Peace in our time: Trump to return to Fox News tonight

Oddly, this is happening on O’Reilly’s show at 8 p.m. — the same one from which Trump was booted last week — instead of Hannity’s extremely Trump-friendly program at 10 p.m. Even more oddly, it’s happening before the big sitdown between Trump and Roger Ailes and his Fox editors. Is that still scheduled? The point of announcing it, I assume, was simply to show Trump’s Fox-watching fans that Ailes is taking their concerns seriously. Having Trump back on the network’s highest-rated show serves that same purpose, in which case what’s the meeting for?

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The day after Trump’s “boycott” tweet, Trump and Fox News chairman Roger Ailes spoke by phone. Fox said afterward that they “plan to have a meeting” to “discuss their differences of opinion regarding Fox’s coverage of Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign.”

The meeting is expected to take place sometime this week; the date and time have not been confirmed.

How long will the current Trump/Fox truce last? Ten bucks says it blows up in the second week of October, but here’s your thread to comment just in case he and O’Reilly start screaming at each other tonight and calling each other losers. While we wait, in honor of the occasion, here’s a new poll showing America’s trust in its media cratering, at least among Republicans and independents:

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The partisan gap opened wide during the 2004 presidential election, with Republicans convinced (thanks in no small part to Rathergate) that the media was out to get Bush, and persisted throughout the next few years of coverage of Bush’s disintegrating second term and the deterioration of conditions in Iraq. Republicans’ trust in the media has never durably recovered. Democrats, by contrast, have stayed reliably north of 50 percent in trusting the media but that majority has slowly declined by 15 points over the last 10 years. I think that’s mostly a function of Bush too: In the worst years of his presidency, early in his second term, the sheer volume of bad news convinced Democrats that the media was on the case. As things improved a bit in Iraq and fallout from Katrina faded, some of the dire tone of the coverage faded and so did Dems’ trust in the media. They’ve been pretty stable since Obama took over, though — just a three-point decline since 2009. And there’s probably some downward pressure organically just because of the Internet and the opportunities it presents for partisan sites to convince readers that the media’s hopelessly corrupt. If you’re a Media Matters reader or a Jon Stewart fan, of course you think that the media can’t be trusted. How could it be? It’s deeply right-wing, you know.

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So there’s your intro to Trump reemerging on the most right-wing cable network of ’em all. Here’s his interview this morning with the Today show, in which he discusses his new tax plan — which one group estimates would lead to $10 trillion in new debt — and, somewhat surprisingly, the uncertainty over whether his big lead in the polls will last. “Can I keep that going?” he says at one point. “I have no idea.” Huh.

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