Remember when FOX News decided it didn’t need to cover TFG anymore? Here’s a reminder:

According to four Trump aides who spoke with Semafor, the former president is now facing an unofficial ban at Fox News, with the network refusing to book him or even talk much about him in the context of the Republican presidential primary. “It’s certainly — however you want to say, quiet ban, soft ban, whatever it is — indicative of how the Murdochs feel about Trump in this particular moment,” said one aide. Another said they’ve heard directly from people at Fox News that the policy exists.

While the network did not respond to a request for comment, the approach is playing out on television: Trump hasn’t been on Fox News since September, when its hosts rallied around him in the wake of the Mar-a-Lago raid and he told Sean Hannity that he could declassify documents by “thinking about it.”

Uh huh.

And remember all the trash talking FOX hosts did about TFG in private, saying he was crazy and awful and that they were never, ever, ever getting back together? And since then, Fox had become a Ron Desantis cheerleader, propping him and constantly having him on air?

And then today, this:

Trump making his return to Fox News with a Hannity interview on Monday, per release from the network, amid a possible indictment as early as tomorrow

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) March 23, 2023

There’s no real mystery here.  FOX needs TFG for ratings especially as the true believers moved to other alternative news outlets. Newsmax returning to DirecTv probably played a role, too. Trump onscren means eyeballs, and eyeballs mean money. Rupert Murdoch himself said it’s all about the green. And FOX is going to need a lot of green to pay Dominion.

With TFG moving ever closer to reaping the harvest of accountability for his criminal behavior, he needs cash and Newsmax and online wingnut talk shows aren’t going to cut it. There were reports that he raised $1.5 million in 3 days after his tweet lie about being indicted, and you have to think that money was an incentive for him as well.

It’s so sweet when couples are in such harmony, isn’t it?

All of this just continues to underscore the most important part of all of this:  it’s all a big joke to these extremists. Nothing they say matters. Unless they are under oath, they say stuff they don’t actually believe all the time.

And it’s not just about the money; it’s also about power. Sean Hannity was called TFG’s shadow chief of staff and it’s no coincidence that they are working together again. TFG is desperate to get back into the White House so he can make a bunch of his legal woes go away, and polling shows him definitively beating Desantis for the nomination.

I don’t think that is likely to change because if anyone were going to beat TFG, their best shot would be after he’s been politically wounded. Desantis has peaked way too early, and by going back to FOX, TFG can clear his own path to the nomination.

It’s all so depressing.

Taylor can take it from here.