Never funny

Fox News disputes Trump’s claim that its employees helped write his jokes

It’s an escalation of tensions between Donald Trump and his favorite network that have bubbled up over the course of the campaign.

Irie Sentner

Donald Trump says Fox News employees helped him write his jokes for the Al Smith dinner. Fox says that’s fake news.

The former president, whose roast of Kamala Harris and other Democrats at Thursday’s Al Smith dinner pulled no punches, said Friday morning on “Fox & Friends”: “A couple of people from Fox actually — I shouldn’t say that — but they wrote some jokes, and for the most part, I didn’t like any of them.”

The network disputed that claim. In a statement, a Fox News spokesperson said: “Fox News confirmed that no employee or freelancers wrote the jokes.”

A spokesperson for Trump’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

It’s an escalation of tensions between Trump and Fox — once the former president’s favorite network — that have bubbled up over the course of the campaign. Trump has rejected invitations from the network to debate Harris a second time, though he has participated in several Fox interviews recently and agreed to one Sept. 4 Fox debate Harris never accepted.

Ahead of Fox News anchor Bret Baier’s Wednesday interview with Harris — her first with the network — Trump took to Truth Social to blast Baier as “very soft to those on the ‘cocktail circuit’ Left” and Fox as having “grown so weak and soft on the Democrats, constantly polluting the airwaves with unopposed Kamala Representatives.” During the Friday interview, he complained that the network has run Harris ads that are negative about him.

Trump later congratulated Baier “on a tough but very fair interview,” several clips of which he posted to Truth Social.