In some ways he is Fox’s biggest star of the past five years. But now his presidential show is ending.

Trump might think that Fox needs his star power, and on the margins it’s true that Trump appearances and interviews are right-wing ratings boosters. But the network was No. 1 long before he became a politician.

As sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild wrote in her 2016 book “Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right,” about Tea Party supporters in Louisiana, “Fox News stands next to industry, state government, church, and the regular media as an extra pillar of political culture all its own.”

“To some,” she explained, “Fox is family.”

It takes a lot more than a Trump tweet to convince people to abandon family.