The Murdoch Empire Shows Trump’s Enemies No Mercy

As MAGA media splinters over Trump’s foreign wars, the Murdoch empire has stayed loyal—but what happens when Lachlan succeeds Rupert?

On May 2, 1982, during the conflict between Britain and Argentina over the Falkland Islands, a Royal Navy submarine torpedoed and sank an Argentine cruiser called the General Belgrano. The ship had been outside a large “exclusion zone” set by the British, and the attack killed more than three hundred people, many of them teens conscripted by Argentina’s military dictatorship; it became an instant controversy for Margaret Thatcher’s government. Thatcher’s supporters, though, rallied to her cause. The loudest press cheerleader for the war over the Falklands, an archipelago in the southern Atlantic that had been a British colonial possession since 1833, was The Sun. Rupert Murdoch had bought the paper in 1969 as an ailing, left-leaning broadsheet and transformed it into a populist right-wing tabloid, a playbook he later replicated at the New York Post. The Sun’s pages were crammed with sex, scandal, sensationalism, and now war. The paper accused rivals of “treason” for failing to match its unblinking patriotism, and on May 4, it celebrated the Belgrano’s sinking with the front-page headline “GOTCHA.”

When the United States and Israel started bombing Iran, on February 28, several outlets in the sprawling Murdoch media empire took a similarly enthusiastic stance. On March 1, after news broke that Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, had been killed, the Post splashed: “DEATH TO THE DEVIL.” On March 4, the US sank an Iranian warship, the Soleimani, named after the prominent Iranian general assassinated during Trump’s first term, which had been in international waters off the coast of Sri Lanka; eighty-seven bodies were recovered by the Sri Lankan navy and transferred to a makeshift morgue, the Associated Press reported, with dozens more sailors missing. “DON GETS LAST LAUGH,” the Post’s headline about the attack said the next day. The March 7 splash from the Post—which clocked the third-highest newspaper circulation of 2024, behind the New York Times in second and the Wall Street Journal, another Murdoch title, in first—said simply: “NO MERCY.”