After a lackluster night for MAGA candidates, the New York Post, the WSJ editorial page, and Fox News have shown signs of moving on from Trump.
Since Donald Trump secured the Republican nomination in 2016, and particularly after he won the White House later that year, the Murdoch media empire has remained in Trump’s corner.
Of course there were holdouts, but most of them have been vanquished. At the Murdochs’ flagship enterprise of Fox News, two longtime anchors, Shepherd Smith and Chris Wallace, left over frustration with the opinion side’s fealty to the former president. The Dispatch‘s Jonah Goldberg and Stephen Hayes, both contributors to the cable news network, followed suit over the release of a Tucker Carlson documentary that suggested that the January 6 Capitol riot was a false-flag event.
But after Republicans’ disappointing midterm performance — which has been attributed, in part, to both Trump’s unpopularity with the electorate and his elevation of subpar down-ballot candidates — it seems that Murdoch-owned properties are making a collective heel-turn.
At the New York Post, Trump was portrayed as Humpty Dumpty on the cover of Thursday’s print edition, and his caricature was accompanied by the caption: “Don (who couldn’t build a wall) had a great fall — can all the GOP’s men put the party back together again?” Inside, conservative commentator John Podhoretz mused that “the surest way to lose in these midterms was to be a politician endorsed by Trump,” critiquing the former president for his “pathological inability to accept his own failure,” as well as “his desperate need to elevate cringe-inducing boot-lickers while punishing politicians capable of an independent thought.” The cover ran the day after the paper highlighted Ron DeSantis’s crushing victory in the Florida gubernatorial race with the headline “DeFuture.”
The Wall Street Journal chimed in with its own scathing editorial, deeming Trump “the Republican Party’s biggest loser,” and wondering if “Republicans are sick and tired of losing” after poor performances in the last several election cycles. The view of the Journal itself was supplemented by several columns with similar theses, including “With No Red Wave, Trump Is Out at Sea,” and “The Trump Liability for the GOP.”
The mounting frustration with Trump has shown its face on Fox’s previously friendly airwaves, too.
On Wednesday night, Jesse Watters questioned why Trump had been so active in promoting his favored Republican candidates during the primary, but held so fast to his wallet during the general election.
“J. D. Vance won in Ohio, congratulations. Trump endorsed him. I like J.D. But [Senate minority leader Mitch] McConnell had to plow about $32 million to help J.D. win in a state that Trump won by eight,” noted Watters before eventually observing that “Trump’s sitting on a massive war chest in Mar-a-Lago — where did that money go? We don’t know.” Earlier this year, Trump’s team revealed that his super PAC was sitting on $122 million, but it spent only a small fraction of that number on the 2022 midterms.
Another opinion host, Laura Ingraham, who vociferously defended Trump throughout his presidency, submitted that “the populist movement is about ideas” rather than “any one person.”
“If the voters conclude that you’re putting your own ego or your own grudges ahead of what’s good for the country, they’re going to look elsewhere, period,” she continued.
Carlson was a notable dissenter, arguing that “Trump has always been a mixed blessing politically,” whose “downsides are marbled in with the upsides.”
“In this case, he’s certainly not the single cause of anything,” he said.
Trump has reacted heatedly to the stream of criticism on his social-media platform, Truth Social. In one post, the former president mused that “for me, Fox News was always gone, even in 2015–16 when I began my ‘journey,’ but now they’re really gone.”
“Such an opportunity for another media outlet to make an absolute fortune, and do good for America. Let’s see what happens?” added Trump. In another post, he claimed that he had done a “great job” working to elect Republicans and urged his followers to remember that he is a “‘Stable Genius.'”
Trump and Rupert Murdoch, the patriarch of the Murdoch empire, have a complicated relationship. In 2017, the New York Times reported that, in the early days of Trump’s presidency, Murdoch enjoyed frequent and direct access to Trump, who allegedly counted the mogul “as one of his closest confidants.” But if Trump’s tweet is to be taken at face value, it appears he has not forgotten Fox’s initial skepticism of his candidacy during the 2016 presidential primaries.
Moreover, CNN’s Oliver Darcy wrote in August that Lachlan Murdoch, Rupert’s son and the CEO of Fox Corporation, was privately critical of Trump. Lachlan, according to Darcy, had told others that “it would be bad for the country” if Trump ran for president again in 2024. This came after the Times reported that Trump was being deemphasized at Fox because of the Murdochs’ discomfort with his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.