Megyn Kelly came out as a strong supporter of Donald Trump in this year’s election, including speaking at a rally in support of the GOP candidate on Monday — but that doesn’t mean that she is always going to support the actions of Republicans. In an interview with TheWrap, the conservative host explained why she still calls out moments like Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally last week, criticizing its “brotastic” atmosphere and how its speakers turned off women on an episode of her “The Megyn Kelly Show.”
“Forgive me, but I’m nobody bitch,” Kelly said. “I’m just not. I’m still a skeptical reporter. And while I am absolutely supporting Trump in this election, that doesn’t mean that in doing my news analysis on my show, I need to be blindly loyal to Trump.”
“I have no deal with Trump,” she continued. “I’m not on Trump’s staff. I’m an independent journalist calling it like I see it. That may not be your cup of tea, and that’s totally fine — or if it is your cup of tea, I think you’re a grown-up to the point where you can understand she’s supporting Trump, but she’s not a sycophant. She’s still going to tell me what she thinks when Trump does well and when he does poorly, she’s going to call him out.”
Not blindly supporting Republicans
While Kelly has a clear point of view, which she’s open about on her show, she said that she won’t “run cover for Republicans.” Kelly pointed to an interview she did with Republican Senate candidate Tim Sheehy released Friday.
“It did not go well for him. At all,” Kelly said of the segment, in which Sheehy struggled to explain the story behind how he received a bullet wound in his arm. “We were doing what we always do after the show, deciding what clips we’re going to post. And I said, ‘Post that clip. Make sure you get that up there. People need to see that.’”
“We didn’t bury it,” Kelly added. “We posted it, we promoted it, and he’s getting a lot of blowback as a result. Would I do that if I were just in the ‘let’s get Republicans elected’ game? No, I wouldn’t.”
She also touted that she’d avoided the belief among Trump’s most ardent supporters that the 2020 election was stolen, saying that she “never got sucked into election denialism.”
“I kept saying, ‘Show me. Show me the facts. Show me the fraud case. Show me the evidence,’” Kelly explained. “They never did it … Now we’ve had four years for you just anecdotally to show it, just like put it out in a binder, and they haven’t done it.
“I realize I’m in the minority, at least on the right half of the country — they believe it was stolen,” Kelly added. “I stay factual, and if it hasn’t been proven, I don’t go there.”
She explained that she will speculate, but when there’s evidence that something is false, she tells the audience. Even when she knows her audience won’t like hearing it.
“Sometimes you’ll see, the numbers will take a hit for a day or two. People are mad at me,” Kelly said. It’s something she faced at Fox News too when she would, as she put it, “punch a Republican.”
“They always come back,” Kelly said.
Kelly underlined that she feels facts have to be behind the arguments she makes and the stories she shares on-air.
“If you stay factual, I think net-net, your audience appreciates it. They may not like it in the moment,” Kelly said. “You’re not whispering sweet nothings, but they respect you and then trust you. And most of them will like you. Some, it will be begrudging, but most will — it will be genuine.”
She also said that when she’s giving her opinion versus sharing facts, she’ll make that clear.
“But the facts, I’m not going to spin,” Kelly said.
Kelly compared what she does on-air to her pre-media background in law.
“I’m a lawyer at heart,” Kelly said, “and I still understand that when you go into court, you absolutely are rooting for one side and you’re getting paid to represent one side … But you must stay factual. You must have ongoing credibility with this court. You don’t sacrifice that for any one client, or your integrity.”
Throughout the interview, Kelly repeatedly asserted her role as an independent commentator who will continue to be open about what she sees, even if it doesn’t help the side she supports.
“I just, I will not sell my soul like that,” Kelly said. “I have made clear, and will continue to make clear publicly as often as I can, that I think Trump should win, and I think Kamala Harris should lose, and I think the media should stop lying about both of them. But that doesn’t make me a hack who will sell out facts and reality in order to help him or the GOP.”
It’s a view that she came to, despite her own famously contentious relationship with Trump and his direct insult of her when she moderated a primary debate ahead of the 2016 election and Trump called her “nasty” and later said she had “blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever,” which many took to be a deeply misogynist remark against the then-Fox News journalist.
