‘Rupert, please do it this way’: Trump asks Murdoch to help him secure victory

Michigan: Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump says he plans to ask Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch to stop running negative ads and airing people who will criticise him ahead of November’s election.

With just over two weeks left in the campaign, Trump appeared on Fox & Friends where he also revealed that people on the network helped write the jokes he told the night before during a speech at the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner in New York, a longstanding feature of US presidential campaigns.

Donald Trump speaks as he visits a campaign office, in Hamtranck, Michigan. Credit: AP

The comments came as both Trump and Kamala Harris hit the battleground of Michigan on Friday (Saturday AEDT) – a swing state in the midwest with high numbers of union workers, black voters and Arab Americans.

Trump won the state against Hillary Clinton in 2016 but lost it to Joe Biden in 2020. But in a sign of just how desperate Democrats are to hold on to it, Harris plans to return to Michigan next Saturday to campaign with one of the party’s most popular figures: Michelle Obama.

Before heading to Michigan, Trump appeared on Murdoch’s conservative cable network for an interview, in which he told the hosts: “You know the event I have now? A very big event. I’m going to see Rupert Murdoch.”

“I’m going to tell him something very simple, because I can’t talk to anybody else about it: Don’t put on negative commercials for 21 days and don’t put on the horrible people that come and lie,” he said. “I’m going to say: Rupert, please do it this way. And then we’re gonna have a victory, because I think everyone wants to have a victory.”

The night before, the former president appeared at the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Dinner, an annual dinner to raise funds for Catholic charities supporting children in New York.

For years, the dinner has offered candidates from both parties the chance to trade light-hearted barbs in the final stretch of the campaign.

Harris opted not to attend, marking the first time a major presidential candidate has snubbed the dinner in 40 years. She instead appeared in a pre-recorded video and comedy skit alongside actress Molly Shannon reprising her Saturday Night Live character Mary Katherine Gallagher, a quirky Catholic student.

Trump was the keynote speaker and made a rare appearance with his wife, Melania. His jokes not only took aim at Harris, he also mocked her husband, Doug Emhoff, who had an extramarital affair with his first wife – “The only piece of advice I would have for her in the event that she wins is not to let her husband Doug anywhere near the nannies” – Joe Biden – “President Biden couldn’t be here tonight. The DNC made sure of that” – and Democrat Senate Leader Chuck Schumer, who Trump said was “looking very glum” – “But look on the bright side Chuck. Considering how woke your party has become, if Kamala loses, you still have a chance to become the first woman president.”

Donald Trump says he will talk to Rupert Murdcoh and ask him to stop airing attack ads against him on Fox News.Credit: Emily Najera/The New York Times

Fox & Friends co-host Steve Doucey praised Trump for his material at the event, and asked the former president: “Who helped you with it?”

Trump replied: “I had a lot of people helping, a lot of people, a couple of people from Fox – actually, I shouldn’t say that, but they wrote some jokes.”

“For the most part, I didn’t like any of them,” he added.

Trump’s appearance on Fox is the latest stage in his volatile relationship with the network and its Australian-born owner, whose outlets propped up the former president for years – even to the point of deluding its audience about the 2020 election being stolen, as revealed through a lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems.

Donald Trump speaks as Senator Chuck Schumer listens.Credit: AP

The pair fell out after that election when Fox declared early during the vote count that Biden had won the state of Arizona. Things soured again in the 2022 midterm elections, when a much-anticipated red wave failed to materialise, blamed in part on Trump’s coterie of extremist candidates.

Soon after, Murdoch’s New York Post ran a front cover depicting the former president as “Trumpty Dumpty” with an accompanying story referring to him as “perhaps the most profound vote repellent in modern American history”.

The Fox & Friends interview was a lighthearted affair, in stark contrast to Harris’ earlier combative interview with Fox presenter Bret Baier.

The vice president has leaned into the interview in recent days, and sought to paint a contrast with Trump by suggesting he is too old and unfit to be president.

Amid reports suggesting Trump, 78, was cancelling interviews because he was “exhausted”, Harris said in Michigan: “Being President of the United States is probably one of the hardest jobs in the world, and so we really do need to ask if he’s exhausted being on the campaign trail, is he fit to do the job?”

Both candidates have descended on Michigan as polls show the candidates are statistically tied. Harris spent her day speaking at a union hall before holding a rally in Oakland County, northwest of Detroit that went from being Republican to Democrat over the past 10 years.

At the rally, she promised to “work with unions to create good-paying jobs, including jobs that do not require a college degree.”

Across town, Trump told his supporters that he would revitalise the state’s auto industry through a combination of tax incentives and tariffs.

Earlier, he visited a campaign office in Hamtramck, the only Muslim-majority city in the US, and will also hold an evening rally in Detroit.

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