In February, Rupert Murdoch joined Donald Trump in the Oval Office, where the president lavished the now 94-year-old media mogul 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. It was public confirmation that the two men had reached a détente after years of hostilities.
Five months later, 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.”
Murdoch might have moved on from Trump, but his audience hadn’t. Fox News’ ratings collapsed in the days after Trump lost in 2020, as viewers switched to right-wing rivals Newsmax and One America News. Chris Stirewalt, Fox’s politics editor at the time of the election, compared making the Arizona call to “serving up green beans to viewers who had been spoon-fed ice cream sundaes for years,” adding that it “came as a terrible shock to their systems.”
What happened next shows the perils Murdoch faces in his present war with Trump: To rebuild Fox News’ audience, Murdoch allowed Fox anchors to promote Trump’s stolen-election conspiracies on air. Two election-equipment makers often cited in those claims, Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic, sued Fox for defamation. Fox settled with Dominion for $787.5 million in April 2023, on the day the trial was set to begin. The Smartmatic litigation is ongoing.
There was also a personal cost to Murdoch’s decision to go all in on Trump’s lies: Murdoch’s son James essentially stopped talking to him because he was so upset by Fox’s propaganda, sources told me. The father-son rift over Trump was a factor in Murdoch’s failed attempt last year to rewrite the family trust so that he could hand the media empire to James’s older brother, Lachlan. (Earlier this year, a spokesperson for Murdoch and Lachlan told The New York Times, “A significant part of the rationale for this amendment was consistent leaking by individuals seeking to undermine and disrupt both the Murdoch Family Trust and the two companies.” A rep for James and his sisters said they would not comment at the time.)
Now, with this lawsuit, Trump is essentially forcing Murdoch to choose again between his family’s business interests and his personal principles. This time, Trump holds more cards. Trump’s leverage over Murdoch is that the press baron knows the president has the power to turn his audience against him. On Monday, the White House banned Journal reporters from officially traveling on Trump’s upcoming trip to Scotland—a warning shot that suggests this is only the beginning.
And there’s a sign that Murdoch has already begun to bow: Fox News is scarcely covering the feud.
CORRECTION: As originally published, this article stated that Murdoch had joined Trump at a soccer match on July 13. Murdoch was not in attendance.