Rupert Murdoch shows up at Republican convention

MILWAUKEE – The Trump-Murdoch alliance appears alive again.

Mr Rupert Murdoch once confided to friends in the fall of 2020 that he thought

Donald Trump was going “increasingly mad” and would be “a danger” in a second term

– and happily predicted that by the end of that year, “Trump will be becoming irrelevant”.

Two years later, he backed Trump’s chief rival in the Republican primaries, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, bestowing the latter with a brute-force promotional heft that only he could deliver.

But on July 16, Mr Murdoch, the recently retired global media titan, was in Milwaukee to take his place among the rank-and-file Republican faithful.

And with that, he became one of the most prominent one-time Trump detractors to line up behind the former president and join a convention that has doubled as a resounding show of Republican unity.

Mr Murdoch, 93, has not been a regular at conventions.

And his attendance here was, in part, to give support to his ranks of reporters at the convention – including those who work for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, Fox News and others.

But his appearance is also another extraordinary turn in his contorted relationship with Trump. The latter’s unshakable hold over the audience of Mr Murdoch’s major cable network, Fox News, has kept the tycoon yoked to the former president for the better part of the past decade.

The relationship between Mr Murdoch and Trump broke hard and seemingly inexorably in late 2020. Fox News became the first network to declare Trump had lost Arizona and refused to reverse the call when Trump’s family and strategists insisted victory there was still in hand.

Fox’s Trump-loving audience initially punished the network by briefly taking its ratings elsewhere – and, in some cases, joining in protest chants at rallies and protests.

But Mr Murdoch and his Fox News team began winning them back after offering more coverage promoting Trump’s stolen-election lies.

Then the company paid dearly for it, with a record-high defamation settlement of US$787 million (S$1.05 billion) to the voting machine company at the centre of the conspiracy theories, Dominion Voting Systems.

The Dominion case also led to the public exposure of several embarrassing text messages in which Mr Murdoch lacerated Trump.

Trump has responded in kind, at one point writing on Truth Social that Mr Murdoch was a “Maga hating globalist” – one who was “abetting THE DESTRUCTION OF AMERICA”.

Maga stands for Make America Great Again, a slogan popularised by Trump.

But as Mr Murdoch also acknowledged in the Dominion case, his audience was enamoured with Trump, and in the long run, doing anything to antagonise him “would be stupid”.

The two had not been in touch since the 2020 election until a couple of months ago, when Mr Murdoch shared his enthusiasm for Governor Doug Burgum of North Dakota as Trump’s running mate, according to a person briefed on their conversation.

On a recent appearance on the podcast of Mr Clay Travis and Mr Buck Sexton, Trump indicated that the two had spoken more since.

“I speak with Rupert Murdoch a lot,” Trump said, adding” “He’s 100 per cent sharp; he’s as sharp as a tack.”

That does not mean that Trump is taking all of Mr Murdoch’s advice. Trump chose Senator J.D. Vance as his running mate, leaving Mr Burgum at the altar.

And on the first night of the convention, when Trump surprised delegates by taking his place in the hall, he took a seat beside Mr Tucker Carlson, a former Fox News host, who was forced out in 2023.

On July 16, Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr went after Fox News and Mr Murdoch, telling Axios: “There was a time where if you wanted to survive in the Republican Party, you had to bend the knee to him or to others.” He added: “I don’t think that’s the case anymore.”

The younger Trump also said that he had been blacklisted by Fox. The company noted that he was to appear on Fox & Friends on July 17 and had been interviewed on the network as recently as July 15. NYTIMES