August 1, 2024 • 25 mins
In this week’s episode, Michael and James dive into the complex and often tumultuous relationship between Rupert Murdoch and Donald Trump. How did Murdoch, a media titan, come to detest the very president he helped elevate? What are the latest developments in the Murdoch family saga, including the ongoing court case and shifting political alliances? And what is Trump thinking about his VP pick? Tune in to find out.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
So I'm one of Rupert Murdoch's biographers, and I spent
basically a year with him. One of the Murdoch dreams
was to always elect the president. The bitter irony is
that president turns out to be Donald Trump, who he detests, disdains,
has always, throughout his life in New York, looked at
(00:26):
Donald Trump as a clown. Donald Trump actually comes probably
to his initial prominence through Murdoch's New York Post. But
he does this because he's a figure of entertainment. I mean,
he's a tabloid figure, a joke. Welcome to Fire and
(00:56):
Fury the podcast.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
I'm Michael Wolf and I'm James Truman. Good morning, Michael James.
So I thought today we would come in at a
different angle, and the angle being Rupert Murdoch. Who is
your other great fascination, perhaps compulsion white Whale, White Whale,
(01:17):
as you wrote about in The Fall, your last book
on Murdoch. Is this fascinatingly dysfunctional and codependent relationship between
Trump and Murdoch. There's also a fascinatingly dysfunctional and codependent
relationship between Rupert Murdoch and his children, which blew up
last week in the news of a court case going
to be heard in September.
Speaker 1 (01:38):
I mean, I've been in the thick of this for
many years now, a disconcerting number of years. Why am
I so obsessed? I mean, I think that the answer
is that Murdoch hovers over so much, including hovering over
Donald Trump. At the Convention of the week before last,
there was Rupert Murdock as the perfect Rupert Murdoch was
(02:00):
one of the people he saw before his speech. The
issue at hand for Murdoch and the whole Murdoch family
is this Murdoch family trust. This trust Murdoch put around
his neck first in nineteen ninety eight. This was an
expedient solution to his divorce from his second wife, Anna Murdoch,
(02:23):
the mother of three of his children. That was a
California divorce, and so she could have grabbed half of
his net worth, half of his empire, but she was
willing not to do that, and her terms were one
hundred million dollars. And then the structuring of a trust
agreement which would include the four Murdoch children at that time,
(02:48):
three were hers, one from Murdoch's prior marriage, and and
the purpose of this was to lock this in lock
it in so that any other issue would have no
claim on the Murdoch empire.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
He married Wendy Dang.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
Then he shortly thereafter after the divorce, married Wendy Dang
and they shortly had two more children. Now this was
kind of an awkward situation that they had two children
who had nothing. They were paupers. Their father was a
billionaire I don't know twelve thirteen, fourteen, fifteen times over,
(03:28):
and they had nothing. From Murdoch's point of view, he
hadn't had to split up his empire, so all good.
Although Wendy Dang became increasingly irate about the fact that
her children had nothing, making Rupert's life miserable. So then
the trust came under revision in I think two thousand
(03:51):
and four, and he went to his older children and said,
this is really unfair and what am I going to
do here? Basically saved me because Wendy is gonna kill me.
I gotta do something. As for older children, although they
were due to split this fortune four ways after his death,
they actually had very little money of their own. At
(04:14):
this point. All of their net worth was tied up
in shares of what was the News Corp of the
Murdoch family assets. So in this he needed them to
agree to admit the two younger children to the trust.
Their offer was, okay, but you have to give us money. Now.
(04:35):
The settlement was each of the older children immediately got
fifty million dollars apiece, and for that they admitted the
two younger children to the trust. But they only admitted
them as what's called economic participants and not as political participants,
(04:55):
meaning they got no vote. So it is just the
four children.
Speaker 3 (05:00):
Now.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
The effect of this was twofold. It solved the problem
of the younger children, but exacerbated the problem with the
older children because suddenly they had independent money. Now, Murdoch
had always tried to yoke them to the business and
to him he wanted this was his dream. His dream
(05:22):
is of a dynasty. His dream was to have these
children close by him. In his ideal world, there would
be an executive floor and it would be Ruper in
one office, and then his children in successive offices. Now
and his children, you know, unlike in the succession drama
(05:42):
where they're crowding in and they want to be next
to the father, the Murdoch children have always been intent
on getting away from him for a host of reasons.
Foremost among them is he's just an incredible, annoying, constant, micromanager.
