Donald Trump’s reordering of America’s gilded hierarchy is forcing the Murdochs to confront a hard truth: you can pass wealth down through generations. But power? Not so much.
Indeed, as billionaire oligarchs such as Australia’s Gina Rinehart and Anthony Pratt have lined up to tip their hat to the godfather-elect, one name has been conspicuously missing: the Murdoch princeling Lachlan.
This speaks to the changing nature of power in the age of populism — with its “fusion of state and commercial power in a ruling elite”, as Carole Cadwalladr described it in The Guardian last week. Power is no longer as transactional as in the heyday of father Rupert (and grandfather Keith, for that matter), when they could trade media access for political influence.
Now it spins out from the leader, mediated through an inner circle of Silicon Valley tech bros who have melded their grand dreams of crypto and artificial intelligence with Trump’s MAGA movement. Sorry, Lachlan, the bros have supplanted the twentieth-century power of media moguls.
It’s a rule of oligarchies: when a billionaire (like, say, Trump) takes over politics, his once-were peers (say, the Murdochs) get shuffled down the hierarchy (or all the way out the window, as a few of Putin’s oligarchs have found).
Fox News is still loyally puffing the MAGA line, warehousing activists as presenters and paid contributors. Five have already been named in the new administration and another seven appointees have been “frequent Fox guests”, according to Media Matters.
Yet, when it comes to the family, Trump seems unforgiving. Back in 2016, when Trump surprised even himself by tumbling into the White House, the neophyte president and Rupert Murdoch spoke “almost every day”, according to the ultimate access reporter, The New York Time’s Maggie Haberman.
Now it’s Elon Musk who — having lost billions in MAGA-fying Twitter and donating millions to the Trump campaign — has “uncle” status in the first family (although according to Mar-a-Lago gossip that passes for political access journalism, insiders are already tipping that Musk is outstaying his welcome).
But perhaps Trump and Musk will become more than family instead, with reports that their respective platforms, Truth Social and X, will merge, using the magic of oligarchy to solve the business challenges of either individual company. (Maybe the new company would want a cable arm, like, say, Fox News?)
It’s not just Musk who’s squeezed Lachlan and the Murdochs out of Trump’s inner circle though. At July’s Republican National Convention, Rupert found himself seated up the back of the hall, while Tucker Carlson, the presenter he’d pushed out of Fox just a year earlier, was comfortably ensconced with the Trump family.
The Murdochs’ link to Trump seems to bypass Lachlan, running from 93-year-old Rupert through Musk. The two men reportedly met privately just two weeks before the election. “Young” 53-year-old Lachlan is rarely mentioned in US media, never quite recovering from the “lame duck” tag. If thought about at all, it’s either as a proxy for his father or as a placeholder for his siblings.
Plus, in more bad news for Lachlan, there is already a Murdoch within Musk’s circle: brother-in-exile James, who sits on the Tesla board (the board that was required to return US$735 million in “excessive” bonuses last year).
When monopolies made media scarce (and hard to break into), Murdoch made Trump — first through the 1980s celebrity gossip pages of the New York Post (as dramatised in the biopic The Apprentice, written by Roger Ailes biographer Gabriel Sherman) and then through a lathering of the requisite political seriousness in the Aisles-run Fox News.
This time around, Fox is just another voice in a noisy, multi-channel world. It’s not even the most important, stuck in the declining cable ecosystem, pushed around by its audience, and reduced to chasing conspiracy theories about cat-eating migrants in Ohio or Venezuelan gangs in Colorado, long after they’ve gone viral through the digital manosphere of podcasts, X and alt-right media.
There’s some good news for the Murdochs (and bad news for the rest of us), and it’s that the door to media owners is always open. Trump uses forgiveness as a dominance play, particularly if you’re rich enough.
Take the US$132 million-odd paid to various MAGA causes by businesswoman Miriam Adelson. Adelson was a big supporter of Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential run and owns, among other things, the Las Vegas Review-Journal in swing state Nevada and Israel Hayom, a pro-Netanyahu paper credited with helping tilt Israel to the right. In what I’m sure is unrelated news, Rubio has been named Trump’s secretary of state.
Neither Rupert nor Lachlan appear on the list of top 100 donors to political causes.
The cheap seats in The Australian’s punditocracy responded to the election with a chiacking cheer to sack Kevin Rudd as Australia’s US ambassador. By the weekend, the campaign seemed to have been dropped as family voices (including Fox board member Tony Abbott) became more cautious.
“Two lights are flashing — danger and opportunity,” wrote Paul Kelly in what could be taken as a talking points memo to the Murdochrats. “Some people will make a stack of money and others will be cast into painful obscurity.”
Are the Murdochs on the decline, or will Trump take them back? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
