Megyn Kelly famously feuded with Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign.
She thought it would propel her career to new heights.
But picking a fight with Trump was an awful mistake she quickly regretted for one big reason.
Kelly jumped from Fox News to NBC.
She was supposed to host a primetime Sunday night news magazine show as well as a daytime talk show.
Her Sunday night show flopped and was canceled before it completed its ten-episode run.
The only chance to salvage her career was her 9 AM daytime talk show.
But it is bombing out in the face of poor ratings, awkward interviews, and harsh buzz from critics.
Kelly made the huge mistake of ditching politics for her 9 AM show by announcing she was done with politics and her show would center on celebrity interviews and soft focus pieces.
Her other big problem was she alienated her conservative fans from Fox by constantly attacking Trump, but since she was a former Fox News anchor liberal viewers rejected her out of hand.
The Guardian reported on her problems:
“But Megyn Kelly Today, which kicked off last month with a monologue from its host (“I’m kind of done with politics for now”), was greeted with a lukewarm critical reception and satisfactory but hardly world-beating viewing figures. If Kelly once deftly employed her skills as a prosecutor to pick apart foes like a roadside corpse, she now spends her mornings talking about the season’s best fabrics – velvet – or whether one should be best friends with their spouse (hint: Kelly is). Watching her, one gets a strong sense of claustrophobia; without a desk to sit behind and guests to interrogate, she seems stifled. The show is, to put it kindly, a profound misuse of her talents, and it makes one wonder how NBC thought Kelly a shoo-in.
Without a desk to sit behind and guests to interrogate, she seems stifled
The answer has as much to do with Kelly as the inflammatory environment she’s attempting to flee. Her transition to morning programming proves that in 2017 one can’t be an enemy of Donald Trump’s while remaining above the political fray; it’s a lesson Nordstrom, Jemele Hill and Miss Universe contestants have had to learn the hard way. Moreover, it’s an unfortunate fact of the country’s polarization that once the president tweets angrily about someone, they become both a faux-torchbearer for the resistance and a token adversary of the Trump faithful.
But perhaps Kelly’s greatest folly was how swiftly she expected a new audience would embrace her. If the 46-year-old planned to move to NBC and retain her conservative fanbase, she underestimated how much that fanbase has been subsumed by Trumpism and, therefore, Trump’s disdain for her. If she thought that by switching to a more liberal network she might acquire new fans, she must have forgotten that, at her old network, she used chunks of airtime to insist the death of Eric Garner had nothing to do with race. Even as she appeared considerably more grounded than her Fox News colleagues, Kelly still dutifully adopted the network’s twisted pedagogy.
Watching Megyn Kelly Today, one can so clearly see its host attempt to expunge that past self. She says, repeatedly, that she isn’t a political person, wasn’t raised in a political household, and was dismayed, throughout 2016, at how darn political everything came to be. (“Politics has become like race, you can’t talk about it at all,” she told Ellen Degeneres.) That Kelly spent over a decade ginning up anger over both politics and race is, apparently, a moot point.”
Do you think Megyn Kelly feuding with Donald Trump was a career-killing mistake?
Let us know in the comments section.