He looks over everyone's shoulder. It has to be done
(06:03):
the way he would do it. You can imagine the
incredible frustration that would build up with him promising you
the world the company, this is going to be yours
and him giving you nothing. I mean, you're infantilized at
every step of the way with Rupert Murdoch. So anyway,
this was incredibly distressing to him that the children went
(06:25):
their way. Whose daughter Elizabeth set up her own company,
His son Lachlan went back to Australia. His son James
was willing to come into the company, but only by
running a separate company Sky in the UK, which was
only partially owned by News Corps. Everybody is pushing away,
(06:48):
and then he begins this arduous campaign to bring them back,
and actually ultimately in twenty eleven the two brothers come
back in, but they hate each other, so there was
always friction there. And then when they were brought in
essentially in a bakeoff situation, one of you will be
(07:10):
the CEO. That was almost catastrophic from day one, and
that then led to the brothers not speaking to each other.
It's a complete breakdown. That was a problem because you
had this trust agreement was that when Rupert Murdoch dies,
the company will be controlled by four votes without a
(07:31):
tie breaking mechanism. So suddenly you were looking at an
unmanageable situation with Murdoch realizing that he had kind of
profoundly fucked up on this. So then again, mister expedient,
what do you do? Well, he sold most of the company.
He kind of said, Okay, my dream is a dynasty
(07:55):
that will outlast me and will go on for generations
to come. But then it was suddenly like, well, that's
not going to happen, so let's take the highest price possible,
which they did in two thousand and eighteen, I think
the deal was done. They sold most of the assets
of this company to Disney, but Disney would not take
(08:19):
Fox News News. Yeah, he would have sold everything. At
this point, Rupert keenly recognized that the value of traditional
media was not going to get any higher, and he
sold at the top of the market, realizing a phenomenal gain.
Now the price because of the terms of the trust
(08:39):
when they did this deal, that meant there was a
disbursement to each of the members of the trust of
wait for it, two billion dollars a piece. This all
suddenly put them into a non economic relationship with the
remainder of the family's assets, with their family name, with
(09:03):
what they wanted to do, and there was Fox now
at the center of it. Because they're left with Fox News,
and this is twenty eighteen, so they are left also
with Donald Trump, and with realizing that basically Donald Trump
is a creation, at least in strong measure, of the
(09:26):
Murdoch family. And so this creates even greater tension with James,
the brother, who has now become quite a liberal and
rising in democratic circles, positioned directly against his brother, directly
against Fox News, saying that he won't let this stand.
He said, when his father dies, he is going to
(09:48):
take over the company and push his brother out with
the support of his two sisters. This is untenable. They
cannot live with the Murdoch name being associate forever with
this terrible thing that has happened, which is to say,
Donald Trump. So Murdoch sets out at this point to
(10:10):
actually take on Donald Trump, to make sure that Donald
Trump will be at best a one term president. After
January sixth, Murdoch has nothing to do with Trump and
sets out to support Ron DeSantis, to put DeSantis in
place to head off a Trump candidacy. The mandate at
Fox is to support DeSantis in any way possible and
(10:34):
to keep Trump off the Fox air, which has been
largely the bulwark of Trump's support. But after January six
they're finished with him.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
How does it work? Is it like one of those
very old school sort of medium logal relationships where he
can just call up the head of Fox News on
the phone and say we're behind DeSantis now exactly.
Speaker 1 (10:56):
Yes, it's that clear cut, but it's not that easy.
Built in contradiction there, which is to say, if you're
a talking head on Fox, your only measure of success
is your ratings, right, And between Ron DeSantis getting ratings
and Donald Trump getting ratings, there's really no contest. So
(11:18):
that's a tension that is almost impossible to resolve. It
becomes more and more difficult as Ron de Santis clearly
makes no impact on Trump and Trump continues to rise
and whatever Murdoch's intention, In another expedient move in March,
he calls Donald Trump Trump is clearly going to be
(11:39):
the Republican nominee, not impossibly the president again. And there's
Rupert Murdoch calling Donald Trump and basically admitting defeat, capitulating wow.
And so this, in the view of the family, further
increases the ire of his children, at least the three. Lachlan,
(12:02):
who runs the company, is aligned with his father. The
three other children are like, well, this cannot go on.
We'll be back right after the break.
Speaker 2 (12:23):
I remember when Succession was out and we spent a
lot of hours talking about it. At one point you
always made was the major difference between the family dynamic
in Succession, which was one of neglect, cruelty and kind
of abuse. And actually, in the Murdoch family you always
said Rupert's failing was that he was too indulgent of
(12:46):
the children.
