It’s rollout week at Fox News. On Tuesday, the network announced that hosts Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum will moderate the first Republican primary debate of the 2024 cycle on Aug. 23 in Milwaukee. The Republican National Committee had announced in April that the network would have exclusive rights to the debate, a key event in what’s known in political circles as the “Fox News primary.”

Perhaps to give the audience a taste of what’s to come, Fox News started the week by airing a two-part Baier interview with Donald Trump that touched on the former president’s indictment over classified documents, his rocky record on retaining high-quality talent and much more. In key moments, Baier’s interviewing put Trump on his heels, forcing him to formulate slipshod excuses for his conduct.

Which is to say: Baier appears to be ready for 2024. His performance drew praise from all over — conservatives who’ve grown skeptical of Trump as well as media types who appreciate an honest-to-goodness grilling. This impressive start, however, cannot eclipse the memory of the network’s coverage of the last presidential election, which ranks up there with the greatest journalistic frauds of all time.

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Fox News tacitly admitted as much in April, when it paid $787.5 million to settle a defamation lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems. Discovery materials in that case — depositions, texts, emails, etc. — showed that Fox News knew that Trump’s claims of a stolen election were baseless, yet they repeatedly promoted those claims, along with the conspiracy theory that Dominion was in on the whole thing.

Host Maria Bartiromo messaged former White House aide Stephen K. Bannon days after Biden was declared the winner: “I want to see massive fraud exposed. Will he [Trump] be able to turn this around. I told my team we are not allowed to say pres elect at [all].” Bartiromo was just one of a squadron of Fox News hosts and executives who were exposed betraying journalism in the Dominion documents.

This was a mass act of corrupt obeisance to a serial liar — and now that same outfit is playing a leading role in winnowing the GOP primary field. No discussion of Fox News’s role in the debates should exclude the lessons of Dominion.

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Baier was not among the Fox News personalities who indulged the election lies. That doesn’t mean, however, that the anchor emerged from the 2020 election unscathed. On election night, Fox News stirred an enduring controversy by being the first to call Arizona for Democratic nominee Joe Biden. That was the work of the vaunted Fox News decision desk, a place where data, and not political agendas, drove the calls. The Fox News base — as well as key figures in Trumpworld — responded to the Arizona call with fury.

As journalists Peter Baker and Susan Glasser reported in their book “The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021,” Baier complained to a Fox News executive just after the election that Trump-fan backlash against Fox News was making for an “uncomfortable” situation. “It’s hurting us. The sooner we pull it — even if it gives us major egg — and we put it back in his column the better we are in my opinion,” he wrote in an internal message, referring to the possible blowback (“egg” on the face of the network).

The trouble was that Arizona was never in Trump’s column. While Fox News and the Associated Press called it for Biden on election night, other networks kept it in a too-close-to-call holding pattern for days after the polls closed. In a written exchange with then-host Tucker Carlson, Baier expressed concern about the prospect that the network would be early to call Nevada — and the entire presidential race — for Biden. “We have been pushing for answers. I have pressed them to slow. And I think they will slow walk Nevada.”

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Those are the words of a careerist, not a journalist.

When faced with questions about Baier’s anti-journalistic activism, the network has responded with a statement saying, “Fox News stood by the Arizona call despite intense scrutiny. Given the extremely narrow 0.3% margin and a new projection mechanism that no other network had, it’s hardly surprising there would be postmortem discussions surrounding the call and how it was executed, no matter the candidates.”

Through a Fox News spokesperson, Baier said, “We were out on a limb. Arizona was never IN Trump’s column. I was talking about putting the state back into the category of other UNCALLED states that he could still win … where every other network was. Everyone on that email knew what I was talking about despite the poor phrasing in the quickly drafted email.”

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Does Baier’s dubious post-election conduct mean he can’t hold Trump accountable? If this week’s interview is any indication, he most certainly can. Among the coups that Baier scored was an admission by Trump of his own involvement in retaining boxes of documents: “But before I send boxes over, I have to take all of my things out,” the former president told Baier. “These boxes were interspersed with all sorts of things, golf shirts, clothing, pants, shoes, there were many things.” That’s a potentially incriminating disclosure, and one that involves laundry, to boot.

Even better was a blockbuster question in which Baier cited about a dozen examples of aides and appointees with whom Trump had fallen out. For example: “You called your first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, dumb as a rock, and your first defense secretary, James Mattis, the world’s most overrated general. You called your White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany milquetoast. And, multiple times, you have referred to your transportation secretary, Elaine Chao, as ‘Mitch McConnell’s China-loving wife.’ So, why did you hire all of them in the first place?”

It was a shimmering example of a case-building inquiry. Trump fumbled the response, insisting that he hired “fantastic” people and then veering toward talking points. “We had a great economy. We had phenomenal people in charge of the economy,” he said.

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It all goes to show: Baier can one day take leave of journalistic principles, yet deploy them to glorious effect on another. Fox News has capitalized on this dynamic over the years, depressing expectations with daily propaganda, fact-challenged news segments and general silliness. And then, when a guy such as Baier (or, more commonly, his former colleague Chris Wallace, now with CNN) does something in the public interest, people applaud: Hey, look, Fox News did some journalism.

What we learned from Baier’s interview with Trump this week is that in a nonelection year, when the network needs to strut a sense of evenhandedness, it can pull off a meaningful interview. But leaked documents and the Dominion materials showed what happened when the pressure was on: Fox News behaved like Fox News.

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