Welcome back to The Best and the Brightest, and a very happy post Fox-Dominion settlement day to you!

In tonight’s edition, my conversation with my brilliant Puck colleague Dylan Byers, who has been covering Fox News for years, and Eriq Gardner, our intrepid legal reporter, who was in the Delaware courtroom when the $787.5 million settlement was announced.

But first…

• The MAGA Disgusting Brothers: I was at a meeting of the D.C. Young Republicans club last week, watching Rep. Matt Gaetz field questions from a room filled with MAGA-giddy youth activists, when a member of the audience asked what it was like to be attacked by the Washington establishment. Gaetz, who was investigated but never charged in a sex trafficking probe, turned the question over to Rep. George Santos, the bespectacled, be-sweatered New York Republican and known fabulist, who was standing in the corner, smiling and waving. “That’s why George is here, so I’m not the one who’s being attacked,” Gaetz joked as the crowd applauded. A few people in the audience let out a “whoo!”

Santos, after all, has been undergoing a brazen, public, semi-successful and very intentional MAGA rebranding, which I previewed several months back, in an effort to cultivate a new constituency after lying to and alienating his old one. Santos first received a lifeline, of sorts, when he became briefly indispensable to Kevin McCarthy in the midst of his speakership bid, in which every vote (including Santos’s) was suddenly invaluable. Having survived the immediate outrage surrounding his various campaign-trail mistruths—no, he never worked at Goldman Sachs, nor was he a star college volleyball player; yes, he was a drag queen in Brazil and was investigated there for fraud—Santos is now looking for new allies after declaring his once unthinkable intention to run for re-election. He appeared at Trump’s arraignment, hired a bunch of trolls to help run his Twitter account, and will make a headline appearance at a D.C. Young Republicans Club networking next week.
• You Can’t Sit With Us: Though it’s historically never been a good time to be a Florida governor with presidential aspirations, this week has been particularly demoralizing. Multiple DeSantis mega-donors have been publicly freaking out over his six-week abortion ban, as my colleague Tara Palmeri reported earlier this week, while others say they are keeping their powder dry as he sinks in the polls. Meanwhile, about half of Florida’s 20 Republican congressional representatives have now endorsed Trump over DeSantis, with at least two more reportedly coming over the line in as many days. (So far, DeSantis has received the endorsement of only one Florida congressman, Laurel Lee, the former Secretary of State in his administration.)

  These endorsements aren’t just symbolically valuable—they’re also an unmistakable signal of a major DeSantis weakness. As NBC’s Matt Dixon reported, Vern Buchanan, the Florida delegation leader, made it known that Trump had called him personally, while DeSantis had his staff make the pitch. Plus, as Trump-aligned strategist Alex Bruesewitz pointed out to me, Trump now has an army of popular MAGA surrogates in DeSantis’s backyard. “[Byron] Donalds, Gaetz, [Anna Paulina] Luna and [Cory] Mills all have statewide appeal and fanfare. Big followings, good on TV, can host big events on their own,” Bruesewitz noted. “How many people is Laurel Lee going to attract to an event?”

The Murdochs can sustain this loss, of course—Fox Corp., the parentco, has some $4 billion in cash reserves and typically brings in between $1 billion and $2 billion a year in net income, the majority of which comes from Fox News. But it’s nevertheless a very significant hit to the P&L, and there’s likely more to come with the pending Smartmatic and shareholder lawsuits.

Eriq, you’ve been on the ground in Wilmington, and you’ve been anticipating an eleventh-hour settlement for quite some time. I’m wondering if you can give us a sense of why the two sides ultimately came to the table?

Eriq: It wasn’t just one thing, of course, but the factors here have always favored settlement.

On Fox’s end, they were staring at six weeks of bad headlines, grueling testimony from executives and TV personalities, and a jury that seemed distinctly lacking in Fox News viewers. And they were going to lose. Their smart lawyers knew that. Every time I talked to them, I sensed tentativeness because the judge was continually tying their hands with pretrial rulings. These lawyers could never be quite sure what face-saving narrative they’d even be allowed to try. I’m sure Rupert’s impulse is always, “Fight, fight, fight,” but the advice he was likely continually hearing was to retreat.

