Report Says Fox Is COOLING on Trump

Photo: Anton Garin / Shutterstock

The Murdoch outlets’ post-2022 midterms treatment of Donald Trump was not a blip; it was a coordinated editorial cooling unmistakable across marquee brands that had helped elevate him—an inflection point that revealed how partisan media calibrate loyalty against perceived political viability.

At a Glance

The Wall Street Journal editorial board labeled Trump “the Republican Party’s biggest loser” after the 2022 midterms.
The New York Post splashed an unfavorable front page casting a “Blue Tsunami” over Trump the morning after the vote.
Fox News programming pivoted to conspicuously praise Ron DeSantis as the GOP’s rising star.
A former senior News Corp executive tied the shift to audience calculus and aversion to “a loser,” while Trump publicly accused Murdoch outlets of backing a rival.

What changed after the 2022 midterms

Across the Murdoch media ecosystem, the language and the visuals hardened. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board dispensed with euphemism, running a postmortem headlined, in essence, that Trump had become the GOP’s “biggest loser,” and laying the party’s underperformance at his feet. The New York Post, famous for tabloid bluntness, followed with a front page metaphor—an engulfing “Blue Tsunami”—that framed Trump as the problem rather than the solution. On television, Fox News began an unmistakable reprogramming: more airtime and warmer treatment for Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, presented as the ascendant alternative inside the party. None of this relied on rumor; it was visible, dated, and reinforced across properties that had previously moved in closer alignment with Trump’s project.

Trump noticed. He took to his platform to accuse Murdoch media—by name—of pivoting to a rival and declared Fox News effectively lost to him. In the transactional grammar of politics and media, that kind of public rupture usually follows, rather than precedes, a shift; here it arrived immediately after the election-night scoreboard and the chastened analyses that followed.

Mechanism: how partisan outlets recalibrate after electoral shocks

Partisan media live at the junction of ideology, audience, and power. They cultivate an audience with aligned priors, but they also need proximity to future governing coalitions to remain influential. When an electoral shock lands—unexpected losses, underperformance versus expectations—outlets reassess narrative bets. Academic literature on partisan media and audience dynamics describes a feedback loop: audiences reward content that flatters their coalition, yet fragmentation and the chase for like-minded consumers can intensify sorting and harden affect while still leaving room for rapid recalibration when a standard-bearer looks electorally costly. In other words, the base often wants affirmation; the outlets want both affirmation and a winning lane to tomorrow’s power brokers.

That tension was evident here. A former senior News Corp executive, speaking candidly, described an unvarnished logic: Rupert Murdoch “doesn’t want to be associated with a loser” and is “interested in the audience,” not in Trump per se. The quote explains the tonal shift even if it does not furnish board minutes or revenue pivots; as a theory of the case, it is consistent with what the properties actually published and aired.

Institutional nuance: one mogul, two corporate trees

There is an important structural caveat. The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post sit within News Corp; Fox News belongs to Fox Corporation. They are sibling groups with common family control, not a single newsroom under one masthead. That separation gives critics an opening to argue the edits were independent choices rather than a coordinated edict. Still, for readers and viewers, the distinction matters less than the pattern: in the space of days, the Journal reproached, the Post ridiculed, and Fox elevated a rival while maintaining space for Trump content. The sum was a visible cooling, not an exile, and coverage in this period emphasized that Fox had not abandoned Trump entirely; he remained the GOP’s most potent figure and a magnet for attention.

Constraints also ran in the other direction. Fox’s core audience has included a large bloc of Trump-first conservatives, limiting how far and how fast any distancing could go without inviting churn or revolt. Reporting at the time underscored that dependence; an aggressive break risked alienating the very viewers who powered the network’s dominance. The result looked like a hedge: sharper criticism in print opinion pages, visual mockery in tabloid form, and on television, a spotlight trained on the most plausible in-house successor rather than a blackout of Trump himself.

What the evidence supports—and what it does not

The facts that clear the bar of certainty are straightforward. The Journal published the editorial assigning blame to Trump for the midterm outcome; the Post ran its hostile cover; Fox News programming intensified its courtship of DeSantis; Trump fired back publicly at the Murdoch outlets. A former senior News Corp executive supplied a concise explanation aligned with market logic and audience sensitivity. What the public record did not contain at the time were the internal data series—program-level ratings deltas tied to topic mix, advertiser flight, or subscriber churn—that would quantify the commercial stakes of the turn. Likewise, we do not have on-the-record minutes showing cross-corporate coordination between News Corp and Fox Corporation. Those limits matter for historians; they do not erase the observable shift.

In assessing motive, the most economical explanation matches decades of partisan media practice: when a figure is perceived as dragging down electoral performance, editorial warmth cools, and attention migrates to the politician with forward momentum. That is exactly what audiences witnessed after November 2022.

Rupert Murdoch, the self-described saviour of Western civilisation, is silent on Trump’s misjudgments, corruption and erraticism. As our democracies endure a cruel cost of living crisis Trump created (Iran war) and his pro-Putin abandonment of Ukraine there is no contrition from… pic.twitter.com/dgmiVXe7T1

— Quentin Dempster (@QuentinDempster) November 6, 2026

Why it mattered then—and why it still matters

Media signals shape intra-party power in two ways. First, they cue donors, operatives, and activists about which futures are worth betting on; second, they set expectations for audiences about who looks like a winner. Favorable airtime on Fox and positive treatment in Murdoch print titles are not dispositive, but in Republican politics they are accelerants. Conversely, hostile headlines from those outlets impose reputational cost. Even a partial distancing makes governing harder for the target: fewer friendly validators, more friction within the coalition, and a rival granted oxygen at decisive moments.

The larger lesson is portable. Outlets with strong ideological brands are not static instruments. They recalibrate when electoral math changes, balancing fidelity to the base with the pragmatism required to remain central in tomorrow’s coalition. After the 2022 midterms, Murdoch media made that recalibration visible on their front pages, their opinion pages, and their air. The message to Republican elites was legible: the movement’s future might wear a different face.