Why Rupert Murdoch Is Finally Done with Donald Trump A politician on the wane is of little value to the media mogul.
Rupert Murdoch speaks during an event in New York. | Mary Altaffer/AP Photo
Opinion by JACK SHAFER 07/25/2022 03:10 PM EDT Jack Shafer is POLITICO’s senior media writer.
The slow learners at the New York Post and Wall Street Journal editorial pages had a revelation on Friday. As if synchronized to sing the same tune at the same time by their owner, Rupert Murdoch, they cited the proceedings of the Jan. 6 Committee to conclude that Donald Trump had failed to uphold his oath to defend and protect the Constitution.
How could Murdoch, whose editorial pages and Fox News Channel defended Trump for the past six years, have suddenly turned on the former president so viciously? As I, the Jury’s detective Mike Hammer said to love interest Charlotte Manning when she asked the same question as he gut-shot her dead, “It was easy.”
Although Murdoch’s breakup dazed some members of the commentariat, it shouldn’t have. Murdoch has no friends. He has no loyalties. He has no principles. And never has. His support of politicians has always been transactional and extractive.
Now entering the final days of his political career, Trump is expendable, making the Post’s and Journal’s twin discoveries in the same moment of Trump’s crimes against the Constitution a convenient cover story for the orange man.
Murdoch has always been a political cad, swooning and then dumping his political partners when a better-looking one comes along. Murdoch’s next fling looks to be Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, whom Fox News has slathered with positive attention in recent months.
It should be noted that Murdoch’s alliance with Trump was an unholy affair in which Fox, the Journal editorial page and the New York Post disregarded the president’s high crimes and misdemeanors in exchange for the mogul’s access to the White House.
Trump wasn’t the genocidal tyrant’s first pick for president in 2016. In July 2015, when Murdoch still tweeted, he used the site to dis the future president: “When is Donald Trump going to stop embarrassing his friends, let alone the whole country?”
When Fox refused to kiss Trump’s ring during the campaign, Trump boycotted the network’s primary debate. And as I’ve written before, Murdoch opposed Trump’s signature policies on immigrants, the Muslim ban and trade. Only after Trump clinched the nomination did Murdoch and his media empire become Trumpy.
Currently dissolving his fourth marriage to model Jerry Hall, the 91-year-old Murdoch is practiced in ending partnerships that no longer benefit him. In the United Kingdom, he has switched his editorial support back and forth between the Tories and Labour, depending on which party was willing to serve him better.
He performs similar political puppetry in Australia.
The Murdoch-Trump union, never very stable in the first place, has been vectoring toward splitsville for some time. In early June, the New York Post rattled Trump’s cage with an editorial calling him “a prisoner of his own ego” and instructing him to concede the 2020 election. “Look forward!” the editorial urged.
“The 2024 field is rich. You have Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, former UN ambassador Nikki Haley … the list goes on. All candidates who embrace conservative policies without the preoccupations of the Don.”
Ten days later, Murdoch retainer Piers Morgan wrote a New York Post column explicitly urging Republicans to junk Donald for Ronald. Fox News has tilted ever so slightly against the Trump line in recent weeks, with news anchor Bret Baier acknowledging that the hearings made Trump “look horrific” and that Trump’s inaction was “very telling.”
Trump has complained about Fox’s new posture, too. Today, he scorched Fox & Friends, his former home away from home, for “botching” his poll numbers. “That show has been terrible — gone to the ‘dark side,’” Trump posted on Truth Social. Even FoxNews.com recently posted a three-minute montage of Trump voters vowing to back a different horse — like DeSantis — in 2024.
In a June 22 Gettr post, Trump co-conniver Steve Bannon discerned the coming breakup, writing in broken English, “The Murdochs — Australians via England — not American, have never sacrificed anything for this Country — their entire media Empire has turned on Trump — Fox News, Wall Street Journal , New York Post , Times of London , The Sun etc etc etc——all lockstep against Trump.”
Bannon wasn’t exaggerating for once. Murdoch himself signaled the split last November when he blew Trump a big, wet goodbye kiss at his company’s annual shareholder meeting, which the Wall Street Journal excerpted.
Said Murdoch, “The current American political debate is profound, whether about education or welfare or economic opportunity. It is crucial that conservatives play an active, forceful role in that debate, but that will not happen if President Trump stays focused on the past. The past is the past, and the country is now in a contest to define the future.”
