Former President Donald Trump greets his supporters with his wife, former first lady Melania Trump, in Palm Beach, Fla., on Nov. 15.SAUL MARTINEZ/The New York Times News Service
Some breakups are more amicable than others.
Football legend Tom Brady and ex-model Gisele Bundchen, for instance, both insisted last month that they chose to “amicably” divorce, depriving the U.S. tabloid press of any salacious details of their breakup or a nasty custody battle in court.
The New York Post nevertheless did its best to live up to its reputation, with a front-page composite photo of Ms. Bundchen in a cocktail dress tackling her ex to the ground, with the headline: “Sacked! Brady takes another hit as Gisele splits.”
The tabloid chose a different tack to illustrate the decidedly less amicable breakup between its owner, Rupert Murdoch, and former U.S. president Donald Trump. On the morning after this month’s U.S. midterm elections that saw key Trump-backed candidates lose their races, the Post’s front page featured a photo of newly re-elected Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis with the headline: “DeFUTURE.”
It was the political equivalent of revenge sex. After standing by his man through thick and thin (mostly thin) since Mr. Trump first won the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, Mr. Murdoch seemed to go from Tammy Wynette to Henry VIII after the midterms. News outlets belonging to his News Corp. dumped Mr. Trump for Mr. DeSantis in what looked like a co-ordinated effort by their boss to prevent the former president from getting anywhere near the White House again in 2024.
“We have been clear with Donald,” a British newspaper quoted a senior News Corp. source saying. “There have been conversations between them during which Rupert made it clear to Donald that we cannot back another run for the White House.”
In case Mr. Trump failed to get the message, the Post followed up with a post-midterms front page attack on “Trumpty Dumpty.” The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, which had provided the veneer of credibility for Mr. Trump’s economic policies while he was in the White House, called him “the Republican Party’s biggest loser” and blamed him for having “led Republicans into one political fiasco after another.”
Over on Fox News, the News Corp.-owned cable network that had served as a mouthpiece for Mr. Trump during his presidency and a platform for 2020 election deniers, fawning coverage of Mr. DeSantis’s re-election victory – he beat his Democratic rival by almost 20 percentage points – contrasted with the newly negative tone the network had taken toward Mr. Trump.
“Trump may be ready to play dirty to win the GOP nomination in 2024. If he does, he will not only cement the disdain with which many in his party view him today, he will once again scorch Republican chances of defeating Democrats,” Fox News columnist Liz Peek wrote. “Let us hope the millions of Americans who supported Trump in 2016 and again in 2020 begin to see that his time has passed. If they like his policies, they need to move their allegiance to Ron DeSantis, who has never lost a campaign, and who emerged the big winner in these midterms.”
The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, last week ran an excerpt from Mike Pence’s new memoir in which the former vice-president describes pressure put on him by Mr. Trump to stop the certification of the 2020 election results. Mr. Pence insisted (as did countless legal experts) that he did not have the constitutional authority to do so.
With protesters backing Mr. Trump storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, forcing Mr. Pence to take refuge in a parking garage, Mr. Trump put out a tweet attacking him for lacking the “courage” to block the certification. Capitol rioters began chanting: “Hang Mike Pence.”
When the two men met the following week, just after Mr. Trump had become the only president to have been twice impeached by the House of Representatives, Mr. Pence told him that he was praying for him. To which Mr. Trump replied: “Don’t bother.”
Mr. Murdoch is not the only big-name backer dumping Mr. Trump.
Stephen Schwarzman, the billionaire Blackstone Group chairman who served as an economic adviser to the Trump White House, this week told Axios: “It is time for the Republican Party to turn to a new generation of leaders and I intend to support one of them in the presidential primaries.”
Even Ivanka Trump wants out. As Mr. Trump formally announced his intention to seek the 2024 Republican nomination this week at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, his daughter told Fox News: “I do not plan to be involved in politics.”
The cruellest cut came from the Post. Its front page pointed to a story buried inside the paper on Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago speech with this: “Florida man makes announcement.”
Mr. Murdoch now seems set on making Mr. Trump a nobody.
Konrad Yakabuski