Megyn Kelly, the Glittering Aberration

Three days into the new year, Megyn Kelly announced that she was moving from Fox News to NBC. There had been open speculation for some time about what would happen after her contract with Fox expired, as her star rose in tandem with increasingly high-profile clashes with Republican figures. Her testimony about network chief Roger Ailes’s record of sexual harassment clinched his ouster from Fox, last July; for much of 2016, she drew vitriol from Donald Trump for being one of the only figures at Fox—and a woman, at that—willing to challenge him. Kelly’s departure from the network felt in one way inevitable, and, in another, surprising: mere weeks before the Inauguration, it read as a crossing of the aisle, at a time when ideological entrenchment has rarely been more pronounced.