Rupert Murdoch’s Empire Again Seeks to Influence Trump’s Veepstakes, This Time Through Wall Street Journal

News Corporation’s Rupert Murdoch’s media empire is yet again seeking to influence who former President Donald Trump selects as his 2024 vice presidential pick, this time with a Wall Street Journal editorial praising North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum and trashing Sens. J.D. Vance (R-OH) and Marco Rubio (R-FL).

Murdoch’s empire has been heavily imprinting itself on the selection process, with the New York Post editorial board endorsing Burgum last week, as Breitbart News previously reported. Fox News host Sean Hannity, meanwhile, has reportedly been pushing for Rubio to be the selection, a choice the New York Post previously said would be an acceptable runner-up in that newspaper’s editorial that, like the Wall Street Journal, bashed Vance.

Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., speaks with members of the media, Wednesday, Feb. 28, 2024, at the Capitol in Washington. Earlier Sen. Mitch McConnell announced that he’ll step down as Senate Republican leader in November. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)

While any of these choices are fine selections, what’s perhaps more interesting here is that the Wall Street Journal is now coming to terms with the fact that former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley will not end up being Trump’s running mate after all—and that the newspaper is now falling back to pushing Burgum as a fallback option while using its pages to vehemently oppose Vance. The newspaper also, interestingly, throws out another name it says would be an “excellent choice”: Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin.

Republican presidential candidate former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley speaks at a Republican campaign event in Needham, Mass., Saturday, March 2, 2024. (Michael Dwyer/AP)

“We’re on record as recommending Nikki Haley as the choice with the best chance of broadening Mr. Trump’s coalition. He seems to be sore that she stayed in the primary race too long, but many Presidents have looked past such primary opposition in the cause of party unity,” the Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote. “Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin would also be an excellent choice, given his executive experience and popularity in a swing state where the presidential polling this year is surprisingly close. Mr. Youngkin would signal to college-educated Republicans with doubts about Mr. Trump that he wants to expand the GOP. Many voters would think: That’s interesting. He chose someone who clearly could be a future President. The leaks coming from the Trump camp nonetheless suggest the VP finalists are North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum and Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida and J.D. Vance of Ohio. If that’s the field, Mr. Burgum is the best man.”

The WSJ, finally accepting that Nikki won’t be Trump’s VP, comes out for Burgum pic.twitter.com/tZOuuUmU3U

— Jonathan Martin (@jmart) June 26, 2024

Republican presidential candidate North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum waves at the Republican Party of Iowa’s 2023 Lincoln Dinner in Des Moines, Iowa, Friday, July 28, 2023. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)

The fact that Murdoch’s media empire, after spending the last several years since Trump left office trying to block Republican voters from selecting him as their nominee again this year and literally employing former House Speaker Paul Ryan as a board member at Fox Corporation, is now jumping on the bandwagon to try to steer the end of Trump’s vice presidential selection process to the liking of its globalist leadership is fascinating to say the least. Ryan continues to this day to oppose Trump’s candidacy, saying very recently on the Fox News Channel that he will not vote for Trump and opposes his campaign.

House Speaker Paul Ryan of Wis., gives a farewell speech in the Great Hall of the Library of Congress in Washington, Wednesday, Dec. 19, 2018. Ryan is bemoaning America’s “broken politics” in which he calls Washington’s failure to overhaul costly federal benefit programs “our greatest unfinished business.” (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

But the deep irony of this all raises a more important question: These very same people spent the last many years aggressively working against Trump trying to stop him, and now they have all sorts of positive “advice” for him?

While there are plenty of good reasons someone like Burgum could be considered for the position, the Journal’s editorial does not list them but instead pushes things that would probably be points against him in any sane Republican universe, including that he “managed to work well with [then-Microsoft CEO] Steve Ballmer” and that his “global business experience gives him an edge in world affairs, especially China” as somehow evidence of Burgum’s value. There’s no mention in the Journal of Burgum’s work on energy policy, critical to North Dakota and a key tenet of Trump’s vision for the country, like his outspoken opposition to electric vehicles and similarly no mention of how Burgum deployed national guard troops from his state to the border. Those are actually points in his favor, while what the Journal pushed are more negatives in the eyes of most GOP voters.

