On Sunday, July 13, Donald Trump hosted Rupert Murdoch in his suite to watch the FIFA Club World Cup final at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. Murdoch’s attendance at the high-profile soccer match further signaled that Trump and the 94-year-old media mogul had reached a détente after years of hostilities. In February, Murdoch joined Trump in the Oval Office, where the president lavished him with praise. “Rupert Murdoch is in a class by himself—he’s an amazing guy,” Trump told reporters as Murdoch looked on approvingly from across the room.
Four days after the FIFA match, Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal shattered the peace. The paper reported that Trump had contributed a signed drawing of a naked woman as part of a 50th-birthday gift for convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. “Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret,” Trump wrote to Epstein in 2003, according to the Journal. The article deepened a crisis that has been consuming the White House since the Justice Department said earlier this month that it wouldn’t release additional documents from its Epstein investigation. The Journal’s suggestive article fueled a perception that Trump was burying Epstein files because he had something to hide about his well-documented friendship with Epstein.
Trump vehemently denied the Journal’s reporting—“I never wrote a picture in my life,” he told the paper—and filed a $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the publication’s parent company and Murdoch, amongst others. The ferocity of Trump’s pushback is an indication of how seriously he may view his Epstein liabilities. The scandal opened a rare rift within his MAGA base, which largely views Epstein as the avatar of a sex trafficking ring operated by and for the world’s elite. By attacking the Journal, Trump has rallied his supporters.
But the lawsuit also reflects Trump’s deeper suspicions about Murdoch’s intentions. Despite the reliably in-the-tank coverage Trump has long enjoyed from Murdoch’s Fox News and New York Post, the relationship between the two men has proven volatile over the years. Trump has told people that Murdoch betrayed him because Murdoch had promised him that the Journal wouldn’t publish the article when Trump called Murdoch prior to publication to complain. “Rupert assured Trump it wouldn’t run,” said a person who spoke with Trump at the time. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt emailed me: “The Wall Street Journal knowingly ran a defamatory story with no evidence to back up their claim, and they will pay a price for their lies against the president of the United States.”
A spokesperson for Murdoch declined to comment on Murdoch’s private conversations with Trump. The Journal has stood by its story, with a representative telling reporters: “We have full confidence in the rigor and accuracy of our reporting, and will vigorously defend against any lawsuit.”
The question now is whether Murdoch will capitulate to avoid yet another costly legal battle or risk everything on the principle that even presidents can’t intimidate the press. Given their history, Trump seems to be betting that Murdoch’s business imperatives will win out over his journalistic ones.
In Trump’s view, the Journal’s Epstein scoop confirmed Trump’s previous belief regarding Murdoch’s desire to damage his presidency. I reported that, in 2015, Murdoch told then Fox News CEO Roger Ailes to direct Fox debate moderators Megyn Kelly, Bret Baier, and Chris Wallace to hit Trump with tough questions at the first primary debate. “This has gone on long enough,” Murdoch told Ailes. That night, Kelly grilled Trump over his history of calling women “fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals.”
As Trump survived the debate, romped through the primary, and upset Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, Fox News fell quickly in line, though its occasional flourishes of independence have vexed Trump. On election night in 2020, Trump exploded when the network was the first to call Arizona for Joe Biden, a battleground victory that essentially sealed Trump’s defeat. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner phoned Murdoch to question Fox’s choice to make the call. Murdoch later testified that he told Kushner, “Well, the numbers are the numbers.” The Arizona decision became a locus of Trump’s fury. “This is an embarrassment to this country. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election,” Trump fumed at an early-morning press conference in the East Room of the White House.
Murdoch was by then already trying to build a post-Trump Republican Party. Shortly before the 2020 election, Murdoch hosted Ron DeSantis for lunch at his Bel Air vineyard, Moraga, and told the Florida governor that Fox News would support him for president in 2024. After DeSantis won a decisive reelection in 2022, the New York Post ran a front page that proclaimed: “DeFuture.”