As for Dominion, they had already won the P.R. battle, and they were almost certainly going to win at trial, but—and this is a big one—they could nowhere near guarantee a verdict as large as $787 million (which isn’t far from their original $1.6 billion demand minus the company’s heavily contested “lost enterprise value,” which they had just backed off on). And this case was a huge investment for them and their owner, the buyout firm Staple Street Capital. (Which, by the way, is getting an incredible return on their $38 million, 76 percent stake in the company.) Yeah, they wanted to punish Fox, but this was a business decision.

In the courtroom, in the hours between the jury empanelment and the announcement of the settlement, it seemed to me like the vibe on the Dominion side was relaxed—they were smiling at each other, sipping water, leaning back in chairs—while the Fox team appeared fidgety. Their lawyers took a lot of trips out of the room. I imagine that Murdoch, Viet Dinh and others were deciding whether to bite the bullet. Ultimately, they did.

Dylan: Fox definitely seemed to be facing insurmountable challenges in Delaware. The road to trial had been rough, especially after the judge took away the “newsworthiness” defense. So Fox’s lawyers anticipated a loss in Wilmington, like you said, but probably also saw a strong case for appeal given all the restrictions that had been placed on them. Of course, that came with its own costs: the trial, the testimony and, really, the threat of this turning into a years-long national humiliation as it worked its way up the courts. Ultimately, $787 million proved an easier cost to stomach.

You’re right to note the influence of Viet Dinh, Fox’s chief legal officer. He’s one of the Murdochs’ most trusted lieutenants, and he’s long had an underappreciated influence over their media empire. Dinh assembled Fox’s legal team and oversaw strategy, and I have to imagine he was very influential in moving Fox to settle. Still, I think what tipped the scales here was Dominion’s willingness to come down off of $1.6 billion—a number they were never really entitled to. Over the weekend, Dominion lawyers started backchanneling with Fox to signal a willingness to shave half a billion off the damages claim. The two sides brought in mediator Jerry Roscoe, who was on vacation in Romania—a detail, first reported by the Journal, that I just love. He mediated the whole thing over Zoom and 24 hours later the case was settled. Dominion, valued at $80 million five years ago, now gets nearly 10x that in damages, and Fox avoids the trial and, notably, any requirement for an on-air apology.

Tina: If there’s anything we’ve learned from decades of televised trials, it’s that the American people are more responsive to visuals and audio—Amber Heard crying on the stand, O.J. Simpson smiling throughout the trial—than they are to deposition transcripts and copies of emails. If I were a Democratic operative (or Lincoln Project staffer) looking to cut anti-Trump and anti-Fox ads, this would have been a goldmine. Tucker, Sean, Jeanine Pirro and the rest of their talent trade on their reputations as firebrands, fighting (and winning) on behalf of the American people, but that’s only within the structured, choreographed confines of their studios. Footage of them sputtering under cross-examination, especially under bad courthouse lighting, would have been genuinely damaging to the brand. (And that’s nothing to say of how the Fox viewer might react to the presence of Lachlan and Rupert. They might not know them by their faces, but it would be jarring to fully comprehend that Fox News is, in fact, run by New York media elites.)

But now there will be no trial, those depositions will be thrown down the MAGA memory hole, and just as Fox viewers forgot that the talent used to be virulently anti-Trump in 2016, so too will they forget that, say, Tucker texted someone about how Trump is a “demonic force.” There’s a substantial portion of the base (and perhaps, the entire base) that will happily forgive and forget someone disliking Trump as long as they eventually come around to defending him again. The tepid way that Fox addressed the lawsuit in its statements—“we acknowledge the Court’s rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false”—reminded me of how Trump brushed away lawsuits that he settled for millions of dollars: “Without admission of guilt.” If the base shrugged off Trump, they’ll certainly shrug off Fox.

