GOP frontrunner Donald Trump slammed Fox News and the broader Rupert Murdoch empire for its open adoration of donor-class favorite Marco Rubio. As Breitbart News has previously reported, Rubio has been Congress’s biggest champion of Rupert Murdoch’s open borders advocacy efforts. Trump explained that Fox News has “protected” Rubio — constantly buoying his campaign, even as he has continued to perform dismally.
“They’re in love with Rubio. Why? I have no idea, but they’re in love with Rubio,” Trump declared on Thursday’s program of Breitbart News Daily on SiriusXM Patriot 125.
“They are in love with Rubio and it’s amazing to me,” Trump said.
Perhaps further delineating the chasm between the media’s portrayal of Rubio and his actual performance, Trump has previously described Rubio as “a choke artist… And we can’t have that as a president can we?” Trump explained that, under pressure from Chris Christie, Rubio could not stop sweating during his televised debate meltdown. “I was standing next to Rubio and I thought he just got out of a swimming pool” Trump said.
Yet Trump pointed out that Fox has gone to great lengths to “protect” Rubio. “After he [Rubio] cratered in the debate, they protected him,” Trump said.
Indeed, prominent conservatives have noted the Rupert Murdoch empire has gone to great lengths to boost Rubio’s campaign. As conservative columnist and best-selling author Ann Coulter has noted, “Rupert Murdoch enterprise… is implacably pro-open borders, pro-amnesty and, consequently, anti-Trump.”
As Breitbart News has previously reported, Rupert Murdoch serves as the co-chair of the Partnership for a New American Economy (PNAE)—arguably one of the most powerful immigration lobbying firms in the country. Via his lobbying firm, Murdoch endorsed Rubio’s 2013 border opening amnesty bill, which would have doubled the annual admission of foreign workers and would have dispensed 33 million green cards to foreign nationals in the span of a single decade.
Rubio’s 2013 bill would have permanently resettled a population of new immigrants that is seven times larger than the entire population of South Carolina.
Via his lobbying firm, Murdoch also endorsed Rubio’s 2015 immigration expansion bill, which would have allowed for unlimited Muslim migration into the United States.
Murdoch similarly joined executives at Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Citigroup in urging Congress to fast-track President Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, which Rubio said would be a central “pillar” of his hoped-for Presidency.
As John McCain and Lindsey Graham told The New Yorker‘s Ryan Lizza, Murdoch’s organization was essential to ushering through the Senate Rubio’s bill to open America’s borders. Lizza wrote:
McCain told me, ‘Rupert Murdoch is a strong supporter of immigration reform, and Roger Ailes is, too.’ Murdoch is the chairman and C.E.O. of News Corp., which owns Fox, and Ailes is Fox News’s president. McCain said that he, [Lindsey] Graham, [Marco] Rubio, and others also have talked privately to top hosts at Fox, including Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and Neil Cavuto… “God bless Fox,” Graham said. “Last time [i.e. during the 2007 immigration push], it was ‘amnesty’ every fifteen seconds.” He said that the change was important for his reelection, because ‘eighty per cent of people in my primary get their news from Fox.’ He added that the network has ‘allowed critics to come forward, but it’s been so much better.’
As such, Trump’s candidacy — which has pledged to secure the nation’s borders, pause Muslim migration, and stop one-sided globalist trade deals — seems to represent a direct threat to Murdoch’s efforts to open America’s borders. Indeed, Murdoch’s lobbying firm has even promulgating material directly attacking Trump’s position on immigration moderation.
Trump’s most recent attack on Murdoch comes after a Wall Street Journal poll suggested that Trump was in second place — despite polls from CBS and Reuters, which show Trump maintains a strong lead as the frontrunner. “You know Wall Street Journal – Rupert Murdoch hit,” Trump explained.
The editorial board of Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal is — like Murdoch — decidedly open borders. In 1984, the WSJ editorial board wrote, “If Washington still wants to ‘do something’ about immigration, we propose a five-word constitutional amendment: There shall be open borders.”
