You have the crazy, conservative nuts, racist loons, nationalists. Then you have the fiscal responsibility people. It’s all over the place. And that frustrates Trump.”
As to why Trump has chosen to downplay the inquiry regarding Epstein, a one-time friend, financier and child sex offender who died by suicide while awaiting trial for sex trafficking, O’Reilly deflected, calling it “a mystery.”
“The people that I talk to don’t really know why he’s so defensive about this,” he told TheWrap.
O’Reilly characteristically reserved his harshest critiques for the mainstream press in our wide-ranging conversation, which was completed over the course of two interviews. He claimed, for instance, that liberal media has “destroyed” itself by throwing away any pretense of objectivity due to its Trump hatred — and he foresees a major reckoning for all media once Trump is out of the picture, arguing that focusing on rifts among conservative voices overlooks how those personalities market themselves.
Trump is a unique phenomenon. Without him, everything changes again.
Trump has long argued that he represents a ratings gift to the mainstream media, and O’Reilly concurred. Yet he expanded that critique to entities on the right, like Fox News, predicting a “revolution” when Trump exits the spotlight.
“If Donald Trump disappeared tomorrow, some alien got him and took him away, how do you think Fox is going to do? The network’s built around him,” O’Reilly said. “In three-and-a-half years, there will be a total realignment of television news. Once he’s off the stage, the networks and cable will all have to recalibrate how they market themselves.
“Trump is a unique phenomenon. Without him, everything changes again.”
On the Epstein files
O’Reilly asserted his support for Trump’s stance not to release the “Epstein list” for which right-wing figures are clamoring, saying it’s unfair to attach names without “compelling, chargeable evidence.”
As it happened, O’Reilly was initially interviewed for this column right before the frenzy unleashed when the Justice Department announced it wouldn’t release additional files related to Epstein. That move spectacularly backfired, causing fury within the MAGA movement while prompting media figures who normally toe the Trump line to blast the administration, if less so the president directly.
During a testy July 14 exchange with NewsNation’s Leland Vittert, O’Reilly dismissed the Epstein story as a “curiosity,” arguing that “the media would run wild” with any names released and potentially “destroy” anyone who might have crossed Epstein’s path. That said, he conceded Trump is “hurting himself” with his resistance to providing more details and the “tabloid wave” stemming from it, “and I just wonder if there’s anybody in the administration that is telling him that.”
Trump’s detractors have plenty of theories, including his well-documented relationship with Epstein, though O’Reilly rejected the notion that anything harmful to Republicans might be in the government’s possession, given the long time the Epstein material spent within the custody of Democrats.
In comments that would surely provoke snickers from liberals accustomed to “Democrats in disarray” headlines, O’Reilly also insisted the political right is less cohesive than the left in seeking to explain the eruption among Trump loyalists on this issue.
Based on his conversations with Trump, O’Reilly concluded, “He’s very interested in his legacy, but I don’t believe that he feels this rises to that level.”
O’Reilly’s reach
Once cable’s ratings kingpin, O’Reilly still makes his voice amply heard via radio and his “No Spin News.” He boasts access to Trump and generally shares his views, which includes accepting the president’s rationale for not releasing the Epstein files strictly to silence the criticism.
Without providing hard figures, O’Reilly notes that his current operation — which charges $6.95 a month for premium members — employs 60 people as a sign of its prosperity.
O’Reilly held forth on a variety of topics, among them a relationship with Trump that goes back 35 years, and the observation that the president appears to have honed his migration into politics by internalizing lessons gleaned from watching O’Reilly’s show and blunt, tough-talking style, which appealed to many of the same people who became Trump’s loyal base.
Whatever Trump learned from O’Reilly, the host sees the president as a uniquely charismatic and media savvy figure in the political world, someone who “knows how to deliver a message, and understands that you have to keep it interesting at all times.” In the spirit of keeping things interesting, O’Reilly offered thoughts on several recent media issues.
