On July 17, Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal (WSJ) published Donald Trump’s bawdy letter, with the drawing of a naked woman, to his then friend Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced sex-trafficker who was arrested in 2006 and who died in jail in mysterious circumstances in 2019.

This letter, with Trump’s trademark signature, was signed off only with his first name, Donald. The letter was part of a leather-bound album that contained greetings from Epstein’s close friends for his 50th birthday celebration in 2003. Before publishing this new revelation, the WSJ sought a reaction from Trump, who is now the president of the USA. In his interview to the Journal, Trump flatly denied writing that letter or drawing that picture. It was a fake thing, he asserted and threatened he would file a lawsuit if the newspaper carried a report on that letter. Undaunted, the WSJ went ahead and published it.

The MAGA crowd's disappointment with Trump

That took many by surprise as the report could potentially damage Trump’s standing among his Make America Great Again ( MAGA) fans who had so far been fed on the conspiracy theory that it was only Democrats like Bill Clinton and others of his ilk who were part of Epstein’s Client List, an exclusive list of rich and powerful men who had access to the paedophile’s secret rendezvous fortresses with pretty, young girls to entertain them.

The MAGA crowd had been made to believe by the Trump backers that the Democratic Administration had suppressed the Epstein files. So there was a clamour from them for the release of the Epstein papers when their tribune, the so-called plebeian hero, made it to the White House.

But the Trump followers were disappointed when Pam Bondi, Trump’s attorney general,  gave out only that information about Epstein files which was already in the public domain. All hell broke loose when the Department of Justice suggested  that there was no client list and there was no further disclosure to make.

The Trump world was livid: they accused the Trump administration of doing the same cover-up job which Democrats had done before and which they had opposed tooth and nail.  The tables are now turned: many people who are now in the Trump government had pushed the conspiracy theories during the election campaign; now they are busy tamping down the same conspiracy angle which they had helped fuel for years.

It’s in such circumstances, the publication of such a report linking Trump to Epstein in the widely-read WSJ  was clearly damaging for the US President. Not surprising that  Trump  made his best efforts to block the publication. His press secretary Karoline Leavitt  spoke to both the WSJ’s editor and the chief executive urging them to drop the story. President Trump himself called up his ‘good old friend’ Rupert Murdoch, the owner of WSJ, and pleaded with him to help him out.

But, despite all these efforts, when the report saw the light of the day on July 17, a furious Trump went public with his ire against Murdoch. In a post on Truth Social, Trump claimed that Murdoch had promised him that “he would take care of it” but he didn’t. He threatened he would “sue his (Murdoch’s) ass off and that of his third rate newspaper”. He made good on that promise the very next day by filing a $10 billion dollar lawsuit against “Murdoch and his ‘pile of garbage’ newspaper, the WSJ”.

Why did Murdoch, a long-time friend of Trump, chose to subject the US president to acute embarrassment? After all, it was Murdoch’s New York Post which had established Trump as a real estate czar in 1970s and 80s by repeatedly highlighting his achievements. It was Murdoch’s Fox News which championed Trump’s MAGA agenda during his presidential campaign and carried his message to the millions. Fox News veritably had become Trump’s mouth piece.

Trump and Murdoch also socialised a lot. In fact, Murdoch was very much there in the presidential box with Trump on the night of July 13 – just three days before the publication of the damaging report –  watching the Club World Cup final in New Jersey where Chelsea triumphed over PSG.

Murdoch hit two birds with one stone with the Trump letter revelation

Why did then Murdoch dump Trump? Was it call of duty? Was the media ethics at play: that a newspaper must do investigations and publish stories, without fear or favour?

But then Murdoch has never been known to be driven by the moral compass. He has always been a transactional media baron, seeking to prop up and destroy the political profiles that suited his business at a given time. He has done so in every country he operated in: through The Times and Sunday Times in the U.K and through some 150 brands in Australia.

It’s then a million-dollar question why Murdoch chose to turn against Trump at this given time. One can only hazard a guess. Possibly, Murdoch believes that Trump is losing hold over the MAGA base due to the botching up of the Epstein affair. But the transactional media baron that he is, Murdoch wants to hold on to the MAGA crowd as it’s the mainstay of the Fox News’s phenomenal viewership.

In fact, Murdoch hit two birds with one stone with the Trump letter revelation: he has consolidated the conservative viewership of the Fox News on the one hand and has added fuel to the fire of the bursting anger of Wall Street Journal readership against Trump’s policy on tariffs, vaccines and immigration.

Friendships can be sacrificed for business – that seems to be the guiding spirit of both Trump and Murdoch. Both have practised it for long; it’s to be seen who emergences triumphant in this battle royal between a media monarch and a political oligarch: will Murdoch’s News Corp end up paying Trump to settle the lawsuit as the ABC and CBS have done or will Trump eat an humble pie and seek to break bread with Murdoch again to protect his political base? Time will tell.

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