Although it looks great in headlines, the Murdoch-Trump divorce isn’t the seismic event that some pretend it is. The two masters of demagoguery have had their differences over the years. In 2015, Murdoch was calling Trump a “phony” to his friends and a “fucking idiot,” according to Michael Wolff’s 2018 book Fire and Fury.
These insults did not prevent Trump from using Murdoch or Murdoch from using Trump. If Trump runs for president in 2024 and buries the field, there will be plenty of time for Murdoch to do what he traditionally does: Place his bet on the leading pony.
Like a pair of powerful gangsters who quarrel over how to divide the spoils, Murdoch and Trump will reconcile if they determine it’s in their mutual interests to reconcile. How could they possibly do that? It would be easy.
By Tim Kreider Mr. Kreider is the author of, most recently, the essay collection “I Wrote This Book Because I Love You.”
Ten years ago, I wrote an essay called “The Busy Trap .. https://archive.nytimes.com/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/30/the-busy-trap/ ,” about the curse of “busyness” that seemed endemic at the time. The treadmill had been imperceptibly increasing its speed for a while, and people were nervously starting to notice. As happens with a lot of unavoidable evils, they tried to rebrand their frantic busyness as a virtue. “Busy — so busy, crazy busy,” was the answer you got whenever you asked how they were. I came out, in my essay, as anti-busy; I advocated idling, daydreaming, hanging out and goofing off. My conclusion: “Life is too short to be busy.”
I guess a lot of other people had been thinking the same thing. For a few days, that essay was the thing everyone linked to, reposted and emailed. Other writers got paid to write responses to it. Someone even “debunked” it [--LOL--], as though it were a fake Bigfoot film. Entrepreneurial self-help gurus cited it and invited me to conferences. “The Colbert Report” even called, but I was unreachable in the Idaho panhandle at my friend Carolyn’s anniversary party, for which my agent has never really forgiven me. (Meg, I am sorry; Carolyn, I blame you; Mr. Colbert, I am still available.)
A decade later, people aren’t trying to sell busyness as a virtue anymore, not even to themselves. A new generation has grown to adulthood that’s never known capitalism as a functioning economic system. My generation, X, was the first postwar cohort to be downwardly mobile, but millennials were the first to know it going in. Our country’s oligarchs forgot to maintain the crucial Horatio Alger fiction that anyone can get ahead with hard work — or maybe they just dropped it, figuring we no longer had any choice. Through the internet, we could peer enviously at our neighbors in civilized countries, who get monthlong vacations, don’t have to devote decades to paying for their college degrees, and aren’t terrified of going broke if they get sick. To young people, America seems less like a country than an inescapable web of scams, and “hard work” less like a virtue than a propaganda slogan, inane as “Just say no.”
The pandemic was the bomb cyclone of our discontents; it not only gave all us nonessential workers an experience of mandatory sloth — which, for many, turned out to be not altogether unpleasant — but also dredged up a lakeful of long-submerged truths. It turns out that millions of people never actually needed to waste days of their lives sitting in traffic or pantomime “work” under managerial scrutiny eight hours a day. We learned that nurses, cashiers, truckers and delivery people (who’ve always been too busy to brag about it) actually ran the world and the rest of us were mostly useless supernumeraries.The brutal hierarchies of work shifted, for the first time in recent memory, in favor of labor,and the outraged whines of former social Darwinists were a pleasure to savor.
Of course, everyone is still busy — worse than busy, exhausted, too wiped at the end of the day to do more than stress-eat, binge-watch and doomscroll — but no one’s calling it anything other than what it is anymore: an endless, frantic hamster wheel for survival.
You’ve seen all the headlines about the Great Resignation — “Gen Z and Millennials Would Rather Be Unemployed Than Unhappy in a Job,” Business Insider reported, nervously. Even the youth of China are embracing the virtues of sloth, with the lying-flat and sang movements .. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/22/opinion/lying-flat-work-rest.html . On YouTube, the faux guru Self-Help Singh exhorts, “Do nothing .. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rerBnAKPn0 .” [Insert: embedded here]
I think people are enervated not just by the Sisyphean pointlessness of their individual labors but also by the fact that they’re working in and for a society in which, increasingly, they have zero faith or investment. The future their elders are preparing to bequeath to them is one that reflects the fondest hopes of the same ignorant bigots a lot of them fled their hometowns to escape. American conservatism, which is demographically terminal and knows it, is acting like a moribund billionaire adding sadistic codicils to his will.