Of course, all that depends on whether Fox tones down or ratchets up its editorializing, post-settlement, as it works to stave off continued audience leakage to more right-wing competitors, such as OAN and Newsmax. There is, after all, still plenty of other litigation on the horizon—with shareholders, the defamation lawsuit from Smartmatic, the suit from the Fox News producer who says she was “coerced” into giving false testimony against Dominion… Does any of that change their programming strategy going forward?

Dylan: Not at all, in my view. This settlement changes exactly one thing behind the scenes: Fox News as an institution will take greater steps to ensure that it doesn’t leave itself vulnerable to further defamation claims. But that doesn’t mean they need to change their editorial strategy. If you look at the primetime trifecta—Tucker, Ingraham and Hannity—they are really masters in the dark art of floating conspiracies without running the risk of libel. Tucker doesn’t say “votes were stolen,” he says, “we don’t know how many votes were stolen.” He raises the specter of scandal, of a liberal plot against America, etcetera, but he stays within the bounds of free speech. It’s terrifying, it’s contemptuous, but it’s quite disciplined.

If you look at Dominion’s lawsuit, 18 of their 20 defamation claims were made against three B-level talents: Lou Dobbs—who has already been ousted from the network—Maria Bartiromo, and Jeanine Pirro. (The other two claims targeted Tucker and Hannity, respectively, but they weren’t nearly so convincing.) Now, right up until the settlement, Fox’s lawyers were getting ready to argue that Dobbs, Bartiromo and Pirro couldn’t be held liable for defamation because they actually believed that Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell’s batshit voter fraud claims might be true. If you’re trying to avoid future libel lawsuits, that’s not exactly the kind of person you want on camera.

So I anticipate one of two things will happen here, or has perhaps already happened: The first possibility is that Fox News C.E.O. Suzanne Scott sits down with Bartiromo and Pirro and anyone else who came up to the line of libel and says, be careful. Alternatively, Rupert and Suzanne have already decided to elegantly and eventually show Bartiromo and/or Pirro the door. Remember, when Rupert was asked during deposition if he believed Fox had endorsed the voter fraud claims, he said, “Not Fox, no. Not Fox. But maybe Lou Dobbs, maybe Maria as commentators… Some of our commentators were endorsing it.” If I’m Maria, that feels like the kiss of death. The last thing on earth that Murdoch wants is to leave himself vulnerable to another $787-million headache.

Speaking of which, Eriq, what do you think happens next, particularly with Smartmatic’s $2.7 billion lawsuit?

Eriq: First of all, if the Smartmatic case doesn’t settle—and settle soon—I’ll be surprised. Fox News will again be facing a jury pool in a liberal state (New York) that, like Delaware, doesn’t cap punitive damages. Also, this next trial would be taking place in the media capital of the world. For reporters, that means there’s no need to get on an Amtrak and book a hotel for six weeks to cover it. What’s more, thanks to the Trump indictment, New York lawmakers are now considering passing legislation that would allow TV cameras in the courtroom. So, the world might see Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Rupert Murdoch, etcetera, getting on the witness stand. It’ll be an even greater spectacle! Fox could get more favorable pretrial treatment from a judge, but I think the Dominion deal sets a framework for Smartmatic and Fox to resolve their differences too.

As for the long term, I think Fox has got a problem on its hands. I agree with you, Dylan, that their editorial strategy is unlikely to change, at least immediately. Some of this will be chalked up to the cost of doing right-wing business. On the other hand, as the public record about the inner thinking at the network expands, it becomes easier and easier to show actual malice—and more enticing for opponents to take a shot. I sense a vulnerability here that I didn’t a few years ago, and I wonder whether Trump has cursed them. Some reflection is necessary. I’m not sure that an extra week of libel training or even some blood sacrifices of a few B-list hosts is going to be enough. But, of course, all bets are off until we know more about who controls this company after Rupert.