Murdoch and his organization’s championing of open borders places them far outside the mainstream of Republican voters. More than 9 in 10 Republican voters oppose the immigration policies pushed by Murdoch, Rubio, and The Wall Street Journal editorial board. Additionally, only 11 percent of GOP voters think so-called “free trade” deals will improve wages. By a nearly five-to-one margin, Republican voters believe these trade deals championed by Rubio, Murdoch, and the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal will reduce wages rather than raise them.
In today’s interview, Trump also called out specific pundits who seem to play favorites: “Megyn Kelly is very biased,” Trump continued.
Indeed, on the night of the New Hampshire primary, as reports emerged in indicating that Rubio’s campaign had crashed the Granite State, Megyn Kelly seemed to try to frame Rubio’s dismal fifth place finish as a “nail-biter” race to third:
Moreover, when interviewing Rubio prior to his now-infamous debate glitch, Megyn Kelly pitched Rubio a question that seemed designed to fend off criticism of his being scripted. Kelly said: “[Chris Christie] says you’re too scripted. You are very smooth. Your acceptance – well, not acceptance [speech] – but your remarks last night were amazing. You were so articulate. There was no teleprompter. To those who say, ‘Oh he’s scripted’– is that scripted or is that just how you talk?”
Trump continued to explain that Fox’s problem was not just with Megyn Kelly, but with other members of Fox’s punditry class as well — such as Charles Krauthammer and Karl Rove.
“The worst treatment I get is from Fox,” Trump said, “Between Karl Rove — who’s a moron — between Krauthammer — he can’t say anything good no matter what… I get treated very badly there.”
Both Rove and Krauthammer have been supportive of Rubio’s border-opening immigration agenda.
In 2013, Karl Rove even began to echo Sen. Rubio’s talking point — one which Sen. Rubio continues to use to this day — that the Senate Gang of Eight bill, which would have granted citizenship — and, by extension, welfare access and voting privileges — to illegal immigrants, was “not amnesty.” Rove took to the pages of the open borders Wall Street Journal, to write: “It is also important that Republicans avoid calling a pathway to citizenship ‘amnesty.’ Amnesty is the forgiveness of wrongdoing without penalty… The current Senate bill has plenty of penalties and hurdles for those here illegally who seek citizenship.”
In a separate piece, entitled, “More white voters alone won’t save the GOP,” Rove outlines his fundamental disagreement with conservative icons like Phyllis Schlafly and Pat Buchanan: “Some observers, including Phyllis Schlafly, Pat Buchanan and the Center for Immigration Studies, argue that if Republicans want to win back the White House, they should focus on white voters (who comprised 72% of the electorate in 2012) rather than worrying about Latinos… This argument is incomplete,” Rove writes.
Similarly, in 2013 Charles Krauthammer — who has been open in suggesting that by backing Rubio’s desire to legalize the illegal population, “I support amnesty”– wrote, “Americans are a generous people. They don’t want 11 million souls living in fear among them. They would willingly, indeed overwhelmingly, support amnesty — as long as it is the last. I know many Republicans are coming over to immigration reform because of the 2012 election results. Fine. I’ve been advocating this for seven years (“First a wall — then amnesty,” April 7, 2006). Welcome aboard… but remember: Enforcement followed by legalization is not just the political thing to do. It is the right thing to do.”
As Breitbart News has previously reported, the Rupert Murdoch empire and corporate media’s backing of Rubio has demonstrated its ability to change the political rules to favor the donor-class candidate. By normal standards, given Rubio’s 3rd place finish in Iowa and 5th place finish in New Hampshire, at this point he would largely be discounted from the race.
As Vox recently noted in a piece entitled, “Finishing 2nd in New Hampshire Has Been Mandatory To Be President:” “In the past 60 years, no eventual nominee finished worse than second in New Hampshire. (Note: Two weren’t in the race when the New Hampshire primary happened — Hubert Humphrey in 1968 and Estes Kefauver in 1952.)”
However, given Rubio’s enormous backing from Party donors and corporate media, the normal political rules do not seem to apply to Sen. Rubio. FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver has explained how the Establishment can draw out the race and change the rules to pick its favored nominee. Silver has observed that the Party establishment’s candidate may be the beneficiary of “a lot of second and third chances” because the Party holds the “power to set the rules of engagement and strategically encourage winnowing of the field.”