At the end of another tumultuous week in Trumpworld, we’re left with a tantalising question: has Rupert Murdoch discovered genuine moral outrage?
Midway through his 10th decade and with mortality looming, has he asked himself the fundamental question: what’s the purpose of it all? Has he looked upon a portrait of his late dad and resolved that now is the time to make him proud?
It should be remembered that Keith Murdoch arrived in Gallipoli as a reporter in 1915 and was so appalled that he risked life and limb to get word to the British and the Australian governments, thereby forging the family legend as a teller of truth to power. What will his son’s legacy be? Can Rupert make his kids as proud of him as he is of his dad? Or will he be remembered for making money out of hacking the messages of missing schoolgirl Milly Dowler, who was later found dead?
Rolling in it
If US President Donald Trump was put on this earth to do one thing, maybe it was to test how low people will go before they say enough is enough. Universities have rolled over. So have law firms and giant corporations. So have media organisations, including the once mighty CBS and ABC networks. So has the Republican Party and the Speaker, the craven Mike Johnson, as devout a Christian man as you will ever meet.
For his part, Rupert has gone along with Trump. He was with him as Trump launched the January 6, 2021, coup against US democracy. His network reinforced Trump’s stolen election claim, knowing it was untrue. He has stuck with Trump as he demonised the media as fake and/or lying and/or evil. Despite it being Murdoch’s own industry, building on a media group established by his father, he has offered not a word in defence.
But now Jeffrey Epstein.
Power source
Can you accept that Trump may have engaged in sex with young girls trafficked by Epstein and that he now lies and deflects about his involvement, using the power and resources of the US government to cover up the truth?
As Nicole Chvastek wrote this week, Murdoch outlets have a record of playing good cop/bad cop. It’s possible for Fox News to continue stoking the Trump machine while The Wall Street Journal attacks. Business is business.
At the same time Murdoch knows a winner — and a loser — when he sees it.
The Epstein scandal is a long way from Watergate. And today’s media operate in a very different environment. But it’s clear that just like The Washington Post of the Nixon era, The Wall Street Journal’s reporters have at least one impeccable, highly placed source. This source has provided two explosive pieces of information. One is the “bawdy birthday note”, including a conspiratorial reference to “secrets”, which Trump allegedly wrote to Epstein for his 50th birthday. The other is the inside tip that Attorney-General Pam Bondi told Trump in May that his name was in the Epstein files. That explained a great deal about Trump’s earlier change of approach to the Epstein case.
Plot twists
Good journalists know they always need to keep a new disclosure up their sleeve for when the inevitable denial comes — which in Trump’s case is as predictable as the sun rising. That’s how it has played out. Good journalists also know that once a source sees bang for their buck they may leak more damaging information.
What we know is that the collection of conspiracy theorists and QAnon nuts who populate the US Justice Department are liable to do anything, especially given the moral depravity of the Epstein crimes that Trump would seek to obscure. This is not what we call a stable environment.
It will ultimately be up to how messed up America is if they are happy to stick with a president like Trump, but it is entirely possible that Murdoch’s outlet can keep up the stream of disclosures on the one and only scandal which has so far stuck to Teflon Don. Internal leakers will be fully aware that having a Murdoch outlet turn on Trump is a powerful thing indeed — whatever Muroch’s motives.
Not enough Poipcorn in the world to follow this movie playing.
Trump is a narcisst due to what his father did to him. I worked with a narcisst and each cannot do anything wrong. This expains why Trump cannot do anything wrong and if he did he would deny he did the wrong thing
Narcissists are psychopaths, they are born not raised.
Trump lies because he can……….
Beautiful Ratty, no truer words could ever be spoken. Trump is what I would deem a ‘very strange individual’. He has no particular human traits at all. Except those negative human traits of narcissism sexism, racism, misogyny – how many other ism’s can be added, I wonder! Over to you lovely people, to educate me in this very important issue. Cheers.
Trumpty-Dumpty envisaged a wall
Then Trumpty-Dumpty suffered a fall
And nothing the White House invaders could do
Could ‘fix’ the election to bring on Trump 2.0
But Trumpty-Dumpty was not fazed at all
With Republican High Court judges on call
With Fox and Murdoch both praising his name
Trumpty was back at the top of his game
Trumpty-Dumpty was buddies with Vlad
But the war in Ukraine now MAGAs him sad
And Bibi’s excesses are so not very nice
That Gaza-lago must be put on ice
Trumpty-Dumpty starts tariff-fueled wars
Proclaiming his greatness is his Holy Cause
It’s good business and best for America’s health
To cut Medic-Aid for those of least wealth
Trumpty-Dumpty gave Epstein a call
But Trumpty now can’t recall it at all
And, likewise, in a convenient twist
Collective amnesia across Epstein’s list
Trumpty-Dumpty dislikes CBS
And Steven Colbert, and South Park, no less
And Paramount needed a prompt to see sense
The Late Show should go the way of Mike Pence
Trumpty-Dumpty has crowned himself king
America First, all must kiss the ring
The rest of us can only breathe easy when
Trumpty falls down and lies broken again
pity there’s not a like button!
Agree. A very clever verse
Maybe you found a new career?
Brilliant writing.
Brilliant poem. Trumpy humpty. Really is a child’s fantasy . A boy who never grew up and now is in charge of the maybe not for long the American Empire. So let’s just hope the American people wake up. Not holding my breath though.
Great work, Jon!
