The Intertwined Legacies of Rupert Murdoch and Donald Trump

On Monday, the House Oversight Committee released a letter that depicted a line drawing of a naked woman, with what appeared to be Donald Trump’s signature in place of her pubic hair. The letter, which also included an imaginary dialogue between Trump and the late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, had been included in a book compiled for Epstein’s fiftieth birthday, in 2003, and was handed over by Epstein’s estate following a congressional request.

Its publication seemed to vindicate the Wall Street Journal, which reported on the existence of the letter in July. Back then, Trump had angrily denied that such a document was real and said that he personally asked Rupert Murdoch, the Journal’s owner, to intervene; per Trump, Murdoch said that he would “take care of it,” but the paper pressed ahead with the story, and Trump subsequently sued it, and Murdoch.

Not that the release of the letter prompted Trump to back down. The White House reiterated its claim that Trump never signed it, suggesting that it would support a handwriting analysis to prove as much. Trump himself told NBC that the letter is a “dead issue.”It likely isn’t. But, as I see it, there were more important stories on Monday alone—including one that involved Murdoch.

For the past couple of years, he has been locked in a Hollywood-esque succession battle involving four of his children—Lachlan, James, Elisabeth, and Prudence—who between them held equal stakes in the trust that controls Murdoch’s global media business. Murdoch apparently became convinced that, after his death, James, whose politics are relatively liberal, would, with his sisters, gang up on Lachlan, a rock-ribbed conservative, and set about softening, or even ending, the empire’s right-wing orientation.

Murdoch attempted to change the terms of the trust (even though it was supposed to be more or less irrevocable) to enshrine Lachlan’s control; the other children mounted a legal challenge. Following a secretive—and rococo—probate process, they won. So Murdoch and Lachlan bought them off. On Monday, it was announced that James, Elisabeth, and Prudence will each receive a little over a billion dollars to, essentially, go away.

Veteran Murdochologists likened the news to a dramatic season finale, and to Murdoch pulling “one final rabbit out of his hat.”Taken together, these two stories appeared to present a contradiction. The publication of the Epstein birthday book was a significant development in a tense legal battle between Murdoch and Trump.

And yet Murdoch securing Lachlan as his heir will doubtless rebound to Trump’s benefit by insuring the right-wing bona fides of Murdoch’s empire—and, in particular, Fox News, which has often propagandized on Trump’s behalf. There are various potential explanations for this discrepancy. The Journal and Fox may share an owner, but he has allowed them to cultivate different audiences and sensibilities; the Journal’s editorial board, although reliably conservative, isn’t afraid to give Trump a bloody nose, and its newsroom (although, perhaps, conservative in a subtler sense) has pursued rigorous reporting that has embarrassed the President.

(Even before Trump took office for the first time, it was the Journal that broke the story of hush-money payments to the former Playboy model Karen McDougal.) Murdoch might simply love a salacious scoop above all else. And his relationship with Trump has long been contradictory, or, at least, love-hate.

I think that there’s truth in all of these theories. But, with talk of Murdoch’s legacy now swirling, none of them—nor the Epstein lawsuit itself—should obscure how much Trump has done to boost Murdoch and how much Murdoch has done to boost Trump. Their relationship, ultimately, deserves to be remembered not as one of occasional antagonism but one of persistent mutual benefit.

Not that we’ve necessarily seen the season finale just yet.The story of Murdoch and Trump’s relationship has certainly been peppered with colorful insults. Shortly after Trump announced that he would run for President, in 2015, the New York Times depicted them as a pair of clashing titans and reported that Murdoch viewed Trump as a “phony.

” During that campaign, Murdoch was both privately skeptical of Trump’s odds and, on occasion, publicly disdainful of his policies, not least his nativist stance on immigration; at one point, Trump accused Murdoch of tweeting “evil” things about him. The author Michael Wolff would later write that, during the transition process after Trump won, Murdoch branded him a “fucking idiot.

” (Murdoch denied this.) Four years later, after Trump’s efforts to stay in power culminated in an insurrection, Murdoch told a friend that he wanted to make Trump a “non person.” Ahead of the 2024 Republican primary, he appeared to support Ron DeSantis as a challenger; when that didn’t work, he reportedly lobbied Trump to pick anyone other than J.

D. Vance as his running mate. (That didn’t work, either.) After Trump filed his Epstein lawsuit, he demanded that Murdoch testify promptly, on the indelicate grounds that he is ninety-four and might be “unavailable for in-person testimony at trial.” The Times is talking of clashing titans once again.

During this same period, however, there was a lot more evidence of warmth between the pair. In 2016, Murdoch eventually got on board the Trump train; the following year, the Times reported that they spoke often, that Murdoch would try to lift Trump when he was down, and that the relationship was “deeper and more enduring” than most in Trump’s life.

Trump’s denialism in the wake of his 2020 election loss may have displeased Murdoch, but he later admitted that he didn’t prevent various Fox stars from endorsing Trump’s lies. (Murdoch made this acknowledgment under oath, as part of a libel suit brought by Dominion, a voting-technology company, that Fox would eventually settle for $787.

