The New York Post sent Donald Trump a clear message on Friday with a searing front page showing Vladimir Putin alongside the headline: ”THIS IS A DICTATOR.”
Trump’s onetime “favorite newspaper,” owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, ran the cover after Trump accused Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky of being a “dictator” in a Truth Social post this week.
The scathing headline—known in tabloids as “the wood”—ran alongside an op-ed by columnist Douglas Murray which outlined “10 other Ukraine war truths we ignore at our peril.”
These included a rebuke against Trump’s spurious claim that Zelensky has a measly 4 percent approval rating among Ukrainians (a recent poll suggests it actually sits at 57 percent). Another “truth,” Murray writes, is that Russia “resents American power and the world the U.S. has built” and that their main allies are America’s biggest foes.
Murray also claimed that Trump could ”win a Nobel Peace Prize” if he finds a way to end the war, but Trump ”will not be honored if the peace is an appeasement, one that bows down in the face of evil as it denies obvious truths.”
“Without a strong peace, it won’t be just Ukraine that suffers. It is all of us,” Murray concluded. “That is the ultimate truth.”
His strongly-worded piece is the latest shot fired from a Murdoch newspaper over Trump’s approach to Kyiv and the Kremlin this week. On Tuesday night, The Wall Street Journal similarly condemned Trump’s “rehabilitation” of Putin in a seething editorial, “The Rapid Rehab of Vladimir Putin.”
The Journal listed a considerable rap sheet of the death and destruction wrought on Putin’s orders. It also questioned what kind of “peace” would be borne out of an agreement made with Putin and Trump calling the shots, without Ukrainian representation at the negotiating table.
“He [Trump] didn’t say what kind of peace Mr. Putin has in mind, though if history is a guide it won’t be what most Americans understand by the word,” the center-right newspaper wrote.
In the United Kingdom, The Times and The Sun also broke with Trump. The latter, a conservative tabloid, said Trump’s “smearing of the Ukraine regime as scam artists who provoked a war using U.S. taxpayers’ money is a rant beneath the dignity of his office. Almost nothing in it is true.”
Meanwhile, The Times—a center-right broadsheet—slammed Trump’s “appalling” statements about Zelensky and Ukraine made after a so-called peace summit in Saudi Arabia.
An insider told Britain’s i Paper that the “attacks” had been greenlit at “the very top” of News Corp. “The Post has flipped on Trump many times. But when Trump took Putin’s side over Ukraine it crossed a red line. It’s personal for Rupert, he believes in the cause,” they said.
However, a former News Corp staffer said Trump “doesn’t care what the papers say,” and is only concerned with Fox News.
“Trump is only bothered about Fox News, that’s his direct channel to his supporters,” the ex staffer told the i. “And Fox News makes a lot of money for Murdoch. It’s unlikely to turn against Trump. So they both have a mutual interest whatever else they disagree about.”
Trump nevertheless apparently cares enough about the Post to have one of its front pages—showing his mugshot—framed and proudly displayed right outside the Oval Office.
