President Donald Trump's sprawling MAGA media apparatus may be starting to come apart, a columnist argued Saturday.

Salon's Sophia Tesfeye wrote that Maria Bartiromo's sudden, shocking departure from Fox News this week exposed a fundamental weakness in Trump's relationship with journalists-turned-pundits who echo his talking points. Bartiromo was one of the network's most visible anchors, hosting programs on both Fox Business and Fox News, and her exit removes a high-profile platform that Trump allies had regularly used for friendly interviews.

"Machines break down," Tesfeye wrote. "The Bartiromo break up shows where Fox's loyalty actually ends."

The circumstances of that break up remain contested. News outlets including Status, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal reported that Bartiromo was fired for sharing internal information with the White House about Fox management's guidance on covering Trump's election claims. Her lawyer, however, asserts that this account is "absolutely and unequivocally false."

Tesfeye argued Saturday that whatever the specifics, the larger issue rests on reported fact.

"The network didn't fire her for lying," she wrote. "It fired her for leaking."

The Salon writer noted that Bartiromo's alignment with Trump might have startled those who followed her early career. She spent two decades at CNBC as a respected financial journalist, earning the nickname "Money Honey" as the first journalist to report live from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

"Bartiromo had stature, and a generation of young women moving into financial journalism looked up to her," Tesfeye wrote. "Then came Trump."

After moving to Fox, Tesfeye said, Bartiromo became increasingly uncritical of the commander in chief. She emerged as a prominent promoter of Trump's claim that the 2020 election was stolen and pushed the Dominion conspiracy theory — coverage that ultimately cost Fox News $787 million. That 2023 Dominion Voting Systems settlement, one of the largest defamation payouts in U.S. media history, followed disclosures of internal messages showing Fox hosts and executives privately doubting the election-fraud claims even as the network aired them.

"MAGA has a way of breaking people," Tesfeye wrote. "Somewhere along the way, whether for love of Trump or for the money and access that loving him on television reliably generates, Bartiromo made a calculation to stop being a journalist and become something else entirely."

That transformation cost Bartiromo her job, Tesfeye argued, and the same "breaking" dynamic points to trouble ahead for Trump.

Fox News can readily install another pundit in Bartiromo's slot, but it will no longer tolerate employees who place Trump's demands above the corporation's, she concluded. Whether other pro-Trump voices at the network adjust their posture in response remains to be seen, but the reported circumstances of the departure — if accurate — mark a shift in how the network polices the boundary between corporate interests and presidential loyalty.

"Fox may remain a propaganda network in most of the ways that matter," she wrote. "It is simply, for the moment, a propaganda network with shareholders, lawyers and executives who remember exactly what the last legal cliff cost them, and who are no longer willing to let one anchor's loyalty to Trump outrun their own."