In March, as the United States and Israel opened Donald Trump's war on Iran, Fox News couldn't stop talking about it. Six months later, with the conflict bogged down and increasingly unpopular, the network's biggest evening stars have nearly stopped mentioning it, according to a new Media Matters analysis.

The progressive watchdog counted references to "Iran" across five Fox evening "opinion" shows, The Five, The Ingraham Angle, Jesse Watters Primetime, Hannity, and Gutfeld!, and found they fell 78% from June to August, dropping from 801 mentions to just 178. In March, when the strikes began, those shows said "Iran" more than 2,300 times. Watters' program alone went from 258 mentions in June to 46 in August.

"... on Fox News — the MAGA propaganda network that urged Trump to attack Iran in the first place — some of his most devoted allies have all but completely stopped talking about it," the analysis noted.

The piece also flagged the topics rushed in to fill that deafening silence.

In August, Media Matters found, the five shows invoked "socialism" 730 times, the WNBA 238 times and Anthony Fauci 193 times, collectively about six times more often than the war itself.

Media Matters argued the retreat is strategic, as the war Fox hosts had cheered curdled into a fiasco that exacerbated economic pain and dragged on Republicans' hopes. Instead, the hosts fell back on familiar culture-war targets.

"I don't want to cover women's basketball," Watters groaned on The Five. "We have to do this again, really?"

It marked a remarkable turn from spring, when Laura Ingraham assured viewers, "Trump has already won in Iran." The analysis noted Hannity had helped lead the Fox hawks who urged Trump to strike in the first place.

The pivot aligns with Trump's own stark change of rhetoric. The president has instead leaned into wild warnings of communism as he fights to hold onto a narrow congressional majority in November's midterms.

A plane carrying Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy from Moldova to Oslo for the funeral of Norway's King Harald V was almost struck by a drone, Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre said Wednesday, though Ukraine's own presidency pushed back on the severity of the moment.

"His flight was almost hit by a drone when it was taking off from Moldova. That is the reality he lives in," Støre told public broadcaster NRK, according to CBS News. He offered no further details.

A source in the Ukrainian presidency gave AFP a more measured account, saying, "It was an alert in Moldova when a Russian (drone) entered Moldovan and Romanian airspace." The same source called the suggestion that Zelenskyy was personally at risk "exaggerated."

The region has been saturated with such incursions in recent months, with Russian drones repeatedly violating Moldovan airspace and disrupting airports across northern Europe, which complicates any read of what the drone near Zelenskyy's plane was meant to do.

Online, the report landed with alarm before those caveats set in.

National security journalist Shashank Joshi called it "just one data point, but not encouraging if part of [CIA Director John] Ratcliffe's trip to Moscow was to send a deterrent message to Russia on aggressive and violent actions in Europe."

Journalist Christopher Merrill reacted simply: "OMG."

Middle East correspondent Amichai Stein reported a sharper claim, writing that a source with knowledge told him the delegation waited out the drone and that "Moldova's authorities think that it was not accidentally." That assessment has not been confirmed by Moldovan officials on the record.

Zelenskyy arrived in Oslo on Tuesday evening for talks with Støre on Norwegian military aid, then attended Wednesday's funeral for Harald, who died Aug. 28 at 89, alongside Britain's Prince William, Japan's Crown Prince Akishino and leaders from more than 20 countries.

President Donald Trump’s departure for Texas took an unusual turn Wednesday when an emergency slide was seen hanging from his new Air Force One.

The inflatable slide was deployed as Trump prepared to leave Joint Base Andrews for the Republican midterm convention in Dallas. The president told reporters that officials were “doing a check on the slide” that would take about 15 minutes.

But the delay caught CNN host Brianna Keilar’s attention.

“It is extremely uncharacteristic for the president to show up at Andrews Air Force Base in Marine One and then not get off pretty quickly,” Keilar said as CNN carried live pictures from the base.

Trump instead remained aboard the helicopter for several minutes before walking over to the Qatari-gifted Boeing 747 and speaking with reporters.

Keilar said it wasn’t initially clear what was causing the holdup because the network could only see what was shown by the pool camera. But the CNN anchor still had questions even after the deployed slide was revealed.

“Why exactly was this deployed?” she asked. “He said they’re testing it. Was this deployed accidentally? We don’t know.”

“This was quite the unusual scene,” Keilar added.

She noted to viewers that an emergency slide was accidentally deployed aboard Air Force One in 1994 as President Bill Clinton returned from Germany.

Trump eventually boarded the plane and departed for Dallas, according to media reports.