Speaker 1 (12:47):
Rupert murloc had too exclusive interest in life, money and
the love of his children. And he pursued that. I mean,
he would give them anything. I mean, he just needed
their approval rather than the other way around. And it
was the one thing that was always elusive for him.
But we haven't emphasized this enough. Rupert Murdoch is ninety
(13:09):
three years old. It was funny to be that. Someone
who knows Murdoch very well told me that last year
it seemed like he had weeks to go, barely seemed compassmentous,
could hardly rise from his chair. And then he met
this new woman who would become his fifth wife, and
suddenly he was rejuvenated. So right now he's decided he's
(13:33):
looking at this trust and realizing that this is the end,
that this is. Whatever Murdoch assets are left Fox News,
they're going to become Liberal assets. And then he decides, well,
what can I do. I'm going to try to break
this unbreakable trust. So that's where we are right now.
Speaker 2 (13:56):
It now seems quite likely that MAGA will endure off
Trump has gone. Why is Murdock going to these lengths
to ensure that his properties remain on that side of
the political equation.
Speaker 1 (14:10):
Well, because he's on that side of the political equation.
I mean, if you had to make the choice between
Democrats and Republicans, he's going to choose Republicans, even Marga Republicans,
even MAGA Republicans. If the Democrats win, If Kamala Harris
becomes the next president of the United States, how does
that change Rupert's view of things, and it would and
(14:33):
it may be changing now. So when this happened, we
were at a moment when it seemed without question that
Donald Trump was going to be elected president, and that
no longer seems as clear.
Speaker 2 (14:48):
Yeah the least.
Speaker 1 (14:50):
So where does Ruper go in thinking about this? It's
not clear. Rupert Murdoch is ninety three years old. Who's
calling shots here? Lachlan Murdoch is desperate to hold onto
his job. So to some degree you have his father
humoring his son, and to a great degree, I think
you also have Lachlan Murdoch, who's kind of an idiot
(15:12):
calling the shots. Then there's this other kind of curious
conspiracy view. I mean that the woman he married is
the mother of the woman who married Roman Abramovich, one
of the senior most Russian oligarchs, long in the Putin circle.
Speaker 2 (15:32):
Yes, with a very good cover story of being western
and liberal.
Speaker 1 (15:36):
Yes, but that's the conspiracy that the new wife is
the Russian plant. But you know, and curiously, when he
married Wendy Dang, the conspiracy theory was that she was
a Chinese plant, which was ridiculous until after they were divorced,
and then Rupert went around saying she was a Chinese plant.
Speaker 2 (15:57):
Let's jump from Rupert and his children to Donald and
his what's the similarity in the dynamics. Do you think
between what we've just been talking about in the Murdoc
family and what's going on in the Trump family.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
Well, I think actually the succession storyline is more appropriate
to the Trump storyline. Trump doesn't much like his children,
has never been particularly affectionate, goes around publicly saying he
wish he could take back Don Junior's name is kind
of a brace of his critical of his children, publicly critical.
(16:32):
He seems to have a soft spot for Avanka, but
also speaks in her in terms that one would not
ord narrowly speak of one's daughter. Yes, and I mean
he's put all of his children in the position of
exclusively having a business relationship with him, and in that
(16:52):
business relationship, he's the boss, He's the center of all
concern and gravity, and they are merely there to attend
to him, and if they don't, that's to their peril.
And so they are forced and they are attached to
him because that's where the money is, and they have
no independent lives. Part of the convention, the weird feeling
(17:16):
was that they were all called on to pay this
kind of slavish obessance to him was kind of really creepy.
Speaker 2 (17:25):
Yeah, it was like a mafia wedding.
Speaker 1 (17:28):
And it wasn't even the children. It was also the
daughters in law, I mean, everybody trying to get in there.
Speaker 2 (17:34):
Yeah. And then of course at the convention, we also
had the image of JD Vance, who looked alarmingly like
the two sons. So there were the two sons behind
JD fans in front, all with this kind of feral
look and this exactly identicate beard, which had a very
strange feeling to me of almost like something like Game
of Thrones. Wait, there was this outsider that would be
(17:57):
John Snow, the bastard son who's back to Esteros to
be part of the family. And you just know that
in a storyline like that, the two existing beards, the
two sons are shortly going to shive the third son.
I mean, at this point he has to be embarrassed
by him.
Speaker 1 (18:16):
My understanding is that he's been making calls and he's
been saying to his call list of friends and donors
and golf buddies, what do you think of J D.
And when Trump starts to do that not a good sign.
