Laura Ingraham's Total Support of Trump Is Very Smart
It was election night 1984, and Laura Ingraham, then a student at Dartmouth College, was drinking and dancing at a hotel near her campus when the returns rolled in. She and her friends, a small group of conservatives, had plenty of reasons to celebrate. President Ronald Reagan was drubbing Minnesota Senator Walter Mondale (Reagan wound up winning all but one state), and Ingraham fondly recalls the “seething leftists” who paraded by, horrified as they watched the young conservatives cheer. “God,” she tells Newsweek, “I loved the ’80s.”
She’s enjoying the Donald Trump era almost as much. Once a true believer in the Reagan gospel of supply-side economics, massive defense spending, a muscular foreign policy and traditional family values, Ingraham has fully embraced Trumpism, adopting all of its anti-establishment fervor. And with the New York real estate mogul in the Oval Office, she has parlayed her national radio show and frequent appearances on Fox News into her own nightly prime-time program (The Ingraham Angle) on the conservative network—the ultimate media perch for a right-of-center pundit.
The decision to hire Ingraham comes at a crucial point for Fox News: Bill O’Reilly, for years its prime-time powerhouse, resigned in the wake of, about the forces that propelled the president to victory last year.
