“This is a very sad day for all of us, irrespective of party, irrespective of affiliation,” Fox News host Jeanine Pirro said on the network’s 5 p.m. show. “We have seen the criminal justice weaponized to bring down a candidate for president and a former president.”
On her 7 p.m. show, Laura Ingraham called it “a disgraceful day for the United States, a day that America may never recover from,” while 9 p.m. host Sean Hannity called it “a conviction without a crime.”
Trump allies have long accused the Biden administration of covertly steering the criminal indictments facing the former president. On Thursday, Fox News host Greg Gutfeld called it a “conscious collusion of allies that came together with a private strategy to eliminate a common, shared adversary.” Hannity denounced New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan as a “far-left, partisan judge,” who “all but encouraged the prosecution to mislead the jury.”
Fellow host Jesse Watters put a more existential spin on things, casting himself as a combatant ready to avenge the convictions.
“I feel this cool resignation, this resoluteness that we’re wounded as a country and we’re not going to go down,” he said. “That we’re going to get back up, we’re going to regain our strength, and we’re going to vanquish the evil forces that are destroying this republic. … We will seek justice. We guarantee that.”
During the jury selection process, Watters called out what he claimed without evidence were “undercover liberal activists” trying to get on the panel. After the verdict, he called the jury “biased,” even as Trump lawyer Todd Blanche praised the panel’s conduct during a guest appearance on Watters’s show.
Pirro, a longtime friend of the Trump family, argued on-air that the verdict will “energize” the Republican nominee and his base. She deemed the prosecution a case of “election interference.”
Ingraham spoke darkly about the verdict’s significance. “If they can do this to someone like Donald Trump, with his means, it will be very difficult to ever turn this around,” she said. “Are we going to establish a precedent where the president can put his political opponent in jail? Because, if they can do this now, I promise you this will be the new normal.”
She and Watters tried to use the verdict to urge conservative viewers to mobilize for the election.
“Turn this dark day into a time to recommit yourself to saving America from these vindictive, far-left tyrants,” Ingraham said.
Echoing Trump, Hannity told viewers they “get to render the final verdict in this case” on Election Day, Nov. 5.