Never know, because everybody knows. You have to say what
he wants to hear, and what he wants to hear
(18:37):
at this point is what he's thinking, which is why
the fuck did I choose this guy? So one of
the concerns of taking Vance as the VP was that
he's thirty nine years old, and it would make Trump,
in contrast, look old. What Trump had going for him
was that Biden actually made Trump look young, and now
(19:00):
setting up this direct contrast, almost the opposite thing has happened.
Vance seems so young. I mean, the first thing, he's
so babyfaced that he had to grow this beard, and
then every word out of his mouth, the cat lady
stuff is immature, unformed, unthought out.
Speaker 3 (19:18):
Do we be?
Speaker 1 (19:20):
He's out there in a way confirming that he's clearly
not ready to be the president of the United States.
Speaker 2 (19:27):
Is Trump or anyone close to Trump overseeing what Vance says?
Are his speeches vetted or do they let him go
out and wing it?
Speaker 3 (19:36):
No?
Speaker 1 (19:36):
No, I mean the speeches are vetted now, but what
wasn't vetted is what he had said in the past. Now,
how that happened? I think that these are major questions
within the Trump camp. Now, why didn't he know about
the cat lady? Why wasn't all of this, these long
conversations that Vance had had with Tucker Carlson in Vance
(19:58):
effort to impress Tucker Carlson maybe to be Tucker Carlson,
Why didn't they know about that? But let's not lose sight.
We're in this remarkable turnaround. Kamala has gone from nobody's
saying a nice word about her ever to she is
the savior of democracy and the killer of Donald Trump.
(20:24):
But I would anticipate that this could be a moment
in time the Vance ridicule might also begin to shift,
because actually the Vance strategy might in fact pay off,
which is to say that he's positioned for the MAGA crowd,
for the white working guys, that center of the Trump constituency,
(20:48):
and if you can anchor that, and that allows Donald
Trump to float in a freer way on the abortion issue,
on any of those issues that can move him to
take the few points of that swing center that he needs.
I think that what we have to remember about this
moment is that we're effectively back to the day before
(21:12):
the debate, the day before the debate, we would have said, yeah,
it's a fifty to fifty race, it's a toss up.
It's going to come down to in that Steve Bannon formulation.
In a tight race, really nothing matters into the last
two weeks. What happens then. I think that was where
this race was before the debate, and I think we
are right back there, tempestuous, and what would have seen
(21:35):
transformational month probably in the history of American politics, may
in fact mean nothing at all, And we are just
back before the last month took place. Before the debate,
it was fifty to fifty, but the wind was at
Trump's back. Now it's fifty to fifty, but the wind
is at the Democrats back. Yes, yeah, I want to
(21:57):
finish this because I want to claim some thing.
Speaker 2 (22:00):
Go for it. Ear Gate, Eargate. Tell me.
Speaker 1 (22:06):
I don't think anyone's gotten there yet, but let us
get there first. Eargate. From the beginning, this was always
the top of his ear. Those bandages, those are the
best bandages you can do here. And now we have
this discussion at the highest levels of government what exactly
(22:26):
hit his ear? Yeah, with Trump now also basically being
in wild fury about this, they're trying to steal the
assassination from me.
Speaker 2 (22:39):
I mean everyone I've read, and one person I talked
to who knows about this stuff thinks that the munition
shot from the gun that it was shot from. If
you're wearing a kevlar helmet and it next the edge
of the helmet, it blows your head off. Still, so
the idea that this was an actual round that clipped
his ear seems implausible to people who are knowledgeable in
(23:04):
that field.
Speaker 1 (23:05):
Okay, man is certainly decisive testimony, thank.
Speaker 2 (23:08):
You, But the pauses with which the FBI dealt with this,
and then a not quite convincing determination that, of course
it had to be the actual bullet itself.
Speaker 1 (23:20):
My only interest is to send eargate out into the world.
Speaker 2 (23:25):
Okay, well, how do you think it's going to have
legs now the FBI is ruled.
Speaker 1 (23:29):
I think you've already done a great job. You've introduced
the word kevlar, so that seems very authoritative.
Speaker 2 (23:36):
Nothing like hearsay to keep a story going. One hopes
there's a long, unhappy success for Eagate. In the lexicon
of this selection campaign, we usually end with a trumpometer.
What are the odds? Last week you said you thought
it could move back to fifty to fifty. While presently
you still gave Trump the advantage.
Speaker 1 (23:55):
I think it clearly has moved back to fifty to fifty,
an advantage the Democrats at this moment in time. I
think that what we're seeing is this incredible desire to
beat Donald Trump. That's all the time we have for today,
(24:16):
and we'll be back next week.
