Washington was all atwitter this week over the clearest signs yet that Rupert Murdoch, the Wizard of Trumpism, has decided to dump Donald Trump.
Tabloid with long relationship with former president blasts him over Capitol attack, saying he is unworthy to be elected again.
Rupert Murdoch, hitherto one of Donald Trump’s most loyal media messengers, appears to have turned on the former president.
US media circles were rocked this weekend after the New York Post issued an excoriating editorial indictment of Trump’s failure to stop the attack on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. …
The Wall Street Journal, another Murdoch paper, issued a similar critique in which it said evidence before the House January 6 committee was a reminder that “Trump betrayed his supporters”.
(The Guardian, July 25, 2022)
Post and WSJ just following my lead…
While everyone else was expressing shock and relief, I was feeling flattered and disappointed: the former because I’m on record predicting that Murdoch would dump Trump; the latter because, well, nobody in Washington seems to have noticed.
After all, here is what I wrote here two weeks ago in “It’s Gavin Newsom vs. Ron DeSantis for President in 2024!’ July 11, 2022:
I am convinced Rupert Murdoch has already anointed DeSantis as the Republican nominee, and it’s only a matter of time before Fox News begins indoctrinating the base accordingly.
And nothing vindicates my prediction quite like this from Wednesday’s edition of The New York Times:
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When former President Donald J. Trump spoke to a friendly crowd on Tuesday in his first visit to Washington since leaving office, he was covered extensively by a range of news outlets, both mainstream ones and those more sympathetic to him.
There was one notable outlier: Fox News.
On Monday, “Fox & Friends,” which helped defend Mr. Trump through four years of controversy and chaos, pointed out that Mr. DeSantis’s poll numbers were rising in hypothetical matchups of potential Republican candidates in 2024. Mr. Trump was not pleased.
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Better the Trump you know than the wannabe…?
But I’m also on record warning that a Trump wannabe like DeSantis with brains will pose a far greater threat to American democracy than the venal Trump even did. Specifically, here is what I wrote here in “Biden Calls Putin Murderous; Murdoch Dangerous,” April 6, 2022:
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Biden is right, of course. Because, despite all the dystopian maladies Fox News has already wrought, Murdoch is doubling down.
Again, this Aussie interloper seems as hell-bent on destroying America from the inside as Vladimir Putin is on doing so from the outside. And, with Tucker Carlson on Fox News feeding viewers far more palatable lies and conspiracies on a nightly basis, all he needs is a Trump with brains, like Ron DeSantis of Yale BA and Harvard Law, in the White House doing his bidding to consummate the destruction he so devoutly wishes for America…
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The point is that it is tantamount to signing a murder-suicide pact, or signing up for a civil war, for anyone to vote for any Republican who exhibits any of the Trumpian traits that now define the MAGA Republican Party. And DeSantis exhibits all of them in spades.
This means that, if you want to “keep the republic,” the only safe bet is to vote for Democrats – up and down the ballot!
America, you have been warned…