WORST-CASE SCENARIO

Report: Rupert Murdoch Wanted ‘Anyone But Trump’

Instructed Roger Ailes to swing the election to anyone else, “even Hillary.”

Rupert Murdoch was reportedly so against the idea of Donald Trump becoming president that he instructed Roger Ailes, then head of Fox News, to tilt the election to “anyone but Trump”—“even Hillary.” Prior to his death earlier this year, Ailes apparently revealed details of his conversations with Murdoch to journalist Michael Wolff, who reported them in a new piece for The Hollywood Reporter that marks the one-year anniversary of Ailes' ouster from Fox News following numerous sexual-harassment allegations. “It was Ailes’ tacit support of Trump that, in part, made his removal from Fox all the more urgent for the Murdochs,” Wolff writes. “And it was not just the liberal sons who were agitated by Ailes’ regard for Trump, but also the father, whose tabloid, the New York Post, helped create Trump, but who found him now, with great snobbery, not of ‘our’ conservative class.” Early in Trump’s presidential campaign, Murdoch tweeted that the candidate was “embarrassing” not only himself but “the whole country.”

— Matt Wilstein