Speaker 3 (24:26):
Fire and Fury. The podcast is hosted and executive produced
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Speaker 2 (25:00):
M
So I'm one of Rupert Murdoch's biographers, and I spent
basically a year with him. One of the Murdoch dreams
was to always elect the president. The bitter irony is
that president turns out to be Donald Trump, who he detests, disdains,
has always, throughout his life in New York, looked at
(00:26):
Donald Trump as a clown. Donald Trump actually comes probably
to his initial prominence through Murdoch's New York Post. But
he does this because he's a figure of entertainment. I mean,
he's a tabloid figure, a joke. Welcome to Fire and
(00:56):
Fury the podcast.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
I'm Michael Wolf and I'm James Truman. Good morning, Michael James.
So I thought today we would come in at a
different angle, and the angle being Rupert Murdoch. Who is
your other great fascination, perhaps compulsion white Whale, White Whale,
(01:17):
as you wrote about in The Fall, your last book
on Murdoch. Is this fascinatingly dysfunctional and codependent relationship between
Trump and Murdoch. There's also a fascinatingly dysfunctional and codependent
relationship between Rupert Murdoch and his children, which blew up
last week in the news of a court case going
to be heard in September.
Speaker 1 (01:38):
I mean, I've been in the thick of this for
many years now, a disconcerting number of years. Why am
I so obsessed? I mean, I think that the answer
is that Murdoch hovers over so much, including hovering over
Donald Trump. At the Convention of the week before last,
there was Rupert Murdock as the perfect Rupert Murdoch was
(02:00):
one of the people he saw before his speech. The
issue at hand for Murdoch and the whole Murdoch family
is this Murdoch family trust. This trust Murdoch put around
his neck first in nineteen ninety eight. This was an
expedient solution to his divorce from his second wife, Anna Murdoch,
(02:23):
the mother of three of his children. That was a
California divorce, and so she could have grabbed half of
his net worth, half of his empire, but she was
willing not to do that, and her terms were one
hundred million dollars. And then the structuring of a trust
agreement which would include the four Murdoch children at that time,
(02:48):
three were hers, one from Murdoch's prior marriage, and and
the purpose of this was to lock this in lock
it in so that any other issue would have no
claim on the Murdoch empire.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
He married Wendy Dang.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
Then he shortly thereafter after the divorce, married Wendy Dang
and they shortly had two more children. Now this was
kind of an awkward situation that they had two children
who had nothing. They were paupers. Their father was a
billionaire I don't know twelve thirteen, fourteen, fifteen times over,
(03:28):
and they had nothing. From Murdoch's point of view, he
hadn't had to split up his empire, so all good.
Although Wendy Dang became increasingly irate about the fact that
her children had nothing, making Rupert's life miserable. So then
the trust came under revision in I think two thousand
(03:51):
and four, and he went to his older children and said,
this is really unfair and what am I going to
do here? Basically saved me because Wendy is gonna kill me.
I gotta do something. As for older children, although they
were due to split this fortune four ways after his death,
they actually had very little money of their own. At
(04:14):
this point. All of their net worth was tied up
in shares of what was the News Corp of the
Murdoch family assets. So in this he needed them to
agree to admit the two younger children to the trust.
Their offer was, okay, but you have to give us money. Now.
(04:35):
The settlement was each of the older children immediately got
fifty million dollars apiece, and for that they admitted the
two younger children to the trust. But they only admitted
them as what's called economic participants and not as political participants,
(04:55):
meaning they got no vote. So it is just the
four children.
Speaker 3 (05:00):
Now.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
The effect of this was twofold. It solved the problem
of the younger children, but exacerbated the problem with the
older children because suddenly they had independent money. Now, Murdoch
had always tried to yoke them to the business and
to him he wanted this was his dream. His dream
(05:22):
is of a dynasty. His dream was to have these
children close by him. In his ideal world, there would
be an executive floor and it would be Ruper in
one office, and then his children in successive offices. Now
and his children, you know, unlike in the succession drama
(05:42):
where they're crowding in and they want to be next
to the father, the Murdoch children have always been intent
on getting away from him for a host of reasons.
Foremost among them is he's just an incredible, annoying, constant, micromanager.
He looks over everyone's shoulder. It has to be done
(06:03):
the way he would do it. You can imagine the
incredible frustration that would build up with him promising you
the world the company, this is going to be yours
and him giving you nothing. I mean, you're infantilized at
every step of the way with Rupert Murdoch. So anyway,
this was incredibly distressing to him that the children went
(06:25):
their way. Whose daughter Elizabeth set up her own company,
His son Lachlan went back to Australia. His son James
was willing to come into the company, but only by
running a separate company Sky in the UK, which was
only partially owned by News Corps. Everybody is pushing away,
(06:48):
and then he begins this arduous campaign to bring them back,
and actually ultimately in twenty eleven the two brothers come
back in, but they hate each other, so there was
always friction there. And then when they were brought in
essentially in a bakeoff situation, one of you will be
(07:10):
the CEO. That was almost catastrophic from day one, and
that then led to the brothers not speaking to each other.