5 million; a similar case filed by a separate company is ongoing, and recently threw up more embarrassing revelations of Trump sycophancy.) This year, Murdoch has been spotted at the Inauguration, in the Oval Office, and—just days before the Epstein story dropped—in Trump’s box at a soccer game. As of recently, they still talked.

This broader discrepancy, too, can be explained. I’ve written before that Murdoch both makes the weather and checks the forecast—strives to shape public opinion, in other words, while also anticipating or following it—and that these dual impulses are the key to understanding how he operates. He is hugely influential, but he has never been quite as omnipotent as some of his detractors believe.

Murdoch himself has always seemed to recognize this; in his native Australia, and then in the U.K., he backed politicians that he perceived as friendly to his interests—and who, crucially, looked like winning horses—including liberals, such as the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. When Trump proved popular, Murdoch came around.

As Jane Mayer wrote in this magazine, in 2019, he benefitted from several favorable regulatory maneuvers during Trump’s first term.Reading some of the more recent Murdochology, however, I’ve been struck by how, at least on occasion, he has appeared to underestimate his own power. According to documents released in the Dominion case, part of the reason that Fox indulged election denialism in 2020 was fear of losing viewers to fringier networks, which, as I’ve argued before, betrayed a surprising, reactive pessimism about its ability to ride out the storm (at the eventual cost of $787.

5 million). And Murdoch’s urgency in anointing Lachlan was reportedly rooted in a belief that his outlets are “the only faintly conservative voices against the monolithic liberal media,” and that “maintaining this is vital to the future of the English-speaking world.” Such thinking is grandiose but also strangely paranoid, not seeming to recognize how much the Western world has moved to the right—and how much credit Murdoch can take for that.

It likewise suggests that Murdoch views his legacy in strikingly political, and not merely financial, terms. (In attempting to change the structure of his family trust, which would be permissible only if it could be shown to benefit all of the trustees, Murdoch tried to link the two, contending that a future war over his empire’s ideological orientation would be bad for business—but the probate commissioner overseeing the case dismissed this rationale as a “charade.

”)It would be an oversimplification to say that Murdoch, who has long presented as an old-school Reagan-Thatcher type of conservative—and whose media properties have successfully promoted that school of thought on three continents—has been taken hostage by Trumpism, and its attendant repudiation of that world view.

Murdoch’s politics have always been flexible; even before Trump came to power, Murdoch seemed happy enough to let his titles peddle xenophobic bile while he personally espoused more globalist views. But if he is locking his empire onto a right-wing course, its direction of travel will surely be set by Trumpism and its populist corollaries around the world, which utterly define the conservatism of this moment and have left many of Murdoch’s own views in the dust.

In many ways, we are all living in a world Murdoch created. But Murdoch now seems content to live in Trump’s world—and to make plans to die in it as well.It could be argued that the future of Murdoch’s media empire will not be as consequential as its past, in a world that’s moving on from legacy media.

(The huge influence of Charlie Kirk, a right-wing youth activist who straddled the line between politics and new media, and who was shot and killed on Wednesday, is a testament to this.) During Trump’s first term, much was made of the symbiosis between his Administration and Fox—which traded both personnel and ideas.

By the dawn of Trump’s second term, a younger billionaire, Elon Musk, appeared to have supplanted Murdoch, and pundits were hailing the power of independent podcasters, comedians, and vloggers. (Earlier this year, Fox’s parent company appeared to make a concession to this new reality when it acquired a firm that works with various right-wing content creators.

) And yet Fox is hanging in there—thriving, even. Its ratings are up in an era when ratings typically go down. The Trump symbiosis is still in evidence, as I explored earlier this year, in a column about Fox hiring Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara. During Trump 1.0, I would sometimes roll my eyes when #Resistance liberals yelled about the network being the prime MAGA vector.

(Yes, Fox has helped to radicalize people, but it is clearly also serving a demand.) This time around, if anything, we should probably all be talking more about its persistent influence.Fox certainly still drives—or at least boosts—much of the right-wing narrative-making of this moment. (Kirk, for one, was a regular guest on the network.

) As CNN’s Brian Stelter noted, this did not include the Epstein birthday book, which scarcely merited a mention on the network earlier this week. Setting aside Democrats’ fantasies, the Epstein scandal won’t end Trump’s Presidency; that will not be Murdoch’s legacy. And yet Murdoch’s apparent willingness to defend the Journal’s aggressive pursuit of a story that has been a continuous source of embarrassment for the President remains a curious wrinkle in what is surely his final act.

According to the Washington Post, after Trump filed suit, Murdoch told associates, “I’m 94 years old and I will not be intimidated.” Murdoch is nothing if not bloody-minded. Perhaps he even spies the potential for a line of nuance in critical obituaries—that, in some sense, he stood up for journalism to the last.

Or, as other observers have predicted, he might cave after all. If it ends up being in his interests, it wouldn’t be remotely surprising to see Murdoch follow in the footsteps of other media moguls and settle with Trump, however legally solid the Journal’s case may be. Indeed, if his succession planning proves anything, it’s that when playing hardball doesn’t resolve a problem, throwing money at it can make it go away.

His deal with his kids may not be the final rabbit he pulls from his hat. He might yet do as Trump requested, and take care of it. ♦