After Donald Trump attacked Fox News host Megyn Kelly, the network's CEO Roger Ailes asked him: “What the hell is wrong with you?”
“I've always had the same relationship with Donald for 30 years. It's a friendly relationship, surprisingly enough,” Ailes said in an interview with Adweek, which selected him as its “Media Visionary of the Year." “I did call him after the first go-round and I said, ‘What the hell is wrong with you? The United States is at war with every goddamn country in the Middle East and you're at war with Megyn Kelly and you think that looks good? It doesn't look good.’”
Trump and Kelly’s spat began after she asked him a series of tough questions, including about his treatment of women, during the first GOP presidential primary debate on Aug. 6.
A seething Trump got his revenge afterwards, retweeting supporters who called her a “bimbo” and saying that the Fox host had “blood coming out of her wherever.” (He was referring to her nose, he later explained.)
The feud lasted on and off throughout August, with Ailes eventually calling on Trump to apologize for “a surprise and unprovoked attack.”
“Megyn Kelly represents the very best of American journalism and all of us at Fox News Channel reject the crude and irresponsible attempts to suggest otherwise," Ailes said in a statement at the time.
By the next day, the two seemed to have struck a truce.
“Roger Ailes is great. He’s a special guy and a good friend of mine. We just spoke two minutes ago. I mean, Roger Ailes is a great guy and no, I have no problem,” Trump said to radio host Laura Ingraham.
In September, however, Trump — apparently aggrieved by the network's coverage of his poll numbers — announced a boycott of Fox News. "@FoxNews has been treating me very unfairly & I have therefore decided that I won't be doing any more Fox shows for the foreseeable future," he tweeted. (Fox responded that it had broken with Trump first by canceling his appearance on Bill O'Reilly's show.)
In the Adweek interview, Ailes was asked whether he had any interest in following in Trump’s footsteps of being a businessman turned politician.
“I was asked many times, and about 20 years ago somebody actually tried to get me to run. And I concluded I would never do what I advised people to do, which is to behave and not punch people if they say something I don't like,” he said.
When the reporter pointed out that Trump was doing it, Ailes responded: “Yeah, but he hasn't physically done it yet.”