It's a complete breakdown. That was a problem because you
had this trust agreement was that when Rupert Murdoch dies,
the company will be controlled by four votes without a
(07:31):
tie breaking mechanism. So suddenly you were looking at an
unmanageable situation with Murdoch realizing that he had kind of
profoundly fucked up on this. So then again, mister expedient,
what do you do? Well, he sold most of the company.
He kind of said, Okay, my dream is a dynasty
(07:55):
that will outlast me and will go on for generations
to come. But then it was suddenly like, well, that's
not going to happen, so let's take the highest price possible,
which they did in two thousand and eighteen, I think
the deal was done. They sold most of the assets
of this company to Disney, but Disney would not take
(08:19):
Fox News News. Yeah, he would have sold everything. At
this point, Rupert keenly recognized that the value of traditional
media was not going to get any higher, and he
sold at the top of the market, realizing a phenomenal gain.
Now the price because of the terms of the trust
(08:39):
when they did this deal, that meant there was a
disbursement to each of the members of the trust of
wait for it, two billion dollars a piece. This all
suddenly put them into a non economic relationship with the
remainder of the family's assets, with their family name, with
(09:03):
what they wanted to do, and there was Fox now
at the center of it. Because they're left with Fox News,
and this is twenty eighteen, so they are left also
with Donald Trump, and with realizing that basically Donald Trump
is a creation, at least in strong measure, of the
(09:26):
Murdoch family. And so this creates even greater tension with James,
the brother, who has now become quite a liberal and
rising in democratic circles, positioned directly against his brother, directly
against Fox News, saying that he won't let this stand.
He said, when his father dies, he is going to
(09:48):
take over the company and push his brother out with
the support of his two sisters. This is untenable. They
cannot live with the Murdoch name being associate forever with
this terrible thing that has happened, which is to say,
Donald Trump. So Murdoch sets out at this point to
(10:10):
actually take on Donald Trump, to make sure that Donald
Trump will be at best a one term president. After
January sixth, Murdoch has nothing to do with Trump and
sets out to support Ron DeSantis, to put DeSantis in
place to head off a Trump candidacy. The mandate at
Fox is to support DeSantis in any way possible and
(10:34):
to keep Trump off the Fox air, which has been
largely the bulwark of Trump's support. But after January six
they're finished with him.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
How does it work? Is it like one of those
very old school sort of medium logal relationships where he
can just call up the head of Fox News on
the phone and say we're behind DeSantis now exactly.
Speaker 1 (10:56):
Yes, it's that clear cut, but it's not that easy.
Built in contradiction there, which is to say, if you're
a talking head on Fox, your only measure of success
is your ratings, right, And between Ron DeSantis getting ratings
and Donald Trump getting ratings, there's really no contest. So
(11:18):
that's a tension that is almost impossible to resolve. It
becomes more and more difficult as Ron de Santis clearly
makes no impact on Trump and Trump continues to rise
and whatever Murdoch's intention, In another expedient move in March,
he calls Donald Trump Trump is clearly going to be
(11:39):
the Republican nominee, not impossibly the president again. And there's
Rupert Murdoch calling Donald Trump and basically admitting defeat, capitulating wow.
And so this, in the view of the family, further
increases the ire of his children, at least the three. Lachlan,
(12:02):
who runs the company, is aligned with his father. The
three other children are like, well, this cannot go on.
We'll be back right after the break.
Speaker 2 (12:23):
I remember when Succession was out and we spent a
lot of hours talking about it. At one point you
always made was the major difference between the family dynamic
in Succession, which was one of neglect, cruelty and kind
of abuse. And actually, in the Murdoch family you always
said Rupert's failing was that he was too indulgent of
(12:46):
the children.
Speaker 1 (12:47):
Rupert murloc had too exclusive interest in life, money and
the love of his children. And he pursued that. I mean,
he would give them anything. I mean, he just needed
their approval rather than the other way around. And it
was the one thing that was always elusive for him.
