Maria Bartiromo turns 59 next week and Fox News gave her an early — and, might I add, well-deserved — birthday present. They fired her.
As I began writing this column soon after the announcement, I clicked on her staff bio, and a message appeared that said, “something has gone wrong.”
Wow, that’s for sure, because Bartiromo went wrong, way, way wrong, when she jumped ship from CNBC 13 years ago, and ended up becoming a frothing mouthpiece for Donald Trump on Fox Business News. She went from the Money Honey to Trump Chump.
Bartiromo was thefirst journalist to broadcast live from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. She was a legit trailblazer at CNBC whose work was appreciated even by people who suspected, correctly, that she leaned politically right.
Then, in 2013, she left CNBC for Fox Business. It was big news. I can recall telling people she went to the dark side. And boy did she ever!
It didn't happen all at once. She edged her way, like her network, closer and closer to Donald Trump once he was elected president in 2016. Then, she put her bathing cap and goggles on, and went in for a deep dive into the Trump muckety-muck.
And she did it so brazenly.
In April 2017, in an interview now infamously called "the chocolate cake interview," Bartiromo let Trump recount how he'd ordered a missile strike on Syria while eating a chocolate cake dessert with China's president. It was a tone deaf, dark and dystopian remark — bomb a country and kill people while eating delectable sweets.
Bartiromo didn't push. She gobbled it up like, well, chocolate cake. When you watch the video, you can’t help but wonder why her next question wasn’t, “What are your three favorite desserts?”
Later that same year, she went further,wrongly asserting on air that no sexual misconduct allegations existed against Trump. Say what? It was so indefensible she took it back and said it was taken "out of context."
By the 2020 impeachment trial, she wasn't even pretending to be a fair and balanced journalist anymore. At Davos that year, as Trump rattled off aparade of false claims during an interview, Bartiromo was more worried that he wouldn’t get a "fair trial."
And it just kept getting worse. After he lost the 2020 election, she became something closer to a bona fide Trump confidant. Text messages later surfaced by the January 6th Committee showed herfeeding interview questions, and suggested answers, directly to Trump’s Chief of Staff Mark Meadows before putting them to Trump on air, so he'd know exactly what was coming and how to spin it.
She gave Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powella national platform for demonstrably false conspiracy theories about rigged voting machines that Fox's own people, reportedly including Bartiromo herself, privately called "wackadoodle."
That segment, and others like it, helped cost Fox a$787.5 million defamation settlement with Dominion, one of the largest settlements in American media history.
A year later, she was ramping it up, dumbly sitting across from Trumpas he dumbly called the January 6th rioters "peaceful people" full of "love," and echoing him by describing Ashli Babbitt as a "wonderful woman" at a "peaceful protest." No pushback like the enjoyable chocolate cake war interview. Not even a raised mascara-drenched eyebrow.
But her audience of one, Donald Trump, considered her a “Helping Honey.” So much so that rumors were abound that Trump had floated her as apotential running mate before settling on JD Vance. Can you imagine having to choose between Vance and Bartiromo? I’m definitely not going to sleep well tonight.
He praised her on Truth Social as "FANTASTIC." She really became indispensable to him, although perhaps not as much as Natalie Harp.
Then the bomb went off. Fox Business quietly instructed senior staff over the summer not to lend on-air credibility to Trump's claims about China and the 2020 election. The network was clearly trying to avoid writing another nine-figure check.
But like a gossiper with a salacious secret, Bartiromo ran around her own employer and reportedly leaked that internal guidance straight to the Trump White House. And the rest, they say, is sayonara history.
Oh Maria, you should have known better. Nobody is indispensable to Donald Trump. Loyalty to him goes in one direction. She joins Giuliani, Powell, Michael Cohen, Sean Spicer, Pam Bondi, and Kristi Noem, among many others whose careers went kaput because they thought being loyal to the toxic Trump would pay off.
There's a rumor floating around that Bartiromo might be up for the White House press secretary job. Not a chance. First, the job is way beneath her. Second, that 59th birthday looms, and the press secretary role, as I wrote about before, is excruciatingly excruciating.
Karoline Leavitt, at 28, was burned out in less than two years. For Bartiromo to go from a potential VP running mate to presidential spokesperson is a humiliating fall from grace. And she’d be at Trump’s beck and call 24/7. He would drive her infuriatingly bananas.
More likely, she’ll do a podcast, or a humiliating stint at Newsmax. But her days in the sun are over after having DT branded on her brain, and getting burned after metaphorically and incessantly feeding chocolate cake goodies to Donald Trump.