By Aaron Miller-
Rupert Murdoch told Donald Trump’s in law, Jared Kushner, in advance of the U.S election results that Donald Trump had no chance of winning the elections because the numbers were not even close.
Trump’s son-in-law and chief adviser has detailed the media mogul’s conversation with him in a memoir, Breaking History, due out next month.
It reveals a series of events during the 2020 elections in which Donald Trump, who was desperate to win the U.S 2020 elections, was told in advance that the numbers were going against him and his dream of staying in power was slipping away.
Trump is being investigated by the January 6 Committee for actively encouraging a mob to storm Congress in the insurrection that rocked America and became world news. The former U.S president is also accused of doing very little to stop the mob, instead gleefully watching the insurrection on Capitol Hill play out whilst resisting persuasions from his political team to stop the attack.
Text messages between Donald Trump and highly placed White House officials which were meant to be examined as part of the investigation mysteriously disappeared, heightening suspicion they were hidden to evade accountability. Trump’s endless efforts to overturn the U.S elections was more than a soap opera, the subsequent investigations into his corrupt attempts to subvert the results worthy of several documentaries and potentially films.
In the meantime, segments of the story are already being monetized with many more on their way
Rupert Murdoch, whose broadcasting networks had previously been in support of Trump, told Donald Trump he had lost his bid to stay in the White House after the president personally called him to ‘rage’ about Fox News’ election coverage.
Mr Murdoch is said to have ignored demands to retract his network’s decision to call the key state of Arizona in Joe Biden’s favour late on Tuesday night – before any rival news outlets.
Jarred Krushner Image: NDTV.com
Vanity fair also revealed that President Trump had become increasingly anxious about Fox News’ less partisan coverage in recent ‘screamed’ at the media mogul after it became clear he wouldn’t budge, according to Vanity Fair.
Path
The Guardian reports that Kushner describes the Trump campaign’s focus on Arizona and writes that losing there “would drastically narrow our path to victory”.
Author Michael Wolff also reported in a book last year that Murdoch gave his son Lachlan Murdoch approval for Fox News to call Arizona for Biden with “a signature grunt” and a barb for Trump: “Fuck him.”
Kushner writes: “I dialled Rupert Murdoch and asked why Fox News had made the Arizona call before hundreds of thousands of votes were tallied. Rupert said he would look into the issue, and minutes later he called back.“‘Sorry Jared, there is nothing I can do,’” he said. “‘The Fox News data authority says the numbers are ironclad – he says it won’t be close.’”
Biden eventually won Arizona by about 10,000 votes, a margin which increased after a partisan audit encouraged by Trump allies and commissioned by state Republicans.
Key members of the Fox News decision desk left after the election. Chris Stirewalt, the politics editor, was fired. He has appeared before the January 6 committee.
“We knew [Arizona] would be a consequential call because it was one of five states that really mattered,” Stirewalt testified.
Stirewalt also said that by the time of the Arizona call, Trump’s chances of beating Biden were “very small” and “getting smaller”. After Arizona, he said, those chances dwindled to “none”.
In his book, Kushner shades close to his father-in-law’s lie about electoral fraud in Biden’s victory, writing: “2020 was full of anomalies.”
The election was called for Biden on 7 November, when Pennsylvania fell into his column. He won the electoral college by 306-232, the same margin Trump called a landslide when it landed in his favour against Hillary Clinton in 2016. Biden won the popular vote by more than 7m.
In his passage on the speech Trump gave in the early hours of 4 November, the day after election day, claiming “Frankly, we did win this election”, Kushner says he was called by Karl Rove, the strategist who helped George W Bush win “the closest presidential election in US history”, against Al Gore in 2000.
Trump claimed to have been the victim of fraud. Rove, Kushner writes, said: “The president’s rhetoric is all wrong. He’s going to win. Statistically, there’s no way the Democrats can catch up with you now.”
Kushner says he responded: “Call the president and tell him that.”
Trump later turned on Rove, who he said called him at 10.30pm on election night “to congratulate me on ‘a great win’”. Fox News called Arizona just before midnight.
Murdoch’s alliance with Trump was believed to be purely business orientated in which Fox and the New York Post traded the president’s high crimes and misdemeanors in exchange for the mogul’s access to the White House.