This article is part of a series about a legal threat sent to Crikey by Lachlan Murdoch, over an article Crikey published about the January 6 riots in the US. For the series introduction go here, and for the full series go here.
Next-gen billionaires Lachlan of the House Murdoch and Javanka of the House Trump are learning a hard truth about oligarchy: you can inherit the money that makes you a billionaire, but you can’t inherit the political clout that makes you an oligarch.
As that political-science classic The Godfather tells us, there’s only room for one Don in a family. It’s why the 91-year-old Rupert can’t (or won’t) step down. It’s why the 76-year-old Trump is running for president, rather than backing the politically-eager Don Jr or the more marketable Ivanka.
The children (if that’s the word for offspring in their 40s and 50s) find themselves left in “swell a progress, start a scene or two” roles. It’s the pathos that drives the drama of the fictional Roy family in Succession. It’s on display, too, in the “soulless and very selective memoir” (as per the eviscerating take in The New York Times) of Jared Kushner’s book.
It’s the clout that turns the billionaire into an oligarch. It’s the fight over clout that marks the recurring battles between the Murdochs and the Trumps.
The Murdoch family built its wealth by monetising Rupert’s clout, translating it into hard-earned political favours (sorry, arms-length administrative decision-making) back in the 1980s: the 1981 Thatcher tick to take over the Times, the Reagan-era abandoning of the “fairness” doctrine in 1987, the Hawke government waiving through the foreign takeover of The Herald and Weekly Times in 1987.
Rupert’s still the company’s go-to guy, as Malcolm Turnbull knew when he reached out to save his leadership in 2018 and why he felt dissed when Rupert palmed him off to Lachlan as the decision-maker. Yeah, right.
It’s why outgoing British Prime Minister Boris Johnson spent so much of his non-partying COVID lock-down time dining with Rupert and then-wife Jerry Hall. And why the current contenders have spent so much of their past year trying to replace BoJo in Rupert’s patronage.
Trump, for Murdoch, is trickier. From the moment Trump’s candidacy was embraced by Republicans, he slipped the bounds of patronage as he competed directly for the loyalties of the Murdoch’s Fox-watching audience.
As Henry Hale writes in his analysis of post-Soviet bloc politics, the greatest risk to oligarchs is when one of their own takes over politics, upsetting the power balance, threatening to kick his once-were peers down the hierarchy.
For the third time, the Murdochs are trying to put the Trumps back in their place — cautiously, with editorials in their News Corp papers last month: “The President who stood still on Jan. 6” from the WSJ Editorial Board. “Trump’s silence on Jan. 6 is damning,” according to the New York Post. Privately, according to CNN’s Oliver Darcy, Lachlan “has gone so far as to tell people that he believes if Trump were to run again, it would be bad for the country”.
Brave. Meanwhile, the Fox network that employs him as chief executive is carrying on its stolen election narrative, hatcheting the January 6 committee with “nothing to see here”, “show trial”, “boring”.
The two patriarchs date back long before the children joined the cast. The original Trump persona as the lovable billionaire rogue was forged in the 1980s in the “Page Six” gossip column of Murdoch’s New York Post, out of a relationship forged by their mutual lawyer Roy Cohn.
The younger Trumps and Murdochs were likewise long conjoined: In Rupert’s third marriage (to the much younger Wendi Deng), the Murdoch-Deng pair socialised with Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump and, Kushner says, helped keep his marriage together. When Kushner bought the weekly New York Observer he claimed Rupert as a key adviser.
After the Murdoch-Deng marriage ended, Ivanka became trustee for their two daughters in the complicated and contested Murdoch family trust. She’s credited with brokering the final peace settlement with Lachlan and, through Lachlan, the other three Murdochs.
In his book, Kushner says he settled the 2015 spat when Trump declared himself for the US President and Murdoch responded with an eye-rolling WTF tweet.
Come election night 2020, it appeared — all too briefly — that the Murdochs would finally be rid of Trump when the network’s specialist election panel called Arizona for Biden. Kushner again reached out to Rupert.
His response, according to Kushner: “Sorry, Jared, there is nothing I can do.” To Lachlan, according to biographer Michael Wolff, he was more direct: “Fuck him.”
But Trump was irresistible. He attacked Fox and talked up fringe competitors (like the One America News Network). Rumours circulated on Twitter that Trump would poach the Fox stars to his own network. No need. Falling quickly into line, Fox aired repeated conspiracy theories about the stolen election to win its audience back.
Maybe third time’s the charm. The Murdochs are hoping that this time around they’ll be able to carry their audience — and clout — over into a post-Trump future. Cautiously.
