Rupert Murdoch now has a Trump problem Croatia will join the Schengen area in 2023 without border controls

Rupert Murdoch is one of the most powerful people on the planet. His media empire spans from Australia to the UK to the US. This includes tabloids such as the Sun and the New York Post, as well as respected quality newspapers such as the Times and the Wall Street Journal. Most importantly, Murdoch controls Fox News, the most politically influential television station in the United States.

Murdoch himself is considered conservative. In business, however, he is an unbridled opportunist. In 1997, for example, he helped make the Social Democrat Tony Blair Prime Minister of Great Britain, albeit reluctantly. “It was like having sex with a porcupine,” Murdoch would later explain. “Very, very careful.”

Murdoch also distanced himself from Donald Trump for a long time. The real estate magnate seemed too vulgar and clumsy. However, when Trump got his way with the Republicans, Fox News not only accepted him, he praised him. Individual star moderators such as Sean Hannity became Trump’s de facto advisers, and Trump could tune in at any time to the popular morning show “Fox and Friends” and spew lengthy monologues there undisturbed.

For Murdoch, the close relationship with Trump paid off twice. Fox News viewership skyrocketed, as did profits. At the same time, Murdoch now had direct access to the White House. Trump would have regularly asked Murdoch for advice, to flatter the publisher’s ego. It was easy to get over the fact that Fox News is now being threatened with a billion-dollar lawsuit because the broadcaster has uncritically accepted allegations from the Trump camp that its computer software was manipulated in the 2020 election.

Murdoch, however, cannot believe that Trump is no longer performing. This development is in the offing. Americans are losing interest in the ex-president. Whether it’s Fox News ratings or Google queries, both decline when Trump’s name is mentioned.

This is no wonder. Herschel Walker’s Senate loss in Georgia was the icing on the cake of a losing streak the likes of which Trump has never seen before. The ex-football player should have laid the groundwork for Trump’s triumphant return to the White House. The ex-president personally launched his political career. “Wouldn’t it be great if Herschel Walker ran for the U.S. Senate,” Trump said in March 2021. “He was unstoppable.”

Trump is confused

Walker’s election was intended to mark the culmination of a Republican victory in the midterm elections and a prelude to Trump’s renewed candidacy for president. It shouldn’t be. The “red wave” in the midterm elections failed to materialize and Walker lost the election to Raphael Warnock.

Trump is now in a mess. Against the advice of his inner circle, the ex-president announced his candidacy ahead of the Georgia midterm elections with a speech so boring that even Fox News tuned in. Most of the Trump-backed candidates who bet on the Big Lie were not elected. And in Ron DeSantis, the ex-president has an opponent who is seriously dangerous for him.

The behavior of the former president is also becoming more and more confused. He is dating anti-Semitic rapper Kanye West and his friend and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes. In an absurd tweet on his Truth Scocial platform, Trump calls for the repeal of the Constitution, breaking the holiest taboo of conservative Americans in particular. In addition, a New York court has found the Trump Group guilty of tax fraud and more classified documents have been seized from a warehouse of the ex-president in Florida.

All this means that not only are individual Republicans distancing themselves from Trump, but the Murdoch media is becoming skeptical. The New York Post and the Wall Street Journal have already written him off. Above all, support at Fox News is becoming brittle. Following Walker’s defeat, star presenter Laura Ingraham stated that she was “pissed off” (soured). Meanwhile, Sean Hannity demands that Republicans finally get serious about controlling mail voting. This is an indirect criticism of Trump, who describes mail-in voting as a central part of his imagined voter fraud.

Trump is not just a problem for Fox News. Should Ron DeSantis actually step into the ring against the ex-president, the Grand Old Party would face a fratricidal war like in the 1960s, when Barry Goldwater and Nelson Rockefeller blocked each other and helped the Democrats to a landslide victory.