But we haven't emphasized this enough. Rupert Murdoch is ninety
(13:09):
three years old. It was funny to be that. Someone
who knows Murdoch very well told me that last year
it seemed like he had weeks to go, barely seemed compassmentous,
could hardly rise from his chair. And then he met
this new woman who would become his fifth wife, and
suddenly he was rejuvenated. So right now he's decided he's
(13:33):
looking at this trust and realizing that this is the end,
that this is. Whatever Murdoch assets are left Fox News,
they're going to become Liberal assets. And then he decides, well,
what can I do. I'm going to try to break
this unbreakable trust. So that's where we are right now.
Speaker 2 (13:56):
It now seems quite likely that MAGA will endure off
Trump has gone. Why is Murdock going to these lengths
to ensure that his properties remain on that side of
the political equation.
Speaker 1 (14:10):
Well, because he's on that side of the political equation.
I mean, if you had to make the choice between
Democrats and Republicans, he's going to choose Republicans, even Marga Republicans,
even MAGA Republicans. If the Democrats win, If Kamala Harris
becomes the next president of the United States, how does
that change Rupert's view of things, and it would and
(14:33):
it may be changing now. So when this happened, we
were at a moment when it seemed without question that
Donald Trump was going to be elected president, and that
no longer seems as clear.
Speaker 2 (14:48):
Yeah the least.
Speaker 1 (14:50):
So where does Ruper go in thinking about this? It's
not clear. Rupert Murdoch is ninety three years old. Who's
calling shots here? Lachlan Murdoch is desperate to hold onto
his job. So to some degree you have his father
humoring his son, and to a great degree, I think
you also have Lachlan Murdoch, who's kind of an idiot
(15:12):
calling the shots. Then there's this other kind of curious
conspiracy view. I mean that the woman he married is
the mother of the woman who married Roman Abramovich, one
of the senior most Russian oligarchs, long in the Putin circle.
Speaker 2 (15:32):
Yes, with a very good cover story of being western
and liberal.
Speaker 1 (15:36):
Yes, but that's the conspiracy that the new wife is
the Russian plant. But you know, and curiously, when he
married Wendy Dang, the conspiracy theory was that she was
a Chinese plant, which was ridiculous until after they were divorced,
and then Rupert went around saying she was a Chinese plant.
Speaker 2 (15:57):
Let's jump from Rupert and his children to Donald and
his what's the similarity in the dynamics. Do you think
between what we've just been talking about in the Murdoc
family and what's going on in the Trump family.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
Well, I think actually the succession storyline is more appropriate
to the Trump storyline. Trump doesn't much like his children,
has never been particularly affectionate, goes around publicly saying he
wish he could take back Don Junior's name is kind
of a brace of his critical of his children, publicly critical.
(16:32):
He seems to have a soft spot for Avanka, but
also speaks in her in terms that one would not
ord narrowly speak of one's daughter. Yes, and I mean
he's put all of his children in the position of
exclusively having a business relationship with him, and in that
(16:52):
business relationship, he's the boss, He's the center of all
concern and gravity, and they are merely there to attend
to him, and if they don't, that's to their peril.
And so they are forced and they are attached to
him because that's where the money is, and they have
no independent lives. Part of the convention, the weird feeling
(17:16):
was that they were all called on to pay this
kind of slavish obessance to him was kind of really creepy.
Speaker 2 (17:25):
Yeah, it was like a mafia wedding.
Speaker 1 (17:28):
And it wasn't even the children. It was also the
daughters in law, I mean, everybody trying to get in there.
Speaker 2 (17:34):
Yeah. And then of course at the convention, we also
had the image of JD Vance, who looked alarmingly like
the two sons. So there were the two sons behind
JD fans in front, all with this kind of feral
look and this exactly identicate beard, which had a very
strange feeling to me of almost like something like Game
of Thrones. Wait, there was this outsider that would be
(17:57):
John Snow, the bastard son who's back to Esteros to
be part of the family. And you just know that
in a storyline like that, the two existing beards, the
two sons are shortly going to shive the third son.
I mean, at this point he has to be embarrassed
by him.
Speaker 1 (18:16):
My understanding is that he's been making calls and he's
been saying to his call list of friends and donors
and golf buddies, what do you think of J D.
And when Trump starts to do that not a good sign.
Never know, because everybody knows. You have to say what
he wants to hear, and what he wants to hear
(18:37):
at this point is what he's thinking, which is why
the fuck did I choose this guy? So one of
the concerns of taking Vance as the VP was that
he's thirty nine years old, and it would make Trump,
in contrast, look old. What Trump had going for him
was that Biden actually made Trump look young, and now
(19:00):
setting up this direct contrast, almost the opposite thing has happened.