A dim future for cable news
Kelly sees the future in independent digital creators like herself — as her old home in cable news dies, in her view. Given the way that interest in news spiked with Trump’s election in 2016, Kelly sees him coming back into office as the one last hope for the medium.
“If I were in cable, I’d be praying to God that Trump won — praying to God,” Kelly said. “Cable is a dying breed, 100%. I’m of the firm belief, it’s already been issued its death sentence.”
She added, “They should pray that Trump wins, because love him or hate him, he is a ratings magnet.”
Kelly expressed confidence in her show’s format going forward, no matter who is declared the winner of this year’s election — but knows that the chance to talk Trump helps.
“It’s almost a little unfair, because with Trump, you don’t have to work for it — and with Kamala, you do,” Kelly said. “But it’s going to be very hard for CNN to stay afloat if Kamala Harris wins.”
Along with the current decline of cable, she sees the holes in the economics of the broadcast networks.
“We’ll have to keep assessing that, because it’ll get to the point where the financial incoming doesn’t justify the financial outlay,” Kelly said.
She touted the online success of her show, which has six producers on its staff, to their competitors from the traditional broadcast media world. She pointed to her show’s channel beating the entire YouTube news channels of the three major broadcasters at points this year, including NBC during the Olympics. She also pointed to the show tallying two-thirds of CNN’s total YouTube viewership in the course of a month.
“That’s all of CNN versus us,” Kelly said. “Now you tell me whether that is a viable business model, because it’s not like their actual television numbers are strong. They’re not — they’re very weak. In fact, most people are doing better online than they are on their actual show ratings, in cable at least.”
Kelly also cited the fact that primetime newscasts aren’t receiving the audiences they once did, and the demographics they’re pulling are generally older than digital audiences. Those younger audiences are also what advertisers are looking for, Kelly pointed out.
“This is not a long term business model, what the cables and the nets are doing, and we’re only growing,” Kelly crowed. She also celebrated that, unlike many larger news organizations, she has yet to have to lay anyone off and has been hiring.
“You get a job on a show like this, you tend to be a little bit more entrepreneurial, you tend to be more independent, and you have the added benefit of being part of something special,” Kelly said. “That’s a middle finger to a system that sucks.”
Megyn Kelly’s media viewing habits
Kelly admitted that she isn’t someone who has a lot of interest in the mainstream media, but shared that there are journalists she still admires. Kelly specifically cited Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss and Tucker Carlson.
“And then there are some who I’m friends with, whose product I don’t consume,” Kelly said. “But it doesn’t mean I don’t like them, or wish them well, or respect that they have an important voice in the conversation. So I can delineate — and I can also delineate between reporters who are biased for the left, whose product I might not want to consume, and those who are just hacks.”
Kelly made her name as a Fox News host, earning her bonafides with the network’s overwhelmingly conservative audience, before making an ill-fated pivot to mainstream media working for NBC — and struggling to fit in.
“I think the news industry is completely different than when I was in [the mainstream media], on the other side,” Kelly said. “All I knew when I launched this show was that I could not work for another corporate overlord. Just, there was no world in which I could see myself going back to a place that could control me, what I said, how I covered the news. It felt totally inauthentic.”
She’s also chafed against evolving norms in public discourse, including referring to people as the gender they identify as.
“Look at me. Can you imagine me being forced to say the pronouns?” Kelly asked. “Absolutely not. It would be completely antithetical to everything I stand for. So I hadn’t yet crossed all these bridges exactly, but I just knew inherently I couldn’t do it.”
Her growing disdain for the way news outlets are run led to Kelly launching her show independently.
“I also couldn’t find the news director whose judgment I trust more than my own,” Kelly confidently explained. “So I recognized, after a lot of soul searching, going back into traditional media was not going to be an option for me, just given my values.”
It wasn’t a surefire success when she first launched her show, originally audio-only before adding video.
“I decided I needed to do this, and I understood that I might just have two listeners,” Kelly said. “But that felt more honest and authentic to who I am than selling out to go back on some show, just to see my face on the air.”
The evolution of her politics
When asked if her politics had shifted since her time working for Fox and NBC, Kelly said that’s something she’s continually tried to figure out herself.
“I’ve asked myself that many times,” Kelly said, adding that she identifies with independents, former Democrats and the center-left. “We all feel like the ground is shifted underneath our feet.”
