Author Michael Wolff has a new book coming out called The Fall: The End of Fox News and the Murdoch Dynasty. It’s about, well, the end of Fox News and the Murdoch dynasty, including how much Rupert Murdoch hates Donald Trump. The real-life Logan Roy often wishes the former president was dead.
“Of all Trump’s implacable enemies, Murdoch had become a frothing-at-the-mouth one. His relatively calm demeanor from the early Trump presidency where, with a sigh, he could dismiss him merely as a ‘fucking idiot’ had now become a churning stew of rage and recrimination,” Wolff writes in an excerpt published in New York magazine, adding, “Trump’s death became a Murdoch theme: ‘We would all be better off…?’ ‘This would all be solved if…’ ‘How could he still be alive, how could he?’ ‘Have you seen him? Have you seen what he looks like? What he eats?’” We have, and honestly, it sounds good.
Fearing a repeat of 2016, Murdoch decided that the only man who could defeat Trump was Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who he called a “professional.” Tucker Carlson, Fox News’ then-biggest star, wasn’t as convinced. However, in spring 2023, “the DeSantises [were invited] to lunch at the Carlsons’ home in Boca Grande, an exclusive community on Florida’s Gasparilla Island. And certainly, for DeSantis, this was a significant moment — an opportunity to reach out, to break bread, to make nice, to suck up to a plausible kingmaker.” All Meatball Ron and his wife Casey had to do was win over Tucker’s wife, Susie. Let’s see how it went!
They failed it miserably. They had a total inability to read the room — one with a genteel, stay-at-home woman, here in her own house. For two hours, Ron DeSantis sat at her table talking in an outdoor voice indoors, failing to observe any basics of conversational ritual or propriety, reeling off an unself-conscious list of his programs and initiatives and political accomplishments. Impersonal, cold, uninterested in anything outside of himself. The Carlsons are dog people with four spaniels, the progeny of other spaniels they have had before, who sleep in their bed. DeSantis pushed the dog under the table. Had he kicked the dog? Susie Carlson’s judgment was clear: She did not ever want to be anywhere near anybody like that ever again. Her husband agreed. DeSantis, in Carlson’s view, was a “fascist.” Forget Ron DeSantis.
There’s a scene in the cult comedy Clifford where a fed-up Charles Grodin demands that Martin Short, playing a 10-year-old rascal, look at him “like a human boy.” This would be impossible for Ron DeSantis, who can’t do anything, not eat pizza or laugh or pet a dog, like a normal human.
(Via New York)