The MAGA media meltdown
Even before the Epstein fallout, many of Trump’s high-profile supporters recently found themselves at odds — from Tucker Carlson feuding with Fox News’ Mark Levin and podcaster Ben Shapiro over whether the U.S. should join Israel in attacking Iran to Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal editorial page and New York Post contradicting Murdoch’s Fox network.
Nothing has highlighted those divisions more than the recent Epstein debate, yielding rare blowback toward the administration that Trump has struggled to quell. On Tuesday, Fox News host Laura Ingraham blamed the tumult on “conservative influencers eating their own.”
“The fissures within MAGA world are becoming clear,” MSNBC’s Alicia Menendez recently observed. “They do seem more willing to articulate where the points of differential are.”
To O’Reilly, though, conflict sells. As a consequence, he saw little downside in pundit-on-pundit disputes, saying of skirmishes like the Carlson-Levin divide over attacking Iran, “Levin’s not putting his finger up to the air. If it clashes with Carlson, as he has recently, they both win. There’s no loser in that for those guys.”
Perhaps not, but the notion exists that many conservative influencers and intellectuals are essentially piggybacking on Trump’s cult of personality for fun and profit.
As The Atlantic’s Yair Rosenberg put it, “The thought leaders of the Trump movement are merely political entrepreneurs trying to appropriate the president for their own purposes.” If there are disagreements, he noted, it’s because Trumpism ultimately boils down to “whatever Trump says it is.”
Fox’s strength, and failings
Although O’Reilly spends most of his time deriding the traditional press, he’s not above taking conservative outlets to task. Let go by Fox in 2017, his imprint on the network can still be seen, having nurtured such talent as Jesse Watters, who started as a comic-relief ambush producer on “The O’Reilly Factor” and now occupies his former boss’ old time slot.
While lauding the superiority of Fox’s talent relative to its cable-news channels, O’Reilly said the network erred with coverage of the 2020 election that led to its $787.5 million settlement with Dominion voting systems, maintaining he would have been able to curb those excesses had he still been around.
“That would have never happened if I was there,” he said. “There’s no proof of fraud in that election. And we lost a lot of premium members when I said that.”
Paramount’s “60 Minutes” settlement
Addressing another politically fraught media litigation, O’Reilly also made recent headlines by agreeing that Paramount Global settled with Trump over his “60 Minutes” lawsuit to grease the wheels for its merger with Skydance Media.
Granted, O’Reilly contends“60 Minutes” was clearly pulling for Kamala Harris and that correspondent Scott Pelley (who didn’t conduct the Harris interview) “hates” Trump.
He also balked at characterizing Trump’s demands as a “a shakedown,” as former “60 Minutes” correspondent Steve Kroft recently described it on “The Daily Show.” But he added, “What I do know is this: CBS probably would have won the case had it come to a jury trial,” describing Paramount’s reasoning regarding the merger as follows: “If we settle, he won’t hold it up. So we’ll settle, right? That’s what it is.”
The Mamdani factor
Given the time he spends bashing liberals, perhaps the biggest surprise was hearing O’Reilly dismiss New York Democratic mayoral primary winner Zohran Mamdani’s candidacy as much ado about nothing. Fox’s reams of coverage sounding alarms about the prospect of a Democratic Socialist leading the U.S.’ largest city would certainly suggest otherwise.
While Mamdani has seemingly become a poster child for the conservative stereotype of big blue cities — drawing fire from Trump and his media acolytes — O’Reilly’s response amounted to a bemused shrug. “Nobody outside of New York cares about New York City,” he contended.
One suspects millions of Americans and more than a few producers and executives at his former network disagree, but O’Reilly has a history of making such pronouncements, and it’s gotten him this far.
After decades under the security of a corporate umbrella, O’Reilly has joined the ocean of voices (including several Fox alumni) seeking attention on the outside. To hear him tell it, he finds the water just fine, expressing respect for “the mavericks who go out and forge their own way in the wild west of the internet,” as long as they’re not “dishonest.”
“So I don’t agree with a lot of these guys, but that’s fine,” O’Reilly said. “They got their point of view, and I have mine, and that’s that.”
