Roger Stone, who parted ways with Donald Trump’s presidential campaign late last week, has suggested that the businessman’s feud with Fox News is counterproductive.
{mosads}”I think the voters would rather go to war with Iran and China over trade, rather than go to war with Fox News,” Stone said in an interview with The Daily Beast published Monday.
Stone noted that Fox reaches the vast majority of Republican primary voters Trump would need, compared to other networks such as CNN.
Rush Limbaugh, who has similarly been supportive of Trump’s controversial White House bid, rebuked the Republican presidential front-runner Monday for getting off message.
“Get back to the issues. Get back to immigration. Tell us what you think about whatever the issues are. That’s what put you on the map,” Limbaugh said on his radio program.
Trump alluded to a mending of the relationship with Fox in a tweet on Monday, saying that the network’s chairman and CEO, Roger Ailes, had called him to promise fair treatment.
That came shortly after he shared an article about Megyn Kelly discussing details of her personal life with her husband and demanding the Fox News host apologize after he clarified and defended his controversial remark made to CNN’s Don Lemon about “blood coming out of her…wherever” during the first GOP debate.
Stone, a veteran political operative who maintains he quit, while the Trump campaign says he was fired, said during another interview Monday with conservative radio host Dana Loesch that Trump should “ignore the personality conflicts.”
“How he got diverted into arguing with Fox — I think it’s beneath the campaign and it’s a distraction,” Stone said.
“You know what, Gerald Ford said he didn’t mean Poland was free of Russian influence right after he said it. When you’re explaining, you’re losing ground. When you’re having to go back and explain a gaffe, that’s counterproductive,” Stone told the Beast.
–This report was updated on Aug. 11 at 11:27 a.m.