Rupert Murdoch is not happy with Donald Trump. Murdoch has not said this in interviews, but—as is his wont—through the front pages and editorial columns of the newspapers he owns.
While neither the Wall Street Journal nor New York Post has yet to fully jettison their support of Trump, they have effectively channeled Murdoch's discontent at how Trump is running his campaign against Kamala Harris through august, high-minded sermonizing in the WSJ and screaming front-page headlines in the Post.
“The Trump of the past few weeks has looked and sounded more or less exactly like the Trump of nine years ago,” Journal editor-at-large Gerard Baker wrote in a column on Monday. “This is the problem. It is this Mr. Trump who lost the presidency in 2020. It is this Mr. Trump who lost the House in 2018 and the Senate in the Georgia runoff election in January 2021.”
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The Post’s editorial board also had an aggressive editorial grace the front page of Monday’s issue that framed Harris as a progressive masking herself as a centrist. “KAMA KAMELEON” adorned the front page, backed by a split image of Harris in dueling colors.
When combined, the pieces seemingly represent Murdoch’s frustration with how the Trump campaign has floundered recent weeks, from its pick of Sen. JD Vance as his running mate against his wishes to Trump’s continued belligerent complaints to his inability to land on a clear message to combat against her ascendant campaign.
As Trump has spent weeks defining Harris’ presidential candidacy through racist attacks and baseless crowd conspiracies, it has been left to the two newspapers to vocalize what Murdoch and his editors see as the policy and personality contrasts between the two that the billionaire media mogul would dearly love Trump to major on beyond his relentless, vicious, mad-sounding attacks. If Fox News has, for now at least, stayed fully signed up to the Trump train, the two leading Murdoch newspaper titles in the U.S. are sounding their own passenger alarms.
“Trump Meets Half the Moment in His RNC Speech,” read the headline on a Journal editorial board piece hours after the speech.
Since then, The Journal’s editorial board has published almost daily pieces on various policy positions of Harris’, almost crafting talking point memos for the GOP to seize on. One on Sunday attacked her reversal on single-payer healthcare, while a Thursday editorial questioned her bona fides as a potential commander-in-chief. Others have also targeted her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.
“Donald Trump often shoots from the hip on these subjects, and his favorable comments about dictators are witless,” read Thursday’s Harris piece. “But his first-term record, especially on Iran and the Middle East, is far stronger than the Biden-Harris performance. Americans shouldn’t have to read tea leaves to figure out if Ms. Harris would keep the country safe in a treacherous world.” (The Daily Beast has reached out to the Journal and New York Post for comment.)
New York Post front page, Aug. 12, 2024.
New York PostThe Journal maintains on its masthead page that its opinion page operates independently from its news division, and its opinion editor Paul Gigot reports to Dow Jones CEO Almar Latour.
“The Editorial Board maintains complete editorial independence,” a spokesperson told the Daily Beast.
At the Post, editor-in-chief Keith Poole is responsible for both op-eds and news coverage. He was a guest at Murdoch’s most recent wedding, the 93-year-old’s fifth.
The commentary in both papers reflects how Murdoch has operated his papers and exercised his political muscle in the past, both in the U.S. and abroad. Murdoch is infamous for calling his editors almost daily, and when he vehemently opposed Trump’s pick of Vance last month, he reportedly dispatched Post columnists and executives to meet with Trump and urge him to consider someone else. But Trump stood firm, and Vance got the job.
Murdoch’s U.K. tabloid The Sun was also notorious for making or breaking British governments, for years a staunch supporter of Margaret Thatcher, even gleefully admitting in a front-page headline it aided in the 1992 election victory of the Tories. (Murdoch later claimed he found the headline “tasteless.”) The paper's backing of Labour leader Tony Blair in 1997 after a 20-year streak of supporting the Tories was therefore seen as hugely significant; the paper endorsed him through the 2005 election before reverting back to the Conservative Party.
The paper eventually, and perhaps not surprisingly given the widespread unpopularity of Rishi Sunak's Tories, endorsed Labour's Keir Starmer in last month’s election, which Starmer won—as with Blair, Murdoch likes to be on side with the winning team.
The conservative-leaning Journal editorial board has never appeared eager to anoint Trump, with its November 2022 editorial titled “Trump Is the Republican Party’s Biggest Loser,” following Republicans’ razor-thin midterm wins that cycle, serving as a prime example of its frustration toward his temperament. Yet the paper has still oscillated between defending (and advising) Trump and attacking President Joe Biden.
Rupert Murdoch, left, and Donald Trump, June 25, 2016.
Carlo Allegri/ReutersIt’s a reflection of Murdoch’s own views on the former president, a man he regarded in emails revealed by the Fox-Dominion case as going “increasingly mad” over his 2020 election loss and who Murdoch predicted would become “irrelevant” following the 2020 election. The Fox-Dominion case only ever arose because Murdoch’s TV mouthpiece, Fox News, regurgitated the former president’s claims of a stolen election, costing the network $787 million.
Author Michael Wolff reported in his book last year, The Fall: The End of Fox News and the Murdoch Dynasty, that Murdoch even and often wished Trump were dead.
“Trump’s death became a Murdoch theme: ‘We would all be better off …?’ ‘This would all be solved if …’ ‘How could he still be alive, how could he?’ ‘Have you seen him? Have you seen what he looks like? What he eats?’” according to the book.
Still, the two appeared to have mended their post-election hostilities. Trump told podcast hosts Clay Travis and Buck Sexton that he and Murdoch speak “a lot,” and Murdoch made a rare appearance at the Republican National Convention last month.
“He’s 100 percent sharp—he’s as sharp as a tack,” Trump told the hosts.
Murdoch likely hopes Trump means those words, if the advice his Journal editorial board has offered Trump and Republicans is any indication: “The former President will have to make a case on policy, rather than personal insults, and that isn’t his strength,” read a July 24 editorial. “The economic and security fundamentals still favor Mr. Trump, but this is now a competitive race.”
Whether Trump heeds it, however, is another matter. On Saturday, new New York Times polls showed Harris leading Trump in multiple swing states. On Saturday, Trump called Harris a “RADICAL LEFT LUNATIC.”
If Trump carries on like this, who knows—Murdoch may feel, as the campaign enters its dying days, to do what he did in Britain, and turn his back on the leading right-wing candidate and support Harris. That stated support written in either or both outlets—one totemic for the business community, the other for New York—would not only represent an emphatic rejection of Trump by two communities whose approval Trump so desires, it would be from a mogul whose audiences he has courted so ferociously and effectively.
Perhaps Trump—in his pick of Vance, despite Murdoch’s antipathy—has made his own calculations about what he does and does not need from Murdoch. Certainly Murdoch’s influence in British politics, while still undoubtedly strong, has waned in recent years as people source their media from less-traditional sources. Regardless, this presidential election is not just the battle of Harris and Trump, but a reckoning for two powerful men who find themselves yoked together—the best of frenemies.
