President Donald Trump called into Fox News during its election night coverage and told anchor Bret Baier that his network ought to hire a better pollster. Baier had asked whether Trump regretted backing Ken Paxton in Texas. Within minutes, the president had taken a swipe at Baier personally and accused Fox of giving viewers a false impression of his standing with Republicans.
Baier and Martha MacCallum were anchoring Fox’s midterm coverage when Trump joined them by phone after midnight Eastern time on November 4th. Republicans were losing congressional races, and Baier wanted to know whether the president would accept the outcome. “Yeah, sure, I’ll accept them,” Trump answered. Baier then raised the question of “candidate quality,” asking the president to look back at the choices he had made when Republicans were picking their nominees.
Trump started with Texas, where the Republican Senate runoff had come down to state Attorney General Ken Paxton and U.S. Sen. John Cornyn. “I had no choice. Ken Paxton was a good guy, and I just wasn’t a fan of Cornyn, you know. I just wasn’t a fan. I found him to be a disloyal guy,” Trump said. What he remembered about Cornyn, he added, was how the senator had treated him when it was less popular to support him.
In the exchange shared on X, Trump told Baier, “He was not a fan of mine when, you know, to be honest, when it wasn’t fashionable, he wasn’t there.” Then he turned the criticism on the man interviewing him. “Could say that about a lot of people. Could say that about you,” Trump said. Returning to the endorsement, he added, “I remember the other days, and I just felt I couldn’t endorse him.”
Trump challenged the picture Fox had presented of his popularity. He cited what he described as a CNN poll showing 99 percent approval among Republicans. In the segment Trump had played at rallies, CNN’s Harry Enten put Trump’s approval at 98 percent among MAGA Republicans, a subset of the party. “And then I read at Fox that I’m not popular,” Trump told Baier. “You know, I mean, the Fox polls are terrible. You ought to get yourself a good pollster because your pollsters are the worst.”
Baier pushed back with the returns coming in that night. “But tonight, actually, the results are pretty close to what the Fox polls showed,” he said. Trump disputed that assessment and steered the conversation back to Fox’s polling about him personally. “I can just tell you about speaking for myself. And the results with Fox with me were wrong for 12 years. I mean, they’ve gotten me wrong for 12 years.”
Watch Trump and Baier go back and forth over Fox’s polling here:
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— Ryan Fournier (@RyanAFournier) November 4, 2026
Trump had already spent part of election night taking issue with Fox’s choice of guests. As we reported, he singled out former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio after the Democrat appeared on the network. “FoxNews bears responsibility for these losses by constantly and consistently putting on the Dumocrat opposition, and worse,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. Earlier in the evening, he had objected to Fox putting Democratic commentator Jessica Tarlov on the air.
Baier closed the exchange by returning to the question he had put to Trump before the discussion of Paxton and the polls. This time, he also asked whether the president would work with Democrats once the votes were in. “I would do that,” Trump replied. “Yeah, I think, and the Democrats want to work with me. Yeah.”
Featured image credit: screengrab from the embedded video.