JD Vance paid a visit to Rupert Murdoch’s sprawling Montana ranch on Tuesday, even as the media tycoon’s flagship newspaper continued its biting coverage of his boss.
The vice president met with the 94-year-old mogul, his son Lachlan Murdoch—the chief of News Corp and Fox News—and other Fox News executives at the 340,000-acre property near Yellowstone National Park, according to the Associated Press.
Vance’s office doesn’t release a public schedule, AP noted, so his arrival in Butte, Montana, on Air Force Two came as a surprise. The plane landed at around 2:30 p.m. and Vance left in a motorcade headed for the Dillon area, NBC Montana reported. The plane took off again after dark.
Vance and his wife, Usha, went for a hike after the meeting, a source told Politico. The Beverhead Ranch, which Murdoch and then-wife Jerry Hall bought for $200 million from the Koch family in 2021, spans 50 miles from north to south, including a 28-mile creek stuffed with trout.
It’s not clear what the meeting was about. Representatives of Vance, News Corp and Fox News have been contacted for comment.
President Donald Trump’s schedule for Wednesday included a lunch with Vance, meaning the vice president had to fly around 2,000 miles back to Washington, D.C., following his stop-in with the Murdochs.
Trump has been unhappy with the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal of late, calling it a “rotten newspaper” that has “truly gone to hell.”
“The Wall Street Journal is China-oriented,” he said last month. “And they’re really bad for this country.”
His attacks followed a string of critical articles from the conservative paper’s editorial board, including one several weeks earlier that suggested China was winning the trade war against the president.
Last week, the Journal published an editorial that criticized the Trump administration for its attempts to bar foreign students from studying at Harvard, calling Vance’s position a “classic false choice.”
A day earlier, it had mocked Trump’s “inevitable divorce” from Elon Musk, saying it made for “entertaining political theater, at least for Democrats.”
And they didn’t let up this week. A new editorial on Wednesday was bluntly headlined, “Trump Has No China Trade Strategy.”
As the Republican National Committee’s finance chair, Vance is in charge of securing donations ahead of the 2026 midterms.
The Murdoch family’s net worth is estimated at over $23 billion.
Trump can typically count on favorable coverage from many of Murdoch’s media properties, particularly Fox News, which has long served as a key amplifier of his messages. But on the occasions they let him down, Trump often lashes out publicly, accusing them of disloyalty or bias.
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