In his upcoming book about Fox News, Michael Wolff writes that Rupert Murdoch hates Donald Trump and wishes he were dead, the Guardian reports.
Wolff makes the claim in The Fall: The End of Fox News and the Murdoch Dynasty, which is scheduled for publication next week by Henry Holt and Co. The press says that in the book Wolff “documents, in riveting and revelatory real time, the final days of Fox News.” Wolff is best known for his controversial 2018 bestseller Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, which was sharply critical of Trump, and its two follow-ups, Siege: Trump Under Fire and Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency.
In the book, Wolff writes that Murdoch, who founded the conservative Fox News network in 1996, has an intense loathing for Trump.
“Of all Trump’s implacable enemies, Murdoch had become a frothing-at-the-mouth one,” Wolff writes. “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. 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?’”
The Daily Beast reports that in Wolff’s book he claims that Murdoch also had a low opinion of Sean Hannity, who hosts a show on Fox News. Wolff writes that Murdoch called Hannity a slur used to insult intellectually and developmentally disabled people.
A spokesperson for Fox News told the Daily Beast, “The fact that the last book by this author was spoofed in a Saturday Night Live skit is really all we need to know.”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
