Fox News aired a segment on Monday that was strikingly critical of President Donald Trump, a notable departure from the network's usual posture toward the White House.

Longtime host Stuart Varney welcomed Wall Street Journal editorial board member Allysia Finley, who appeared to discuss her Sunday op-ed, Something Is Rotten in the State of MAGA. Her Shakespeare-inspired critique of the president and his inner circle is unlikely to sit well with the administration.

"Why are you comparing the blue tsunami to Shakespearean tragedy?" Varney asked, referring to the historic midterm defeat suffered by Republicans last week.

"It has a lot of the same elements," Finley replied. "For instance, you have a leader who's very…shall I say prideful? Whose pride blinds him to what is going on around him. He's very receptive or amenable to flattery and surrounds himself with sycophants who are scheming to pursue their own interests. I would say that's true of his new Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and his Vice President JD Vance, who's really positioning himself to be the presidential candidate in 2028 and is not really looking or trying to advance the priorities that would help the president."

Friction between Fox and Trump has been building for months, and it burst into the open last week when the president declared that the conservative network "bears responsibility" for the GOP's historic midterm losses. Fox has typically taken care to align its messaging with Trump, making its decision to platform Finley's op-ed — in which she directly addresses the president's anger toward the outlet — an unusual jab at the president. Taken together, the Truth Social post, the op-ed and the Monday interview trace a single arc: the president blamed Fox, a Wall Street Journal editorial writer answered him in print, and Fox then gave her argument airtime — putting the post-election recriminations on public display across the very platforms at the center of the dispute.

"Like King Lear," Finley wrote, "President Trump is a fool for flattery. He demands ostentatious displays of loyalty that are often insincere." On air, she singled out Vance and Miller as such "brown-nosers."

She also drew a further parallel to Shakespeare's mad king, writing: "'I am a man more sinned against than sinning,' the aggrieved Lear rages on the heath after being cast out by his sycophantic daughters. After the election, Mr. Trump delivered a Truth Social soliloquy: 'FoxNews bears responsibility for these losses by constantly and consistently putting on the Dumocrat opposition, and worse.'"

In Finley's telling, Trump, like Lear, deflected blame onto others, and, like Hamlet, became so fixated on settling grievances that he allowed the destruction of everyone in his orbit.

Corruption featured prominently in her argument. "'Hamlet' also offers a lesson in the insidious nature of political corruption," she wrote. "'Something is rotten in the state of Denmark,' the palace guard Marcellus observes. Voters took the same view of the Trump administration and the Republican Party."

Finley argued the concern was well founded. "Corruption ranked at the top of voters' concerns in polls. Yes, Americans are unhappy about high gasoline prices from the war in Iran and persistent inflation. But the killer was that while they struggled to pay bills, Mr. Trump and his hangers-on looked to be enriching themselves. In exit polls 62 percent of voters said that the president put his personal interests over the interests of the country."

Fox aired a similar assessment on Monday, when host Trey Gowdy — a former Republican congressman — lambasted the administration for ignoring polling on corruption.

Finally, Finley pointed to what she described as Shakespearean schemers within Trump's orbit, citing Iago's line from "Othello" — "In following him, I follow but myself" — and seeing similar motivations in the president's officials. She argued that Vance, a consistent Trump supporter, threw him under the bus over Iran the day after the midterms in an obvious bid to elevate his own profile ahead of a presidential run, while Miller "has egged on the president's worst policy instincts and stoked his resentments."

"His cruel and chaotic mass-deportation agenda was a key contributor to the GOP's rout," Finley wrote. "Nonetheless, the president on Friday elevated Mr. Miller to White House chief of staff, hailing him as 'one of my most trusted advisers.' The president will get the bad advice he invites." For readers following the fallout, the storylines now in motion are the White House's response to criticism aired on a network that has typically aligned its messaging with the president, Miller's tenure in a chief-of-staff role Finley has criticized, and the 2028 positioning she attributes to Vance — all of it playing out in public after a defeat the president has blamed, in part, on Fox.