CLEVELAND—“I think it’s more surprising that Roger Ailes is leaving Fox than that Donald Trump is the GOP nominee,” said Republican political strategist Mark McKinnon as he stood on the convention floor at the Quicken Loans Arena on Wednesday morning.
McKinnon was there to film an episode of The Circus, his Showtime series about the 2016 election cycle. McKinnon’s co-star on the show, Bloomberg Politics’ John Heilemann, stood nearby, and I asked him whether he thought Fox’s headline talent—hosts like Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity—would abandon the network out of solidarity with Ailes. Heilemann thought not and, by way of explanation, rubbed the fingers of one hand together in the universal signal for “moolah.”
Outside the arena, pizza mogul and former GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain wasn’t ready to give in. “You’re asking questions, but we don’t have the facts yet,” Cain said when I asked him whether he had any reaction to the Ailes news. Affirming that Ailes was a friend of his, he reiterated, “Let’s wait for the facts.”
Earlier this month, former Fox News anchor Gretchen Carlson sued Ailes, alleging that the Fox News chairman is a serial sexual harasser who among other things told her, during a meeting last fall, “I think you and I should have had a sexual relationship a long time ago and then you’d be good and better and I’d be good and better.” Since the suit was filed, more women have come forward with their own allegations of sexual harassment, and the network’s biggest star, Megyn Kelly, has reportedly told investigators that Ailes made unwanted sexual advances toward her a decade ago. Ailes is now negotiating the terms of his ouster.
There is no more awkward time for a politico to fall from grace than during a party convention. Just ask Dick Morris. In 1996, Morris—then President Clinton’s chief campaign adviser—resigned during the Democratic Party’s convention in Chicago, amid reports that he’d cheated on his wife with a sex worker. Morris created a doozy of a distraction on the day his boss was to deliver the capstone convention speech.
But Ailes means exponentially more to the Republican Party than Morris ever meant to Democrats. I decided to gauge how Ailes’ ouster was going over in the hallways and plazas of the RNC.
Some attendees weren’t aware of the matter. Some declined to comment—including former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski. “I have no reaction,” said Lewandowski, when I buttonholed him on the arena concourse. “I don’t know him.”
Some folks quickly declared that, if Ailes did what he’s accused of, he should be fired. “If it’s true he should be out,” said one woman. “In the 21st century those things can’t happen,” said one man.
But others were reluctant to judge Ailes’ behavior.
“I know he has girls, or women, that work at Fox charging him with sexual harassment,” said a bearded man in a cowboy hat, standing in an outdoor area within the security perimeter that’s been dubbed Freedom Plaza. “I don’t know the details. Maybe he was just complimenting how they look that day and they took it as something else. In Texas, we treat women with respect, and we’re coming to a place where maybe they don’t like that, but they can let us know instead of trying to be litigious. We’re not litigious in Texas. … Say I was her husband, and my wife tells me Roger Ailes said those things. I’m going to go to her work and I’ll take care of it myself.”
“There’s more serious things happening in our country,” said a female Kansas delegate. “There’s Muslims coming here to try to kill us. I don’t need to know about someone’s sex life. Sometimes a man sees a woman and he just says things.”
Ailes has been brought low at the very moment his ideological legacy is being secured here in Cleveland. The Republican Party over which he long held sway is nominating for the presidency the embodiment of all that dyspeptic white grievance Ailes put on television. “Fox’s populist style didn’t look that much like the populism of the Goldwaterites or the religious right,” New York Times columnist Ross Douthat wrote on Wednesday. “But it did clearly resemble, and prepare the way for, the authoritarian and very New York populism of Donald Trump.”
How integral to the GOP was Ailes? Asked about the Ailes situation, one man in Cleveland replied, “We can’t comment about that, we’re working with the convention.”
“But Roger Ailes is at Fox News,” the man was reminded, “not the RNC.”
“They’re the same thing,” the man replied.
