Lou Dobbs, populist broadcaster liked by Donald Trump

With fewer than 400,000 viewers on a typical night, the audience for Lou Dobbs’s financial television news show was not large. Its impact, though, was significant.
The stock market-savvy audience that tuned in to Moneyline on CNN during the Nineties was so affluent and influential that the hour-long programme was said to be watched by more chief executives than any other and to command an advertising cost in proportion to its viewership second only to the Super Bowl.
This owed much to the authority of the folksy but forceful Dobbs, a Harvard-educated economics correspondent who combined presenting duties with his roles as president of CNNfn, a now-defunct financial channel, and supervisor of CNN’s business coverage. He joined CNN when Ted Turner launched the cable network in 1980 and rose to become one of its biggest stars, before long advancing beyond sober financial analysis to air colourful political views in what was termed “advocacy journalism”.
Not one inclined to dwell on both sides of the argument, Dobbs ushered in a new age of partisanship and sensationalism in American news broadcasting, as networks ditched balance for bias and subordinated facts to feelings.
One of his biggest fans lived in the White House. Dobbs’s populist style, right-wing politics and apocalyptic rhetoric were a blueprint for Donald Trump. “He was Trump before Trump. He has always sort of epitomised the intellectual foundation of the Trump movement on trade and immigration,” the former Trump White House strategist Steve Bannon told The Washington Post.
“Nobody loves America more than Lou,” Trump once said. In 2019 Trump called Dobbs from the White House and placed him on speakerphone during a meeting with his top economic advisers. The pair reportedly talked on an almost daily basis, with Trump especially receptive to Dobbs’s hardline views on border control. With Trump an avid viewer, tuning televisions in the West Wing and on Air Force One to the show, being invited on to the programme was a sure way for allies to gain credibility with the president, while administration figures who incurred Dobbs’s wrath were liable to find their jobs at risk.
After CNN executives deemed his perspective on illegal immigration to be too incendiary, Dobbs joined Fox Business — a sister channel to Fox News — in 2010 and tackled themes that Trump exploited years later, notably the anxieties of rust-belt America about the impact of imported goods and labour on the country’s manufacturing base and culture, and middle-class angst over crime, the economy and the erosion of traditional family values.
When in 2006 the United States government bought computers from the Chinese multinational Lenovo for non-classified work, Dobbs fumed that Washington had “turned to communist China”, making the US potentially “more vulnerable than ever”, though the machines were from factories in North Carolina and Mexico.
Observing the arrival of Latino migrants to carry out reconstruction work after Hurricane Katrina, Dobbs declared that “the fear is that New Orleans will turn into La Nueva Orleans”. He assailed the 2003 Billy Bob Thornton black comedy film Bad Santa as “an assault on the sensibilities of all that’s wonderful about a cherished childhood icon”.
Louis Carl Dobbs was born in 1945 in Childress, a small town in the Texas panhandle, where his father, Frank, co-owned a propane business and his mother, Lydia Mae (née Hensley), was a bookkeeper. He was 12 when the propane company failed and the family moved to a farm in Idaho.
Awarded a scholarship to Harvard, he graduated in 1967 with an economics degree and found a job working for federal anti-poverty initiatives in Washington and Boston, but grew restless. “I decided to go out and make some money. I decided I wasn’t changing the world,” he told The New Yorker. He moved to Los Angeles and earned a good wage as a corporate money manager for a bank but decided that journalism would be more fun and found a job as a police and fire reporter for a radio station in Yuma, Arizona. He appeared on television in Phoenix and Seattle then became CNN’s youngest anchor.
A 1969 marriage to Kathleen Wheeler, his high-school sweetheart, ended in divorce in 1981. He remarried the following year to Debi Segura, a former CNN sports presenter of Mexican heritage. She survives him along with two sons from his first marriage, Jason and Chance, a home improvement contractor and former CNN producer, and twin girls from his second, Hillary and Heather, who became successful equestrian competitors, with Hillary later a bank executive.
Not known for sensitivity in the workplace, Dobbs left CNN in 1999 after a fallout with the then-president, Rick Kaplan: Dobbs was angry that his show was interrupted for live coverage of a speech by Bill Clinton, then president, after the massacre at Columbine High School.
He founded a space news internet site before returning to CNN in 2001. His show was renamed Lou Dobbs Tonight and ratings swelled as his commentaries acquired a more serrated edge. His salary also rose, to $6 million a year by 2006. He owned a mansion in Florida and a 300-acre farm in New Jersey.
Denying charges of opportunism in his pivot towards bombastic economic nationalism, Dobbs described himself as a sincere political independent and considered running for president himself. “Everything I believe, I believe unequivocally,” he said. Dobbs was certainly unmolested by self-doubt. In 2005, the year he won an Emmy for lifetime achievement, he asserted that Americans’ health was menaced by an “invasion of illegal aliens” with leprosy and introduced a segment that drastically exaggerated the number of lepers in the US. When a journalist queried this inaccuracy, Dobbs insisted: “If we reported it, it’s a fact.”
However, a widening divergence from the reality-based community became evident in 2009 when he propagated the “birther” myth, a conspiracy theory questioning whether Barack Obama was really born in the US. This paved the way for his relationship with Trump, who embraced the notion during his first presidential campaign.
Full-throated support for Trump proved costly for Dobbs’s career and for his employer. He downplayed the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, claiming that protesters at the violent uprising seemed to be doing little more than “walking between the rope lines”, and aired groundless conspiracy theories that the 2020 presidential election was rigged in favour of Joe Biden via what he termed a “cyber Pearl Harbor”. His Fox show was abruptly cancelled in February 2021 and the network and several presenters, including Dobbs, were named in a defamation lawsuit brought by a voting technology firm that was settled in 2023 for $787.5 million. Another lawsuit is ongoing.
Dobbs’s books included War on the Middle Class, Border War and The Trump Century: How Our President Changed the Course of History Forever. After his exit from Fox he moved to an internet platform launched by Mike Lindell, a pillow tycoon turned conspiracy-spouting Trump loyalist, and hosted a podcast, The Great America Show.
Lou Dobbs, broadcaster, was born on September 24, 1945. He died of undisclosed causes on July 18, 2024, aged 78