Murdoch vs. Trump – Murdoch Attacks

The day after Donald Trump He announces he’s running for president for the third time, waking up to an insulting front page in his old favorite newspaper, the New York Post. It was bad enough when, after the midterm elections, the paper called him a massive “Trumpty Dumpty” and blamed him for the miserable Republican leadership election.

This was even worse. Much worse.

On an ugly little strip at the bottom of the first page it read: “Florida man makes an announcement.” No name, no picture. Just a reference to page 26. Page 26! And there, tucked away in the paper, is only one short column, where he is described as a retired golfer and former reality show host, who “surprisingly” is presenting himself as a presidential candidate. It is noteworthy that by the next elections he will compete with Joe Biden to become the oldest president in history: “His cholesterol level is unknown, but his favorite food is roast beef with ketchup.”

What a humiliation. In The New York Post itself, the paper he loved and nurtured for decades at the turn of the last century. Who almost made the Trump brand with tireless daily reporting on his forays into the real estate market, or perhaps on the women’s front, in which he divorced and became a New York playboy and not least a royalty.

Which was owned by Rupert Murdoch.

What a betrayal. Here Trump became president to feed the Murdoch media empire, and that was a thank you.

Parliament will cool itself

jA, there is no doubt about the disagreement between the two superegos about who created whom. Down in Mar-a-Lago, there was no doubt that Trump had single-handedly created a terrifying success for Fox News and their stars. Without Trump, no Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, or Laura Ingram would claim a golfer. Without Trump, millions of viewers in the Midwest would not be glued 24/7 to lies and conspiracy theories about American politics.

Rupert Murdoch will shrug. He was king long before Trump became president. He has created monsters before. Not because he loves them. It is said that he despises Trump as much as any Democrat. But Trump delivered what Murdoch had always wanted; Tax exemption, deregulation and minimal interference from the authorities.

When Murdoch was crowned Tony Blair In the late 1990s, the award was said to be a pledge by Blair to leave his media empire alone. Besides, both Blair and Trump were stars. Things were good. Two birds with one stone.

The signs have been around for a while. Media mogul Rupert Murdoch has been preparing his powerful empire to get rid of Trump and crown a new heir. This is what Murdoch did cynically for decades and on several continents, but no one fully believed him. After all, Trump was in a class of his own. It is true that he is no longer the President of the United States, but he was still a media phenomenon that almost created his own world around Fox News.

Why slay the golden calf?

When I wrote about it this spring, I was immediately bullied by experts for being naive. I don’t want to brag about being particularly clairvoyant, but the signs were recognizable. It was leaked that Murdoch heir Lachlan, who controls both News Corp and Fox Corp, had a soft spot for Ron DeSantis. A few months later, after one of the congressional hearings on the attack on Congress, both of Murdoch’s newspapers, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, suddenly wrote a very similar editorial that Trump had failed on January 6, and that this had rendered him unfit as president.

Trump was furious. At the same time, Fox News has almost completely stopped interviewing Donald Trump, some say out of fear that he might make unsubstantiated allegations of election fraud. They were afraid of lawsuits. But clearly something was brewing.

The day after the by-election, Murdoch pressed the “nuclear button”. Both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post blamed Trump for the Republicans’ bad election in unusually harsh terms. They said he stood in the way of the Republicans. But not least, the Fox News anchors are going wild on Trump. When politicians become more concerned with the past and lost battles than with the interests of voters, voters will move on, said Laura Ingram, one of his sworn supporters, without naming names.

new metoo

Two days later it was leaked Rupert Murdoch said he couldn’t support Donald Trump in the next election. And Ron DeSantis will be backed up with money and, if the story is to be believed, with positive media coverage. The bullying and criticism at The New York Post tells us it also means negative reference to Trump.

Some would say there is some kind of justice to that. For years, Trump used the Murdoch empire to discredit his opponents, and now he gets a taste of his own medicine. But I laugh, of course, with a significant relish at the New York Post’s disparaging remark about the Florida man. It was funny. But a powerful media mogul shouldn’t have that much influence over who will be the next president of the United States or prime minister of the United Kingdom. It’s terrifying.

When a political monster makes a pact with the devil, it doesn’t end well for most voters.