Bret Baier Doesn’t Want To ‘Belabor’ Trump Criminal Charges: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly Fox Trump Interview

There was a lot to praise, criticize, and cringe at in Fox News anchor Bret Baier’s interview with ex-President Donald Trump.

Trump sat for an interview with Baier on Monday night’s edition of Fox News Channel’s Special Report, just days after trashing Fox News and dancing a figurative jig over their loss to MSNBC the week of his indictment.

It is no secret that I am not a huge Bret Baier fan. I am of the opinion that he is a poor substitute for Chris Wallace in the role of being the guy Fox News can point at and claim they have a real “hard journalist” working for them. I will say he’s better than most of who they have left, faint praise though that may be.

However, I am fair, and there are genuinely good things that happened in this interview.

The Good:

Baier did manage to push back when Trump made a false claim about President Joe Biden and the classified documents case being investigated by special counsel Robert Hur.

He also spent a decent chunk of time pressing Trump about the most recent developments in the growing tsunami of legal jeopardy against Trump. And he did not shy away from asking tough, if obvious, questions about the case. There was one blunt exchange during which Baier flatly asked him why didn’t you just give the documents back?

Which leads to probably the greatest good to come out of this interview, which is the fact that Trump, true to form, couldn’t help but run his mouth and implicate himself worse than he already has. Trump quite literally incriminates himself like it’s his job.

The rest of the interview provided slam-dunk opportunities for Baier to show his stuff — his almost apologetic corrections of Trump on the 2020 election did result in Baier being cornered into bluntly telling a relentless Trump that he lost the election. You can count that as good.

Baier also challenged Trump on all of the attacks he’s leveled against his own former aides, advisers, and cabinet members.

The Bad:

Setting aside the fact that Baier spent the first several questions on softballs straight from the mines of Trump-worshiping Fox News viewers…

Actually don’t set that aside. It’s tempting to excuse Baier because the news culture at Fox News and the things about Trump’s temperament that demanded this aren’t necessarily in his control, but he does control where he works.

But more concretely, Baier lead off the crucial part of the interview by failing to challenge Trump when he asserted that Biden had him arrested, or more to the point, that he was arrested by Biden.

Then, even when he stepped in to defend Biden, Baier got his facts wrong:

TRUMP: Oh, I’m sure. I’m sure — I’m sure you will see real super sensitive that Biden has, because Biden has far more than anybody’s ever kept.

BAIER: And he turned them over when asked.

TRUMP: No, he didn’t.

BAIER: But — that’s what he says.

Biden did not, in fact, give back the documents when asked. His representatives were the ones who discovered and reported the documents and turned them over, and subsequently invited the FBI to conduct searches for other documents, which turned up a small number of documents that were immediately handed over.

And that’s not just “what he says,” it’s what all of the reporting on this case indicates.

He didn’t challenge Trump on a host of other falsehoods, including the 1,850 boxes that were donated to the University of Delaware, several key facts about the timeline and specifics of the Mar-A-Lago raid, his assertions about the law, and even the accusation that the FBI planted evidence.

Now I am somewhat sympathetic to the argument that an interviewer can’t spend all of their time fact-checking everything a prodigious liar like Trump says, but notwithstanding Baier’s sporadic acknowledgment that these misstatements are at least in dispute, the more egregious ones do in fact demand some sort of refutation.

The Ugly:

Baier’s lapses were undergirded by an omnipresent apologeticness. On more than one occasion, he felt compelled to say he didn’t want to “belabor” or “dwell on” the criminal charges Trump faces, and in which he keeps incriminating himself.

He also set the tone by opening with a pair of softball questions, the first of which he couched with an excuse that sounded pretty decent:

BAIER: You know, I have asked this question, the same first question to all the candidates I have interviewed this year, and that is this: What do you think is the most important issue facing the country right now?

But none of Baier’s other interviews were with accused criminals facing life sentences.

Even if you give Baier a pass on that unearned normalization, there’s no real excuse for the second softball, just days after Trump was arrested:

BAIER: We asked viewers to send in questions on social media. We had a ton of responses.

Here’s one of them. Erica tweets this: “What is the first thing you will do to turn this country around if you get elected?”

If you’re not sure whether both of these questions could have waited, ask yourself how many other journalists, on the day that Hunter Biden cops a plea deal for three federal charges, would have led off with anything remotely similar to this? Would Bret Baier have ever moved on from the topic? Would Jake Tapper have said “I’m not going to belabor this?”

In the final analysis, though, it is tough to grade this interview because you have to evaluate it on a number of levels. Baier’s errors are fundamental and serious, and should not be waved away because the net result is positive.

However, it is difficult to assess just how consequential Trump’s self-incriminating statements will be, self-incriminating statements that he could not have made had he been baited into walking out of the interview, which for the thin-skinned Trump would entail a very low bar for provocation.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.