Fox’s Rupert Murdoch Thinks Trump Is Going Crazy

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Rupert Murdoch said he thought Trump would be “especially angry” after his defeat in 2020. The candid assessment is included in Dominion’s new legal filings in its Fox News case. The filings show that Fox News executives have been critical of Trump, while promoting his fraud claims. Loading Something is loading.

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Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch told an associate he believes Donald Trump will be “very angry” after the then-president refused to accept defeat in the 2020 election.

Murdoch sent an email on November 19, 2020 in which he wrote that Trump and his then-lawyer Rudy Giuliani appeared “increasingly angry” – a British and Australian expression for declining mental health.

He added that Giuliani was “encouraging and flirting with him.”

“The real danger is what he might do as president,” Murdoch wrote of Trump, according to legal documents. “Probably not sleeping and bouncing off the wall!”

“Don’t know about Melania, but the kids are helpless,” added Murdoch.

The blunt assessment is included in a new trove of legal filings released by election engine company Dominion as part of its $1.6 billion lawsuit against Fox News.

Dominion claims that Fox News promoted false claims by Trump and his allies that its machines were used as part of a plot to deprive him of victory in 2020.

Private messages of Murdoch, his top lieutenants, and Fox News star hosts released by Dominion show their uncertainty over how to handle Trump’s refusal to concede after his defeat to Joe Biden in November, 2020.

Murdoch said, in new messages, that he does not believe Trump’s election fraud claims, and predicts that Trump will eventually relent and shift the news agenda.

“In another month Trump will be irrelevant and we’ll have a lot to say about Biden, Dems, and appointments,” he wrote to former Fox executive Preston Padden in Nov. 23, 2020.

But Trump has continued to deny the election results, and Fox News guests and hosts have continued to push his stolen election claims on their listeners. Executives in several messages expressed concern that viewers would abandon the network unless it reflected on Trump’s stolen election claims.

“Nobody wants Trump as an enemy,” Murdoch said in a Jan. 19, 2023, deposition.

When asked why, Murdoch said “because he has a great following, big.”

“Seventy-five million people voted for him,” Murdoch said.

Fox News claims that its right to broadcast stolen election claims is protected under the First Amendment, and that it reports them but does not endorse them.

In a statement in response to the new filings, Fox News said Dominion is pushing “distortions and misinformation in their PR campaign to discredit Fox News and trample on free speech and freedom of the press.”

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