David Hardaker, you somehow always write something worth saying, in terse, quotable prose worth reading.
Many thanks for your comment. I think about this stuff all the time.
Good Morning David, yes I think about this stuff all the time as well.
Would yo be so kind as to send me an email?
What has Maxwell told the DOJ? Incrimination or exoneration, in which case perhaps a pardon? Either way this story has a way to run and I hope the WSJ’s deep throat is as good as the WaPo’s (?) was.
Yes, this is intriguing. The DoJ must be on Trump’s side. Maxwell’s lawyer was quoted as saying to the paparazzi “She answered all of the questions and she answered all of them honestly”. How would he know? Sounds like a set up. Doctored legal questions agreed to beforehand. She gets a sentence reduction (a pardon would be too obvious and only create further scandal) and Trump gets let off the hook.
Exactly Psepho, how would he know? The mind boggles.
Connection betwee4n Trump & Eipstein go back decades! 1993 Trump at Eipsteins wedding.
Child sex trafficking victims will bring Trump down.
Commuting her sentence and giving her immunity (GOP) and curated responses to avoid double jeopardy.
Mike Johnson, what’s in it for him & wealthy people (Eyes wide Shut) his religious values (?) should tell him what to do.
We don’t see the craziness that’s going on behind the scenes.
Eipstein, Trump and wealthy men raping girls and Johnson does not know what to do; he knows that Trump and GOP members ARE implicated in this.
Johnson sends congress home for a month to avoid resolution and accountability and this will backfire.
Congress chose to do nothing and law suits will follow and it will be ruthless as time goes on.
Rupert Murdoch – drip, drip, drip, Trump has caused too much turbulence.
Election interference case in Rockland still long way to go and what will bring down MAGA is sex trafficking, it’s their wine and holy grail.
Heritage Foundation also exposing Trump, they have all been sitting on this information from inception.
Trump will grasp whatever straws he can to stop this, too late! he will also become more unpredictable!
Maxwell wants to stay alive.
“Trump didn’t do anything!” or so she said, if she could remember.
They’re both repellant, so it’s little wonder that they repel each other.
Rarely watch YouTubes but couldn’t resist the South Park one. How long till it is cancelled?
Colbert will run a contract finishing anti-Trump shit show over the next months.
In the meantime he’ll be setting up an alternative hustle that will allow his program to continue beyond the cancellation grave.
30 years is a good gig in the political satire movement.
As the Stones once observed, “You better move on!”
‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ is becoming frighteningly accurate. The reactions by Daffy Donald Dump and his fellow minions of political thugs and gangsters, including Vlad the Impaler, to assorted events happening on the planet now, show the panic and aggression that all great empires go through as they enter an inevitable decline, plummeting, in flames as the Western Roman Empire did if we take into account that the Eastern Byzantine wing, lasted for 1000 years but died with a whimper. The Gilead Empire, modelled on the Roman Republic, is no exception. That footnote to history, in the longer term, and with a more sophisticated view of history, will view him as a sawdust Caesar. Daffy Donald Dump may well be the American Romulus Augustus, and if she won the Presidential Election, Kamala Harris might have been the American Constantine XI Dragases Palaiologos. If we take a deterministic look into the future, it may end up being the Asian century, with the two superpowers, India and China, competing for world influence as both Gilead and the USSR once did. One point worth mentioning is an organization that is laughingly called. “National Endowment for Democracy”, has either ignored or cosied up to repressive totalitarian US client states from Franco’s Spain, right up to the Thai military regime, still in power, and the current rightwing Central and South American dictatorships and military regimes. GILEAD NEEDS TO SEE THE EMERGENCE OF A STRONGLY PRO-WORKING CLASS MASS DEMOCRATIC SOCIALIST PARTY NOW!!!!!!
With the way, they wallow in the mud and excreta of reactionary hypocrisy, the sooner both the Reprehensible Reptile and the Goldilachlan, with their minions of 10th-rate, amateurish semi-literate scribblers, and hydrogen sulphide-filled radio and television airheads(and I include the empty-headed airheads on Fox News and Sky News as well) are all taken down a step or two the better. I would go further and nationalise their media empire, without compensation and operate it in the interests of The People, and under joint worker/community control, since both the Reprehensible Reptile and the Goldilachlan run them like a 12th Century feudal Norman seigneur. Thinking particularly of the retiring reprehensible reptile, and his replacement, the Goldilachlan, I wonder if they also claimed ‘le Droit de Seigneur’ if and when any women he employs enter into wedlock.
All very well for name calling, a feature of Trump’s rhetoric, and alliteration does not really make it clever particularly when capitalised.
Murdoch has been a powerful man far longer than the man of steel, Trump that is not Stalin though the similarities are rather clear .
In a world and an oval office where repition and big and best and bold and beautiful have replaced meaningful policy Murdoch may be thinking about the old newspaper adage….dog bites man.
The trump lost me at “rape”. All that follows leaves me one question: Are we all being too dumb (i.e. to prosecute and punish him) or too clever (I.e. we choose to entertain and indulge ourselves continuing to think about him and throw words about).
Watch this space and break out the popcorn! More juicy leaks are coming and Trump is going to be badly damaged. But remember JD Vance is awaiting in the wings!
The victims of Epstein, etc, etc are still victims and the only person who has been prosecuted and sentenced is a woman. Just saying.
You are right. It’s time the victims were given a voice. We really need to hear from them.