He confided to friends in the fall of 2020 that he thought Donald J. Trump was going “increasingly mad” and would be “a danger” in a second term — and happily predicted that by the end of that year, “Trump will be becoming irrelevant.” Two years later, he backed Mr. Trump’s chief rival in the Republican primaries, Gov. Ron DeSantis, bestowing Mr. DeSantis with the brute-force promotional heft that only he could deliver.
But on Tuesday, Rupert Murdoch, the recently retired global media titan, was in Milwaukee to take his place among the rank-and-file Republican faithful. And with that, he became one of the most prominent one-time Trump detractors to line up behind the former president and join a convention that has doubled as a resounding show of Republican unity.
Mr. Murdoch, 93, has not been a regular at conventions. And his attendance here was, in its way, another extraordinary turn in his contorted relationship with Mr. Trump, whose unshakable hold over the audience of Mr. Murdoch’s major cable network, Fox News, has kept Mr. Murdoch yoked to the former president for the better part of the past decade.
The relationship between Mr. Murdoch and Mr. Trump broke hard and seemingly inexorably in late 2020. Fox News became the first network to declare Mr. Trump had lost Arizona, and refused to reverse the call when Mr. Trump’s family and strategists insisted victory there was still in hand.
Fox’s Trump-loving audience initially punished the network by briefly taking its ratings elsewhere — and, in some cases, joining in chants of “Fox News Sucks!” at rallies and protests.
But Mr. Murdoch and his Fox News team began winning them back after offering more coverage promoting Mr. Trump’s stolen-election lies. Then the company paid dearly for it, with a record-high defamation settlement of $787 million to the voting machine company at the center of the conspiracy theories, Dominion Voting Systems.
The Dominion case also led to the public exposure of several embarrassing text messages in which Mr. Murdoch lacerated Mr. Trump. Mr. Trump has responded in kind, at one point writing on Truth Social that Mr. Murdoch was a “MAGA hating globalist” — one who was “abetting THE DESTRUCTION OF AMERICA.”
But as Mr. Murdoch also acknowledged in the Dominion case, his audience was enamored with Mr. Trump, and in the long run doing anything to antagonize him “would be stupid.”
The two had not been in touch since the 2020 election until a couple of months ago, when Mr. Murdoch shared his enthusiasm for Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota as Mr. Trump’s running mate, according to a person briefed on their conversation.
On a recent appearance on the podcast of Clay Travis and Buck Sexton, Mr. Trump indicated that the two had spoken more since.
“I speak with Rupert Murdoch a lot,” Mr. Trump said, adding, “He’s 100 percent sharp — he’s as sharp as a tack.”
That does not mean that Mr. Trump is taking all of Mr. Murdoch’s advice. Mr. Trump chose Senator J.D. Vance as his running mate, leaving Mr. Burgum at alter. And, on the first night of the convention, when Mr. Trump surprised delegates by taking his place in the hall, he took a seat beside Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host, who was forced out last year and has eviscerated the network since leaving.
On Tuesday, Mr. Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., went after Fox News and Mr. Murdoch, telling Axios, “There was a time where if you wanted to survive in the Republican Party, you had to bend the knee to him or to others.” He added, “I don’t think that’s the case anymore.”
The younger Mr. Trump also said that he had been blacklisted by Fox. The company noted that he was to appear on Fox & Friends on Wednesday, and had been interviewed on the network this week.
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