What Are Rupert Murdoch & Company Trying to Do About Their Donald Problem?

It is a substantial puzzle: getting him to behave in a rational manner is simply not possible, & they are not yet desperate enough to try to replace him with JD Vance. Are they starting to conclude...

It is a substantial puzzle: getting him to behave in a rational manner is simply not possible, & they are not yet desperate enough to try to replace him with JD Vance. Are they starting to conclude he is now so addled and deluded that defeat is better than victory? No. All the current pressure is intended to try to get Trump to stop saying so many lunatic, obtuse, and false things & to simply spend his time attacking Harris over and over again as the sole message of his campaign...

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Somebody-or-other said somewhere that when you read Gerard Baker, it is very likely that you are reading Rupert Murdoch in what Aaronovitch euphemistically calls “one of [Murdoch’s] more thoughtful moments”—i.e., someone trying to put words together to make a position coherent and seem sensible, rather than have it simply sit there as a blancmange of prejudices and irritable reflexes. If so, as of Tuesday we now have Murdoch’s or at least a Murdochian current position on Trump:

Gerard Baker: Trump Is Looking Like a Loser Again: ‘I watched… and then… read the transcript of the press conference…. One-third of Mr. Trump’s remarks fell into three categories: false, obtuse or lunatic… [not] the usual grotesque hyperbolic assertions or baffling verbal manufactures… [like] “people dying financially because they can’t buy bacon.”… False, obtuse, lunatic. Often… two of the three…. Trump’s detailed recounting of an imaginary helicopter ride… the full triple… <https://www.wsj.com/opinion/trump-is-looking-like-a-loser-again-mar-a-lago-news-conference-2024-election-02ec5c8f>

But for Baker, the problem is not that Trump is not a liar, and idiot, and insane and so unqualified to be president.

Baker commends and applauds those who want Trump to be president.

Not, mind you, because he thinks Trump’s policies—aside from tax cuts for the rich and less regulation—are good. Baker does not care. Baker is best, I think, seen as a Mean Girl who wants to make those who he has chosen as his enemies feel small—thus “it’s OK as long as you make liberals cry”:

I don’t disdain the voters who have backed him as the way to express their disgust at a rotten, complacent political establishment—on both sides—that has dominated Washington for too long. I commend them…

For Baker, the problem is purely that Trump’s deceitful, addled, and crazy public freak-flag flying is not popular enough among potential swing voters:

This is the problem…. This…Trump… lost the presidency in 2020… lost the House in 2018… [lost] the Senate… in 2021… [won] in 2016 [only] because he was new and up against the most tediously familiar and disliked politician in America…. The ranks of [Trump-loving] voters won’t be enough to outweigh others who simply can’t face another four years of the Trump show and will back even a party hack concealing her real politics simply to escape it.

That is the end of the column. No action items.

So why was it written? Who is the audience? And what is the audience supposed to then do? In short, what is going on here? I think I have some informed guesses. But I warn you, it does not make a lot of sense to write such a column without action items. And I may well have missed important nuances in Trumpland, and be wrong.