Morning TV Hosts on Fox and MSNBC Digest Trump Victory

The tone was triumphant early Wednesday morning on “Fox and Friends,” in the hours after the Fox News network called the presidential race for Donald J. Trump. Ainsley Earhardt, one of the show’s hosts, declared: “This is the end of the legacy media,” claiming that other news outlets had tried to tell Americans how to vote and had failed. “Middle America loves God, they love country, they don’t want a handout,” she said. “They want to work hard and have their dollar go as far as it did four years ago.” Bill Melugin, a Fox News correspondent, reporting from a celebration held by Mr. Trump, said that his “phone was blowing up last night” with messages from immigration officers and border patrol agents who were “locked and loaded and ready to go.” The show also checked in with joyful Trump voters at a pancake house in Maggie Valley, N.C., and a restaurant in Tyrone, Penn., where voters praised Mr. Trump’s authenticity. One said that she believed a Trump presidency would have sent resources more quickly to the state after Hurricane Helene. Another said he planned to celebrate by watching the daytime talk show “The View” on ABC, and presumably gloating over the downbeat reactions of the hosts. A much more somber set on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” began a postmortem of Vice President Kamala Harris’s failed run. The NBC News Decision Desk had made their race call at 5:31 a.m. “It’s time for the Democrats to take a good, long hard look at how this happened,” the host Joe Scarborough said. “And if they just say ‘Trump bad, Democrats virtuous,’ they’re going to keep losing.” The Rev. Al Sharpton said there had been disbelief and shock at Ms. Harris’s watch party at Howard University’s campus in Washington, D.C., as a Trump victory became apparent. Attendees had been told to go home shortly before 1 a.m., and Ms. Harris has yet to make a public address. “There was a lot of race bias in this, there was a lot of gender bias in this, and I think that we thought that a lot of voters were more progressive in those areas than they were,” Mr. Sharpton said. He added: “The problem that I see is not Trump. The problem I see is people that can be appealed to in this way, and we’ve got to bring this country together.” Former Senator Claire McCaskill, a Missouri Democrat, said: “I think we have to acknowledge that Donald Trump knows our country better than we do.” Katie Robertson covers the media industry for The Times. Email: katie.robertson@nytimes.com More about Katie Robertson Sapna Maheshwari reports on TikTok, technology and emerging media companies. She has been a business reporter for more than a decade. Contact her at sapna@nytimes.com. More about Sapna Maheshwari 2024 Elections: News, Polls and Analysis, Fox Entertainment Group, Inc., NBC Universal, Kamala Harris, Donald Trump