Both Kushner and Trump are said to have personally pleaded with the Fox News owner to retract the call.
In the early-morning hours of November 4, the day after the 2020 election, Donald Trump held a news conference in the East Room of the White House in which he falsely claimed that the fact that he had been ahead in the early tallying of votes, and then later behind, meant that the election had been stolen from him. “This is a fraud on the American public,” he declared. “This is an embarrassment to this country. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election.” Obviously that wasn’t true at all—Trump hadn’t won anything because not all of the votes had been counted yet. Still, in some states it had become clear that he was very likely going to lose, hence Fox News’s decision to declare Arizona for Joe Biden. At the time the call from the right-wing outlet, made before any other major network, shocked the country—and according to a new book, it was Rupert Murdoch who gave it the greenlight, with some less-than-charitable things to say about Trump!
Insider reports that Michael Wolff’s forthcoming book, Landslide, includes a scene in which Lachlan Murdoch, the nonagenarian billionaire’s son, got a call from Fox’s election desk saying it was ready to announce Biden had won Arizona, which he then took to the top:
Trump was unsurprisingly livid about the Arizona decision and, as my colleague Gabriel Sherman reported at the time, personally called Murdoch “to scream about the call and demand a retraction. Murdoch refused, and the call stood.” (Jared Kushner also reportedly tried to convince the Fox News founder to withdraw the call, a “desperate” plea that fell on deaf ears.)
Biden ultimately won Arizona by roughly 10,000 votes. But if anyone thought Fox’s (and Murdoch’s) decision to momentarily refrain from serving as a right-wing propaganda machine suggested the network had changed its ways, they were deeply mistaken. Chris Stirewalt, the politics editor at the time, was fired in January. And the network’s hosts have, of course, perpetuated the lie that Trump won the election, while pushing bullshit conspiracy theories about the January 6 attack on the Capitol.
In May, after Democratic lawmakers staged a walkout to stop a piece of legislation viewed as one of the worst voter-suppression bills in the country from becoming a law, Abbott threatened to cut off funding for the Texas Legislature, tweeting, “I will veto Article 10 of the budget passed by the legislature. Article 10 funds the legislative branch. No pay for those who abandon their responsibilities. Stay tuned.” He also vowed to pass the scuttled bill—which would restrict polling hours, make it harder to vote by mail, give more power to partisan poll watchers, and increase punishments for mistakes made by election officials—in a special session. The so-called election-security proposals are “based on a lie that there was rampant fraud in our elections, and on the ‘big lie’ that Donald Trump actually won the last election,” state Rep. Chris Turner, who urged Texas Democrats to walk out on May 30, told the Post. “That’s what this is all about—so they can curry favor with Donald Trump and his supporters. That’s exactly what’s going on here.
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In the early-morning hours of November 4, the day after the 2020 election, Donald Trump held a news conference in the East Room of the White House in which he falsely claimed that the fact that he had been ahead in the early tallying of votes, and then later behind, meant that the election had been stolen from him. “This is a fraud on the American public,” he declared. “This is an embarrassment to this country. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election.” Obviously that wasn’t true at all—Trump hadn’t won anything because not all of the votes had been counted yet. Still, in some states it had become clear that he was very likely going to lose, hence Fox News’s decision to declare Arizona for Joe Biden. At the time the call from the right-wing outlet, made before any other major network, shocked the country—and according to a new book, it was Rupert Murdoch who gave it the greenlight, with some less-than-charitable things to say about Trump!
Insider reports that Michael Wolff’s forthcoming book, Landslide, includes a scene in which Lachlan Murdoch, the nonagenarian billionaire’s son, got a call from Fox’s election desk saying it was ready to announce Biden had won Arizona, which he then took to the top:
In a statement, a Fox News Media spokesperson told the Hive: "This account is completely false. Arnon Mishkin who leads the FOX News Decision Desk made the Arizona call on election night and FOX News Media President Jay Wallace was then called in the control room. Any other version of the story is wildly inaccurate.” Regarding Bill Hemmer’s call to Miller, a Fox News spokesperson insisted “This never happened and is completely untrue.”
Trump was unsurprisingly livid about the Arizona decision and, as my colleague Gabriel Sherman reported at the time, personally called Murdoch “to scream about the call and demand a retraction. Murdoch refused, and the call stood.” (Jared Kushner also reportedly tried to convince the Fox News founder to withdraw the call, a “desperate” plea that fell on deaf ears.)
Biden ultimately won Arizona by roughly 10,000 votes. But if anyone thought Fox’s (and Murdoch’s) decision to momentarily refrain from serving as a right-wing propaganda machine suggested the network had changed its ways, they were deeply mistaken. Chris Stirewalt, the politics editor at the time, was fired in January. And the network’s hosts have, of course, perpetuated the lie that Trump won the election, while pushing bullshit conspiracy theories about the January 6 attack on the Capitol.
In May, after Democratic lawmakers staged a walkout to stop a piece of legislation viewed as one of the worst voter-suppression bills in the country from becoming a law, Abbott threatened to cut off funding for the Texas Legislature, tweeting, “I will veto Article 10 of the budget passed by the legislature. Article 10 funds the legislative branch. No pay for those who abandon their responsibilities. Stay tuned.” He also vowed to pass the scuttled bill—which would restrict polling hours, make it harder to vote by mail, give more power to partisan poll watchers, and increase punishments for mistakes made by election officials—in a special session. The so-called election-security proposals are “based on a lie that there was rampant fraud in our elections, and on the ‘big lie’ that Donald Trump actually won the last election,” state Rep. Chris Turner, who urged Texas Democrats to walk out on May 30, told the Post. “That’s what this is all about—so they can curry favor with Donald Trump and his supporters. That’s exactly what’s going on here.
“F--k Him”: Rupert Murdoch Reportedly Made the Call to Bury Trump’s Election Night Dreams in a Shallow Grave
Both Kushner and Trump are said to have personally pleaded with the Fox News owner to retract the call.