This fundamental misunderstanding of GOP voters also comes through in the Journal’s dismissal of Vance and Rubio as contenders for the job. First off, with Vance, the first major argument the newspaper makes against him—after some snarky nonsensical remarks about him being like Donald Trump Jr. online—is that on “foreign policy” Vance, per the Journal, “was a political opportunist in opposing military aid to Ukraine with arguments that ignore the menacing axis of Russia, Iran and China.”

Ohio Senate candidate JD Vance arrives to speak before former President Donald Trump at a campaign rally at Wright Bros. Aero Inc. at Dayton International Airport on Monday, Nov. 7, 2022, in Vandalia, Ohio. (AP Photo/Michael Conroy)

Public polling shows that the vast majority of Americans oppose continuing to waste American tax dollars in Ukraine, and pouring billions of dollars of U.S. treasure down that drain is not bringing the end of the war there any closer—and if anything, the continued escalation from the west risks devolving into a global war that does involve the United States, something Vance has been extremely cautious about and rightfully so. In fact, a big part of why Trump won in 2016 was his bashing of endless wars from the political elite of both parties in America—from the Clintons to the Bushes—and even the current President Joe Biden, a Democrat, seems to somewhat understand at least the politics of war, because he ended the United States’s longest war in Afghanistan – even though he did it horribly in a manner that put the Taliban back in power there. Trump has pledged to end the war if he wins, and in Vance he would have a steadfast partner for peace.

If that wasn’t laughable enough from the Journal, the next line in its argument against Vance is even more farcical: “He opposes Nippon Steel’s offer for U.S. Steel in fealty to union leaders, though Japanese investment is a plus for American workers.” Take the meaning of this sentence in for a second: The Wall Street Journal says that the U.S. Senator from Ohio is disqualified from being Trump’s Vice President because that U.S. Senator does not want the Japanese to buy the most critical American steel manufacturer. Seriously, the argument is remarkable in its idiocy—who in the United States would actually want foreign entities to control the manufacture of critical metals used to build literally everything in America? It seems to make sense, somewhat, that the same newspaper that opposes Trump’s tariffs on steel and aluminum imports would make this maniacal argument, but again, if anything, this is a massive point in Vance’s favor, not against him, and if Trump were to pick Vance they should run a billion dollars worth of television ads if they can afford it plastering this stance from Vance all over America, and they’d win 500 electoral votes if they did.

Then the Journal turns its guns on Rubio with this similarly nonsensical argument: “The union label also applies to Mr. Rubio, who has remade himself from a tea party insurgent in 2010 into an advocate of industrial policy and redistributing income through the tax code. He voted against aid to Ukraine despite a career of hawkish foreign policy stances.”

This talk of an “industrial policy” is a deep intellectual debate playing out on the populist nationalist right. Some favor the idea, some are opposed to it, but the fact that Rubio has actually thought through how to use the levers of government to strengthen American industry on critical products and laid out that vision is yet another point in his favor, if Trump were to pick him as a running mate. There are plenty of other things about Rubio that would be appealing as well, including his complete reformation on the issue of immigration—he used to be pro-amnesty, and was a member just over a decade ago of the horrendous “Gang of Eight” that drafted a massive amnesty plan and pushed it through the Senate. But Rubio has now proven himself to understand what was wrong with that plan, and has come around in a big way on this issue to the America First position on it. Of course, the Journal probably thinks the Gang of Eight amnesty bill would have been amazing for America and hates that Rubio turned on it, which again makes the fact that the Murdoch empire’s efforts to steer the Trump veepstakes the way it wants all the more laughable.

In summation, any of these names—Burgum, Vance, Rubio, and a lot of the others being discussed—all have some serious positives and some of them have some flaws too. But it’s high time Trump told Murdoch and his Paul Ryan pals to pound sand, and make his decision himself for the reasons he thinks are right. Lord knows Trump owes them nothing—in fact, Trump owes nothing to nobody, which makes him so dangerous for the political class in a second go-around, which is all perhaps why Murdoch and his crew are trying to get a hand on the wheel before a freed Trump whittles away whatever’s left of the globalists if he gets back into the Oval Office. If Trump lets them influence him now, he might regret it later, too, when it comes to actually achieving things like really ending the war in Ukraine, as these globalists clearly want it to continue for as long as possible.