More young people are opting not to have kids not only because they can’t afford them but also because they assume they’ll have only a scorched or sodden wasteland to grow up in. An increasingly popular retirement plan is figuring civilization will collapse before you have to worry about it. I’m not sure anyone’s composed a more eloquent epitaph for the planet than the stand-up comedian Kath Barbadoro, who tweeted: “It’s pretty funny that the world is ending and we all just have to keep going to our little jobs lol.”
Midcentury science fiction writers assumed that the increased productivity brought on by mechanization would give workers an oppressive amount of leisure time, that our greatest threats would be boredom and ennui. But these authors’ prodigious imaginations were hobbled by their humanity and rationality; they’d forgotten that the world is ordered not by reason or decency but by rapacious avarice.
In the actual dystopian future we now inhabit, the oligarchs have realized they can work everyone harder, pay them less, eliminate benefits, turn every human institution from medicine to corrections into a racket, charge far more for basic rights and services than people in any other nation would stand for without revolting, and get rich beyond the penny ante dreams of a Carnegie or Astor.
In the past few decades, capitalism has exponentially increased the creation of wealth for the already incredibly wealthy at the negligible expense of the well-being, dignity and happiness of most of humanity,
plus the nominal cost of a mass extinction and the destruction of the biosphere — like cutting out the inefficient business of digestion and metabolism by pouring a fine bottle of wine directly into the toilet, thereby eliminating the middleman of you.
Everyone knows how productive you can be when you’re avoiding something. We are currently experiencing the civilizational equivalent of that anxiety you feel when you have something due the next day that you haven’t even started thinking about and yet still you sit there, helplessly watching whole seasons of mediocre TV or compulsively clicking through quintillions of memes even as your brain screams at you — the same way we scream at our politicians about guns and abortion and climate change — to do something.
I once watched in awe as my girlfriend, who’d been lying inert on the couch, hypnotized with dread of whatever she had to do next, roused herself by intoning, “One, two, three” — and on “three,” immediately got up and swung into action.
I have a shameful confession to make: Secretly, I am not lazy. I’ve learned that if I do literally nothing for more than a year, two at most, I start to get depressed. I’m not recanting my old manifesto. I still hope to make it to my grave without ever getting a job job — showing up for eight or more hours a day to a place with fluorescent lighting where I’m expected to feign bushido devotion to a company that could fire me tomorrow and someone’s allowed to yell at you but you’re not allowed to yell back.
But once I become genuinely engaged in a project, I can become fanatically absorbed, spending hundreds of hours on it, no matter how useless and unremunerative. As a teacher, I edit my students’ writing with a nit-picking precision and big-picture ambition they may likely never experience again. And I don’t believe most people are lazy. They would love to be fully, deeply engaged in something worthwhile, something that actually mattered, instead of forfeiting their limited hours on Earth to make a little more money for men they’d rather throw fruit at as they pass by in tumbrels.
It’s no coincidence that so many social movements arose during the enforced idleness of quarantine. One important function of jobs is to keep you too preoccupied and tired to do anything else. Grade school teachers called it “busywork” — pointless, time-wasting tasks to keep you from acting up and bothering them.
Enough with the busywork already. We’ve been “productive” enough — produced way too much, in fact. And there is too much that urgently needs to be done: a republic to salvage, a civilization to reimagine and its infrastructure to reinvent, innumerable species to save, a world to restore and millions who are impoverished, imprisoned, illiterate, sick or starving. All while we waste our time at work.
Tim Kreider .. http://www.timkreider.com/ .. is a cartoonist and the author of two essay collections, “We Learn Nothing” and, most recently, “I Wrote This Book Because I Love You.” He writes the newsletter The Loaf .. http://timkreider.substack.com/ .
That's great!. I quickly touched on the crumb trail you left and look forward to getting into it. Not sure what can be saved and what needs to be amputated (re Capitalism, Power Structures, etc,) but we have super computers now - I don't have to.
Speaking of which, this board is a very good service. One posts a question, an honest one - meaning; trying to discover something new [.. if not, what is usually obvious is someone beating the drum of their agenda or limit of their interest in knowing more] and often one of the many quality posters/researchers has relevant input.
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