There was no wave of Republicans in the US midterm elections, Donald Trump’s fault, the headlines of the Murdoch family’s powerful conservative media group stifled, a new link in a volatile relationship.
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The headline “Trump is the Republican Party’s biggest loser” on Thursday was in columns Wall Street Magazine (The Wall Street Journal) the editorial board of the business daily owned by News Corp, the group of 91-year-old Australian-American media mogul Rupert Murdoch.
The content isn’t much flattering: “Since his unexpected 2016 victory against the deeply unpopular Hillary Clinton, Mr. Trump has a perfect record of electoral defeats.”
“He led Republicans from fiasco to fiasco,” he still asserts The Wall Street Journal Noting that many of the candidates he supported “failed in states that were clearly winnable,” such as Pennsylvania or New Hampshire.
DeSantis
This is not the first time that the Murdoch family’s media has distanced itself from the former president and billionaire Republican. He had already been subjected to much criticism in Wall Street Magazine After the violent attack by his supporters on the Washington Capitol on January 6, 2021.
But this time, “It’s time for Trump to abandon politics,” writes a newspaper columnist New York PostThe New York of News Corp., who was as tough with Donald Trump as with the Democrats he bombed every single day.
one of Mail A caricature of a former president about to fall from a brick wall, referring to that wall he promised to put on the border with Mexico to prevent immigration and “which he didn’t build.”
The day before, the newspaper featured Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who was re-elected Tuesday night, on its front page with this headline: from the future. Shimmering support for Donald Trump’s most powerful potential opponent in the race for the 2024 Republican nomination.
More mixed feelings on Fox News, one of the most watched channels in the US, which is also owned by Rupert Murdoch.
For one of his characters, Tucker Carlson, “Trump has always had good sides and bad sides politically. […]but in this case she certainly isn’t the only factor in anything.” Another columnist, Liz Beck, apparently sided with Ron DeSantis.
Murdoch family outlets such as Fox News are prominent among American conservatives and could make it even more difficult for the former president to land a new nomination in 2024.
Common interest
But since his defeat in 2020, Donald Trump, who promised a “very big announcement” on November 15, has remained a key figure in the ranks of Republican activists.
“Even though I have chosen so many winners, I have to endure fake news. For me, Fox News is always lost,” he wrote on his social network, Truth Social.
“It’s like 2015 and 2016, a media attack (collusion!); when Fox News fought me to the death until I won, they became the kindest and best supporters,” the former president added furiously in a long press release.
Donald Trump also accuses News Corp of spinning Ron DeSantis, who has been dubbed “Ron La Moral.”
Indeed, for Mark Feldstein, a professor of journalism at the University of Maryland, relations between Trump and the conservative media, particularly those of the Murdoch empire, have experienced many ups and downs.
He remembers that the billionaire actually went to war against the channel, in 2016 when “Fox News hosts asked aggressive questions during the first television debate in the Republican primary,” or during the 2020 presidential election when “Fox News rightly attributed the victory to Joe Biden in Arizona.” .
“In both cases it ended in reconciliation because it is in their interests,” he told AFP.
In his eyes, audience and profit will weigh more than the chain’s ideology. If Ron DeSantis captured the imagination of Fox viewers [News]The channel will promote it as much as it can,” at the expense of “a bare old warrior horse like Trump repeats his tired old slogans.”
But “Of course, if Trump comes back to power, Fox [News] He’ll take the cart,” he warns.
