When Rupert Murdoch is angry with Donald Trump he lets his newspapers do the talking.
Now the volatile relationship between the pair has hit a new low after the media mogul finds himself “on the outside” with a President who prefers to take counsel from Rupert’s “tech bro” rivals.
The on-off marriage of convenience between Trump and Murdoch appeared to be heading for the rocks after Rupert’s News Corp titles launched a furious salvo against the President’s Kremlin-pleasing dismissal of Volodymyr Zelensky as a “dictator”.
Accusing Trump of “turning the truth completely upside down” with a “despicable” attempt to squeeze Ukraine for cash, the New York Post ran a cover photo of President Putin with the headline “This is a dictator.”
Despite being an honoured guest in the Oval Office just weeks ago, where the President called the 93 year-old an “amazing guy”, Murdoch has emerged as the administration’s most unlikely media critic.
Whilst Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos have bowed to the new reality, with Meta dropping fact checkers and the Washington Post owner announcing that its opinion pages will now cleave to the President’s agenda, Murdoch has doubled down on a long-standing scepticism over Trump.
As well as attacking the President for appeasing Putin, the Wall Street Journal called his threat to impose tariffs “the Dumbest Trade War in History”.
X owner Elon Musk’s emergence as Trump’s self-titled “first buddy” is displeasing to Murdoch, who has traditionally employed his influence to steer Presidents and Prime Ministers in private discussions.
The Post rebuked Elon Musk’s “job-slashing triumphalism”, telling the world’s richest man to “knock if off” when he expressed glee over the impact of his government efficiency drive.
A News Corp insider said: “Trump took Rupert’s calls in the White House in his first term. This time round he doesn’t listen to anyone except maybe Musk. Rupert doesn’t like being on the outside.”
“When Rupert disagrees with Trump, the newspaper man in him can’t resist slapping Trump down, however powerful Trump is.”
The seasoned Murdoch observer said of the relationship with Trump: “They are like a bickering old married couple. They irritate each other but they also need each other at some level.”
Fox News, America’s most-watched cable news platform, is the bond which ensures the tempestuous Murdoch/Trump is never truly severed.
“Its audience is the pro-Trump, Maga heartland. He watches it all the time. And it makes a lot of money for the Murdochs,“ the insider said.
Murdoch would be in big trouble if he berated Trump to the point where the President boycotted the channel or even threatened Fox’s licences – the Federal Communications Commission has opened probes into multiple US broadcasters that previously criticised Trump.
The Murdoch papers haven’t completely broken with Trump. After its lacerating headlines, the Post published a more conciliatory editorial this week praising Trump for a “course correction” over Ukraine and agreeing a minerals deal.
A News Corp staffer added: “It’s surprising to see the papers going for Trump. It must be personal because Rupert’s main motivation now is making sure Fox News and his papers push a right-wing line after he’s not around. It feels erratic, nobody knows what the next move will be.”
Murdoch’s support for Ukraine is said to be “personal” – he called Zelensky to offer support after a Fox News reporter covering the conflict was seriously injured by Russian ordinance. His papers have consistently backed free trade policies and low tariffs.
Trump this week used his Truth Social platform to complain: “I don’t understand The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board, never have” in a post rejecting warnings that tariffs will harm Michigan’s automobile industry as “sooo WRONG.”
Former editor of The Sun David Yelland praised the Wall Street Journal for “holding Trump to account, doing its job; As a student of newspapers I commend it, unlike Bezos, Murdoch is a trouble-maker who doesn’t care what (the) powerful think. Never has.”
Trump’s transactional relationship with Murdoch dates from the late 80s when the publicity-hungry property magnate’s explosive divorce from Ivana Trump was played out on the front pages of the New York Post.
A regular slot on Fox News gave Trump a platform for the star of The Apprentice to build a political movement.
But Murdoch threatened to make Trump a “non-person” and claimed the former President was going “increasingly mad” over his refusal to accept defeat in the 2020 election, documents showed.
All Or Nothing, the latest book by Michael Wolff, Trump’s unofficial biographer, claims that Murdoch made pleading attempts to get back into the President’s good graces during the 2024 campaign.
He reports that Murdoch phoned so often that Trump started cracking jokes about how the nonagenarian “could not remember that he had called him the day before.”
There was a cringeworthy encounter when Murdoch introduced Trump to his new, fifth wife, Elena Zhukova. “She’s Russian!” Murdoch is said to have told him, appealing to Trump’s supposed Russophilia, Wolff writes.
Trump is said to have used a meeting with Murdoch to complain about Fox News airing ads for his rival Kamala Harris and rejected Murdoch’s advice to choose former secretary of state Mike Pompeo as his vice-presidential running mate.
Trump called the revelations in All Or Nothing, a “total FAKE JOB” written by a “total LOSER.”
The Trump spat coincided with a tumultuous week for Rupert with well-sourced reports laying bare the bitter family feud which erupted over the patriarch’s attempt to install eldest son Lachlan as his undisputed successor, effectively disenfranchising three of his siblings.
The News Corp staffer said the Succession-style infighting threatens to destabilise the media empire. “Rupert and James are taking chunks out of each other in public. That would never have been allowed to happen before.”
“The whole business could come crashing down and be sold off if there is no agreement over the future. Is that what Rupert wants his life work to become?”
Rupert’s failure to unpick a family trust that gave the children equal voting rights after his death means the Murdoch empire could be broken up and sold off in 2030, when the trust expires, sealed court papers lodged in the Reno court battle show.
In an interview with The Atlantic, James Murdoch, the second-eldest of the three children Rupert shares with former journalist Anna dePeyster, called his father a “misogynist”.
James described a Reno deposition, during which he was asked “Have you ever done anything successful on your own?” and told that he and his siblings were “white, privileged, multibillionaire trust-fund babies.” Rupert himself was directing the lawyer’s questioning, James said, which was “f***ing twisted”.
Days later, one of Rupert’s most-trusted columnists called James “a most ungrateful, entitled and treacherous hypocrite” in Australia’s Herald Sun, one of the media magnate’s own newspapers.
Andrew Bolt, who said he had not been asked to write the piece by Lachlan or his team, argued that it would be a disaster for freedom of speech and democracy if Fox News was neutered and there was “no mainstream outlet for conservative voices” – arguments Rupert had deployed in the Reno case.
A spokesperson for Rupert and Lachlan dismissed the claims made by James as a “litany of falsehoods” and which came “from someone who no longer works for the companies but still benefits from them financially.”
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