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**MAY 28, 2025**
On the Prospect website
Predatory Lenders in the Operating Room
[link removed]
Medical credit cards have gone mainstream, preying on sick people at their most vulnerable. BY BRYCE COVERT
Senate Democrats Have Been Handed a Tool to Stop the Big Beautiful Bill [link removed]
Thanks to a Republican vote to stop California from setting its own auto emissions, Democrats can challenge virtually any Trump administration action, and eat up time on the Senate floor. BY DAVID DAYEN
Beating the Press [link removed]
In a time of eroding journalistic freedoms, a new book chronicles the deliberate effort to use libel law to bankrupt the independent media we have left. BY ZEPHYR TEACHOUT
Kuttner on TAP
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**** Is Rupert Murdoch Breaking With Trump?
The
**Wall Street Journal** editorial page joins reality.
We have been wondering when traditional conservative Republicans might openly break with Trump's lunacy. Well, it's been happening right under our noses, in the editorials of The Wall Street Journal, the quintessential voice of business conservatism and right-wing ideology.
This is doubly interesting. The
**Journal**'s editorial page is famously dishonest with its facts as it excoriates anything liberal. And as the
**Journal** expresses more and more alarm about Trump, the other media property owned by Rupert Murdoch, Fox News, is more of a pure MAGA propaganda organ than ever.
Here are just a few recent examples.
On May 12, in a withering editorial titled "The Great Trump Tariff Rollback [link removed]," the
**Journal**
wrote:
"Rarely has an economic policy been repudiated as soundly, and as quickly, as President Trump's Liberation Day tariffs-and by Mr. Trump's own hand. Witness the agreement Monday morning to scale back his punitive tariffs on China-his second major retreat in less than a week. This is a win for economic reality, and for American prosperity."
The
**Journal** editorial writers have zero sympathy for Trump's crusade to take down Harvard. Its May 23 editorial was titled "Is Trump Trying to Destroy Harvard? [link removed]"
The editorial attacked the Department of Homeland Security's move to bar foreign students: "That's 6,800 students, or a quarter of Harvard's student body, whose futures are suddenly in disarray. It's also a short-sighted attack on one of America's great competitive strengths: Its ability to attract the world's best and brightest ... The Trump
Administration seems to think it needs to destroy Harvard to save it. This is the opposite of making America great."
The
**Journal**, as traditional foreign-policy conservatives, is appalled by Trump's courtship of Vladimir Putin. Its April 23 editorial, titled "Trump's Ukraine Ultimatum [link removed]," warned: "Mr. Trump can still salvage a deal in Ukraine, but the current 'final' settlement offer looks like it would set up Mr. Putin to win the war now or later. The world's rogues will notice, and Mr. Trump's headaches will have only begun."
[link removed]
And the
**Journal** joined the rest of informed opinion in denouncing Trump's acceptance of a new Air Force One from Qatar. The May 12 editorial "Beware Qataris Bearing a 747 Gift
[link removed]" warned:
"It demeans the Presidency to have a foreign government handing out such a valuable gift to America's elected leader ... This isn't France offering the Statue of Liberty for public display and enjoyment.
"Mr. Trump's plan to take the Qatari jet is a political gift to Democrats. The GOP objected, rightly and loudly, to Hunter Biden's influence peddling abroad while his father was in high office ... Now the Trump family is making much money in opaque sales of crypto-coins, while Mr. Trump says it's simply good sense to accept a free jumbo jet from Qataris bearing gifts."
The
**Journal** has also called out Trump's "big beautiful bill" [link removed] for its dishonest finagling of the numbers.
Meanwhile, over at Fox News, all is well
in MAGA-land. Fox simply fails to cover Trump's pratfalls and reports his abrupt 180-degree reversals as if they were triumphs deliberately planned in advance.
So what's going on here?
One factor is a bitter struggle for control of the Murdoch empire, well reported in this investigative piece in the
**Journal** [link removed], which felt free to pull no punches. The details are byzantine and you can read them for yourself, but the basic story is that Rupert, now 94, wants to redo the family trust so that control passes to his son Lachlan, whose views are close to his own. But James, who doesn't follow Rupert's line, has the support of the other two siblings for keeping the trust as it is, which would give James paramount influence.
With Rupert thus preoccupied, it may be that the
**Journal**'s editors feel more latitude to go their own way. Or it may be that
with Trump coming off the rails, Murdoch himself may want to cover his bets with divergent viewpoints in his two marquee media properties.
Whichever it is, the result is that the
**Journal**'s editorialists have far more freedom than, say, those at Jeff Bezos's
**Washington Post**, where democracy is dying in darkness. And if James Murdoch does get control, big changes could be in store at Fox.
That could transform American politics, since the Fox echo chamber has been key to creating and reinforcing the alternate reality in which the MAGA base dwells, and in populating the Trump administration.
The Wall Street Journal has always been my first morning read. Its news columns tend to beat The New York Times, and without the
**Times**' obsession with spurious balance. Now, it's an out-of-body pleasure to turn to the editorials as well.
~ ROBERT KUTTNER
Follow Robert Kuttner on Twitter
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