Donald Trump threatens to sue media companies all the time. Sometimes he actually does it.
But the libel suit Trump filed against Rupert Murdoch, Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal, and two Journal reporters last week — over a story the Journal published about a note Trump allegedly sent to Jeffrey Epstein — is extraordinary.
Not only is it seemingly the first time a sitting president has sued a media organization, it puts Trump in direct conflict with Murdoch — perhaps Trump’s most important backer over the years, via his Fox News operation.
But just because Trump has sued Murdoch doesn’t mean we’ll see a verdict in the case. Multiple media and tech companies have settled similar cases with Trump since he was elected last fall.
On the face of it, Trump should have a hard time prevailing: US libel laws place the burden on a plaintiff to prove that someone has said something untrue about them, and that burden gets much steeper when that person is a public figure. Murdoch’s Journal also has a long tradition of not bending when powerful people threaten it. (On Wednesday, the Journal published another Trump-Epstein story, reporting that Attorney General Pam Bondi had told Trump his name appeared multiple times in unreleased documents about the case.)
Still, we are in a different environment than we were before last November’s election, and all kinds of institutions have tried to accommodate Trump. Just as important: Murdoch has backed out of fights in the past.
I ran that theory by NPR’s David Folkenflik — a longtime Murdoch watcher — this week on the newest episode of my Channels podcast. (Though we spent most of our time chatting about Trump’s move to pull $1 billion in funding from NPR and PBS.) Here’s an edited excerpt of our conversation.
Peter Kafka: What do you think happens with this suit? Do you think it actually goes to trial? Do you think they settle?
David Folkenflik: Look. Trump — actually, his ostensible future presidential library — has received a lot of money in recent months from settlements. ABC, CBS — which had a truly flimsy case presented against it, essentially legally nonexistent — plus Meta, plus Twitter/X. But a lot of Trump’s previous lawsuits have been dismissed.
It wouldn’t totally surprise me if it were dismissed here, if Trump would be ultimately OK with that. Because he’s gotten the huge headline out of trying to discredit The Wall Street Journal’s excellent reporting teams.
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It puts Rupert on notice. As well as other elements of the conservative ecosystem — that they don’t get a pass, just because they’re notionally seen as on his side.
Nobody has done more than Rupert Murdoch to help Trump over the past decade. Murdoch is his own power source. These are two titans.
Two titans who don’t necessarily like each other. But they’re transactional and they both see the value in getting something from the other one. And Rupert Murdoch does settle lawsuits — like the $787.5 million check he wrote to Dominion Voting Systems, right before that defamation case was supposed to go to trial.
Just before he was supposed to testify.
So if the current price for settling a Donald Trump lawsuit is a $16 million donation to his library, that’s a nothingburger for Murdoch, right?
This is something I’ve been thinking about and talking about with some of Murdoch’s people. We’ve spoken in recent days. I can’t predict the future. But Murdoch seems to me like the kind of guy who fights things like this — until he doesn’t. Until it’s more useful for him not to.
Like if he has to go on the stand or go into depositions at the age of 94 and prepare for those things — he’s probably like, “Forget it. Sixteen million? I could care less.”
That said, he likes a good story. He didn’t kill the Theranos story, which was an exposé by one of his reporters about a blood diagnosis company built on lies, in which he was the largest private investor. And that’s to his great credit that he didn’t do that.
So I would guess that the excellent legal team of the Journal and Dow Jones fights this right until the point at which it’s going to be inconvenient.
Both sides have a pressure point. Trump doesn’t want to go to discovery, and have to talk at great length in front of lawyers for Murdoch about his actual relationship with Epstein.
That’s a pressure point.
On the other hand, if Murdoch has anything that he may think in the future is going to be in front of federal officials or regulators — like CBS and Paramount, which has its sale about to go through; like the Walt Disney Company, which perennially does — then Murdoch may say $16 million is cheap.
Let’s not forget that these alliances work in both directions. Fox News has run interference for Trump pretty much since 2015.
Murdoch won benefits for that, right? The Justice Department under Trump tried to block AT&T’s acquisition of Time Warner because Murdoch had kind of wanted to take over Time Warner.
And when Murdoch wanted to sell to Disney, Trump said ‘Go right ahead.’ He called it a “great thing.”
Trump’s only question the morning when he learned about the Disney acquisition of most of Fox’s Hollywood assets was calling Murdoch and asking, “Are you gonna hold on to Fox News?” Murdoch says yes. Trump says congratulations.
So would you bet this settles before trial?
Although there’s a part of me that believes Murdoch’s gonna fight it, these guys are totally transactional. If it didn’t happen to have the word “lawsuit” around it, somebody might pay something or send an email to somebody else to resolve this.
These are two billionaires colliding here. But their alliance is probably more useful to them than their fighting.
Unless Trump thinks that he needs this to feed the increasingly radicalized parts of his base that somehow has to be distracted from the idea that Trump knew Jeffrey Epstein. Which he obviously did.