She added that, when it comes to whether her overall view on the world has changed, “I genuinely don’t know.”
“I don’t really know where I’d put myself on the spectrum” of ideologies, Kelly said. “I remain non-ideological. I remain generally open to opinions and persuasion on a lot of issues.”
Issues that she’s most strongly come out against include trans women being allowed to play in women’s sports and minors being allowed to pursue gender confirmation surgery.
“We thought we were more socially liberal, maybe fiscally conservative, and then what it meant to be socially liberal went from supporting gay marriage to, you have to be pro-cutting off children’s body parts,” Kelly asserted. “You have to allow a boy to play against your daughter in rugby and beat the s–t out of her. Like, one day, we woke up and just found ourselves saying, ‘It’s a hard no.’”
Despite what most would identify as clearly conservative views, Kelly said that she doesn’t subscribe to a particular set of beliefs. She said that she has voted for Republicans in five presidential elections and Democrats in four — it was 4-4 before her vote for Trump this year. She expressed frustration with pressure she felt to support the Black Lives Matter movement, among other sociopolitical efforts.
While there has been little evidence that people have cost themselves their careers over maintaining their views, Kelly expressed her concern about that possibility, which she said she’d seen “happen to so many people.”
“It was radicalizing in my own experience of what we’re doing here, and it definitely fired me up to fight this nonsense in a way I would not have been,” Kelly said. “I was always very much a free speech advocate, even in my early days at Fox, but not to the extent I am now.”
A new kind of journalism for online media
Kelly said that she hopes she’s reinventing what it means to be a journalist in 2024, alongside other independent media creators such as Carlson, Ben Shapiro, Weiss and others. She pointed to Taibbi testifying before Congress last year and doing events with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
These kinds of activities wouldn’t be allowed in the journalism world 20 years ago, Kelly noted. “That would be frowned on. But it’s a different world thanks to the way we communicate now. I mean, some of the biggest names in journalism are communicating to their audiences digitally, whether it’s on Rumble, YouTube, podcast, radio, take your pick — and that relationship in all those forums is very open, authentic and transparent. And if it’s not, it doesn’t work.”
Kelly doesn’t see the online world as being particularly receptive to traditional journalism.
“You will fail if you try to do old school journalism in this forum,” Kelly said, “So it’s kind of led to a new hybrid where, yeah, you can be both journalist and pundit, and just be very open about whatever bias you may have. And share it with the audience, but still do good journalistic work.
“I hit people on the right, including Trump, who I’m voting for,” Kelly said. “I’m totally capable of doing that, because I really think the key is, the danger comes when you fall in love with a candidate or a party, that that’s where you’ve crossed over into some sort of serious trouble. Because how could you cover them objectively? How could you hit them on the air?
“I see our profession evolving into a place where you can be open about who you voted for and what your bias may be,” Kelly said, “and still be trusted to bring them the news and to not just be a hack who covers up bad facts for ‘your side,’ or runs cover for them every time.”
Kelly admitted that she had an advantage coming with a built-in audience from her history as a broadcaster, but said that isn’t necessary.
“Especially now with TikTok and Instagram, there are so many ways for people who are savvy enough to master those platforms to get their voice out there and develop a following,” Kelly said, citing right-wing commentator Tim Pool as someone who’s found success building his audience that way, along with conservative ex-military member Shawn Ryan.
“He came back. He’s got all sorts of issues. He just started having conversations about them. Took off,” Kelly said. “And of course, there’s the godfather of us all, and that’s Joe Rogan — who has never done one promotional hit, does not grant interviews, does not go to the Met Gala, does not appear on the cover of New York Times Magazine. Does not do hits on CNN or MSNBC or Fox. Sits in Austin, Texas and does three-hour interviews and is the most influential voice in American media.”
She encouraged anyone who wants to find success to “work for it” and be patient.
“The real question is, do you have something to say? Will you say it honestly and authentically? And do you have the heart, and I think, really, the personality to create bonding with a mass audience?” Kelly asked.
“The Megyn Kelly Show” streams on YouTube and airs on SiriusXM. “The Megyn Kelly Show Election Night Special” will air live on YouTube and SiriusXM from 8 p.m. Eastern/5 p.m. Pacific on Tuesday night until midnight Eastern/9 p.m. Pacific.
