Rupert Murdoch May Want to Stay Away from Open Windows

The Wall Street Journal's Epstein scoops signal that Murdoch believes Trump has outlived his usefulness. But the media mogul should probably watch his back.

The drama unfolding in Rupert Murdoch’s world is a perfect metaphor for the self-defeating evil of appeasement. It’s like Murdoch is starring in a one-man adaptation of Cabaret. Want to know how Germany in the 1930s came to be? Welcome to the Murdoch Cabaret.

What good is sitting alone in your room?
Come hear the music play
Life is a cabaret, old chum
Come to the cabaret

Rupert Murdoch became America’s most dangerous immigrant by building a palace of lies called Fox News. Like a narco cartel kingpin looking for reputation-enhancing legit money laundering opportunities, he bought the Wall Street Journal in 2007. Like the Prussian aristocrats who backed Hitler, Murdoch thought he could have it both ways.

Over at Fox News, he made billions by hiring liars to lie. They lied to help elect Trump, and once in office, they lied about COVID and contributed to the deaths of tens of thousands. They lied about who won the 2020 election and helped launch a deadly insurrection.

The Wall Street Journal last endorsed a presidential candidate in 1928 when it enthusiastically backed Herbert Hoover. While that bad bet seems to have dissuaded them from any further endorsements, they spent decades casting themselves as the intellectual conscience of American conservatism. As it turned out, the concept of an American conservative intellectual conscience was the cold fusion energy source of politics, an idea that had powerful appeal if only it hadn’t proven to be total nonsense.

Murdoch has never pretended to like Donald Trump, clearly seeing himself as a real billionaire whose five wives were all a cut above the tabloid trash of the three Mrs. Trumps. Could Donald Trump ever land an ex-wife of Mick Jagger or one of the Trump wives being romantically linked to Tony Blair, as was Wendi Deng (the third Mrs. Murdoch)?

But like Franz von Pappen, the Prussian aristocrat who ushered Hitler into power, Murdoch saw Donald Trump as useful — a buffoonish character whose greatest threat was cringing embarrassment, like the drunken uncle who tells dirty jokes at Thanksgiving. How could one of Jeffrey Epstein’s running buddies ever threaten the Murdoch Empire?

It all worked until it didn’t. Lying about the 2020 election cost Fox $787.5 million to settle a lawsuit from Dominion Voting System, which, as it turned out, was not actually part of an international Space Lasar conspiracy. Smartmatic Voting Machine company is demanding $2.7 billion in an ongoing defamation suit. In a culture where shame seems to have atrophied like a homo sapien tail, no longer useful to humans, the revelation that the biggest stars at Fox were themselves embarrassed by the corporate pressure to deny what every grade school child knew as true was a sweet moment of schadenfreude.

Now the monster that Murdoch’s Fox helped create has turned on Murdoch’s reputation-laundering prize, The Wall Street Journal. To their credit, there remain at the Journal serious journalists working for a major publication, an increasingly rare sighting in the American wild. Given that Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein were the most public of best friends for over a decade, it is another searing indictment of the phony values of Bible thumping MAGA that a creep-to-creep congratulatory birthday letter would be explosive.

What, the photographs and video of the two sexual predators ogling young women and partying with “models” from the beauty factories of former Soviet states wasn’t enough? The President of the United States offering his sympathy to Ghislaine Maxwell, a convicted child trafficker, from a White House podium, that was just a polite social gesture? We are talking about a man who has commented in public how much he’d like to date his own daughter and mused in hopeful optimism on national television that his just-born daughter would have the legs and breasts of her former Miss Hawaiian Tropic mother.

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Rupert Murdoch had the ability to kill Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in the crib. With one phone call, he could have directed Fox News to put a nice, soft pillow over the Trump campaign’s head until it stopped breathing. What was he thinking? Again, 1930s Germany says it all. He didn’t take seriously the chances of a man who wears more make-up than the drag queens of Mike Johnson’s dreams. Perhaps he even was foolish enough to believe that the Republican Party that had invested so much in proclaiming that Character Was King would never accept a man who had given a joint telephone interview to Howard Stern with his then girlfriend Melania Knaus while both were in bed talking about their great sex. I was that fool.

Expecting wisdom and prudence from an Australian tabloid baron whose breakthrough contribution to journalism was introducing semi-nude young women on page three of The Daily Sun is a quaint notion, like Donald Trump believing Vladimir Putin was sincere. Promoting the presidential hopes of that fat guy from Queens must have been amusing to Rupert Murdoch, a harmless and profitable pursuit, an exotic animal dealer smuggling in boa constrictors. Until you wake up one night and your profit center has wrapped itself around your throat.

Today, Rupert Murdoch faces the $10 billion Trump lawsuit on top of the $2.7 billion Smartmatic suit. There is much glee in the anti-Trump air that Murdoch has finally had enough and is moving to control “the fiend,” as Mary Shelly called Dr. Frankenstein’s creation. I’m eager to buy a ticket on that joyful ride.

But I must wonder if we are falling into the same pit of 2016 assumptions about this America we love. It’s insane to think that Donald Trump would send his masked men of ICE to arrest and deport an immigrant named Rupert Murdoch. Right? To live in that country would require believing that some day the United States government would fund a paramilitary force of masked men with a budget larger than the total military budget of all but two countries. That’s crazy, no?

In Russia, a Rupert Murdoch making a move against the leader would know to stay away from any open windows. How about in today’s America? Donald Trump has always benefited from the assumption that at some point he would be limited by the established rules of society and modulate his behavior.

Well, how’s that going?

Good luck, Mr. Murdoch. Give ‘em hell. But I’d stay away from those windows.