A new book asserts that Rupert Murdoch personally approved Fox News’ decision to call Arizona for Joe Biden on election night 2020, enraging President Trump, according to Insider.
In his forthcoming book, Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency, author Michael Wolff says Fox News’ election-data staff called Fox Corporation CEO and Murdoch’s son, Lachlan, just after 11 p.m. ET to say that the network was ready to call Arizona for Biden, a move no other news organization had yet made.
“Lachlan got his father on the phone to ask if he wanted to make the early call. His father, with signature grunt, assented, adding, ‘F--- him,’” Wolff writes.
Wolff writes that Fox News anchor Bill Hemmer then called Trump social media strategist Jason Miller to alert him to the network’s decision, catching Miller and the rest of the Trump campaign staffers by surprise and prompting Trump to fly into a rage.
“What the f---? How can they call this?” Trump said, according to Landslide. “We’re winning. And everybody can see we are going to win. Everybody’s calling to say that we’re winning. And then they pull this?”
A Fox News spokesperson told Insider the Hemmer story “never happened and is completely untrue.”
Wolff is the author of two previous bestsellers about the Trump presidency, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House (2018) and Siege: Trump Under Fire (2019). He did not cite the sources for his account of the Murdochs’ involvement in Fox News’ decision to call Arizona but has said that Landslide is based on interviews with Trump staffers and that his reporting that has been confirmed by multiple sources.
Landslide is set to be published by Henry Holt on July 27.
Amy Reiter is a writer in Brooklyn.