Vance seems so young. I mean, the first thing, he's
so babyfaced that he had to grow this beard, and
then every word out of his mouth, the cat lady
stuff is immature, unformed, unthought out.
Speaker 3 (19:18):
Do we be?
Speaker 1 (19:20):
He's out there in a way confirming that he's clearly
not ready to be the president of the United States.
Speaker 2 (19:27):
Is Trump or anyone close to Trump overseeing what Vance says?
Are his speeches vetted or do they let him go
out and wing it?
Speaker 3 (19:36):
No?
Speaker 1 (19:36):
No, I mean the speeches are vetted now, but what
wasn't vetted is what he had said in the past. Now,
how that happened? I think that these are major questions
within the Trump camp. Now, why didn't he know about
the cat lady? Why wasn't all of this, these long
conversations that Vance had had with Tucker Carlson in Vance
(19:58):
effort to impress Tucker Carlson maybe to be Tucker Carlson,
Why didn't they know about that? But let's not lose sight.
We're in this remarkable turnaround. Kamala has gone from nobody's
saying a nice word about her ever to she is
the savior of democracy and the killer of Donald Trump.
(20:24):
But I would anticipate that this could be a moment
in time the Vance ridicule might also begin to shift,
because actually the Vance strategy might in fact pay off,
which is to say that he's positioned for the MAGA crowd,
for the white working guys, that center of the Trump constituency,
(20:48):
and if you can anchor that, and that allows Donald
Trump to float in a freer way on the abortion issue,
on any of those issues that can move him to
take the few points of that swing center that he needs.
I think that what we have to remember about this
moment is that we're effectively back to the day before
(21:12):
the debate, the day before the debate, we would have said, yeah,
it's a fifty to fifty race, it's a toss up.
It's going to come down to in that Steve Bannon formulation.
In a tight race, really nothing matters into the last
two weeks. What happens then. I think that was where
this race was before the debate, and I think we
are right back there, tempestuous, and what would have seen
(21:35):
transformational month probably in the history of American politics, may
in fact mean nothing at all, And we are just
back before the last month took place. Before the debate,
it was fifty to fifty, but the wind was at
Trump's back. Now it's fifty to fifty, but the wind
is at the Democrats back. Yes, yeah, I want to
(21:57):
finish this because I want to claim some thing.
Speaker 2 (22:00):
Go for it. Ear Gate, Eargate. Tell me.
Speaker 1 (22:06):
I don't think anyone's gotten there yet, but let us
get there first. Eargate. From the beginning, this was always
the top of his ear. Those bandages, those are the
best bandages you can do here. And now we have
this discussion at the highest levels of government what exactly
(22:26):
hit his ear? Yeah, with Trump now also basically being
in wild fury about this, they're trying to steal the
assassination from me.
Speaker 2 (22:39):
I mean everyone I've read, and one person I talked
to who knows about this stuff thinks that the munition
shot from the gun that it was shot from. If
you're wearing a kevlar helmet and it next the edge
of the helmet, it blows your head off. Still, so
the idea that this was an actual round that clipped
his ear seems implausible to people who are knowledgeable in
(23:04):
that field.
Speaker 1 (23:05):
Okay, man is certainly decisive testimony, thank.
Speaker 2 (23:08):
You, But the pauses with which the FBI dealt with this,
and then a not quite convincing determination that, of course
it had to be the actual bullet itself.
Speaker 1 (23:20):
My only interest is to send eargate out into the world.
Speaker 2 (23:25):
Okay, well, how do you think it's going to have
legs now the FBI is ruled.
Speaker 1 (23:29):
I think you've already done a great job. You've introduced
the word kevlar, so that seems very authoritative.
Speaker 2 (23:36):
Nothing like hearsay to keep a story going. One hopes
there's a long, unhappy success for Eagate. In the lexicon
of this selection campaign, we usually end with a trumpometer.
What are the odds? Last week you said you thought
it could move back to fifty to fifty. While presently
you still gave Trump the advantage.
Speaker 1 (23:55):
I think it clearly has moved back to fifty to fifty,
an advantage the Democrats at this moment in time. I
think that what we're seeing is this incredible desire to
beat Donald Trump. That's all the time we have for today,
(24:16):
and we'll be back next week.
Speaker 3 (24:26):
Fire and Fury. The podcast is hosted and executive produced
by Michael Wolfe and James Truman. The producers are Adam
Waller and Emily Marino. Executive producers for Kaleidoscope are Mangesh
had to get A and Os Valascian. Executive producers for
iHeart On, Nikki Ito and Katrina Novell
Speaker 2 (25:00):
M
Hosts And Creators
James Truman
Michael Wolff
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