How Fox News triggered anger at the White House on election night and a call to Rupert Murdoch

It marked the moment when a promising set of results, including holding Florida, began the slide to probable defeat, triggering Trump to accuse his opponents of fraud and triggering a slew of legal challenges.

“It was total BS. I don’t know Fox News could be allowed to get away with it,” said a source familiar with campaign thinking. “Why did they do it so fast? What was going on?”

Trump was in the residence for almost all of Tuesday evening after the polls closed. An administration official said he was enjoying “family time” after a whirlwind finish to the campaign.

His guests gathered in several rooms in the East Wing, where donors and staff ate sliders, chicken tenders, and French fries.

The mood was jubilant at first in the East Room, where guests, who had been bracing for a tight race, cheered the Florida result.

“Very upbeat atmosphere,” said Doug Deason, a Texas donor. “No one was expecting a Reagan landslide.”

A sign of how difficult reelection would be came at 11:20 p.m. EST, however, when Fox News announced it was forecasting Arizona as a key Biden pickup. The call came considerably ahead of other networks and with only 70% of the votes counted. The Associated Press would not call it for another three hours.

The result was fury among team Trump.

“We pushed our people to vote on Election Day, but now, Fox News is trying to invalidate their votes,” said senior adviser Jason Miller on Twitter.

Trump was raging behind the scenes, according to two sources familiar with how the evening unfolded. He has complained frequently in recent weeks about Fox News coverage, including on Election Day during a phone interview on Fox and Friends, and called Murdoch, its owner, on Tuesday night to demand it retract its forecast.

It did not. And other news organizations followed suit.

By the time the president addressed his supporters in the early hours of the morning, a strategy of challenging the results was taking shape.

“This is a fraud on the American public,” he said a little after 2 a.m. “This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election.”

Senior campaign officials took their cue from the president. On Wednesday morning, they insisted that Trump would win and that he was on his way to a 30,000 majority in the state of Arizona once all the ballots had been counted.

Campaign manager Bill Stepien told reporters: “We know that a final batch of mail-in ballots is being counted.”

“We know that these ballots are counted sequentially, meaning that late-arriving votes or ballots cast closest to Election Day are the ones being counted now. We know and expect that about a half-million votes are left to be counted.”

The campaign followed by announcing legal action in a string of states as it sought to halt counts and prevent what it claimed was fraud.

Justin Clark, the deputy campaign manager who is part of a recount team along with White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, said: “This is the most important election of our lifetime, and President Trump made clear our path forward last night: Ensure the integrity of this election for the good of the nation.”

And later, Eric Trump and Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani accused Democrats of trying to cheat in Pennsylvania.

“Do you think we’re stupid? Do you think we’re fools?” asked Giuliani, without offering evidence of fraud.

The result is a tidal wave of anger that began with the call by Fox News’s decision desk.

The Arizona Republican Party called on supporters to call Fox News and demand the outlet retract the decision.

Kelly Sadler, of America First Action, the biggest Trump-supporting super PAC, said she had turned off the network’s election coverage.

“Quite frankly, I’m fed up with it,” she said.