Titans clash as Trump’s candidacy fuels his feud with Murdoch

In the rarefied world of New York moguls, Rupert Murdoch never thought much of Donald J. Trump.

The real estate developer’s divorces and marriages sold newspapers, but beyond that, Murdoch had no time for Trump’s bombastic business style and ostentatious demeanor. “Phony” was how Murdoch often described him to friends.

There was the time Trump screamed that he would sue for libel, after Murdoch’s New York Post reported that the exclusive Maidstone golf club in East Hampton planned to deny Trump a membership.

Then there was the awkward aftermath of Murdoch’s own high- profile divorce, when Trump’s daughter Ivanka — unlike many New York society figures — remained loyal to her close friend Wendi Deng Murdoch.

Now, as Trump holds on to a first-place position in the polls while being roundly denounced across the political spectrum for harsh statements about Mexican immigrants and for belittling Sen. John McCain’s war record, he has already lost the man who controls many of the nation’s most important media organizations.

“When is Donald Trump going to stop embarrassing his friends, let alone the whole country?” Murdoch wrote on Twitter on Saturday after Trump mocked McCain for having been captured as a pilot during the Vietnam War.

On Sunday, The Wall Street Journal, the crown jewel of Murdoch’s print company, News Corp., published a scathing editorial calling Trump a “catastrophe.” And The Post’s front page screamed, “DON VOYAGE,” under a headline declaring “Trump is toast.”

Trump responded by trashing The Journal on Twitter. “Look how small the pages have become,” he wrote. “Looks like a tabloid.”

Recognizing that winning over the notoriously headstrong Murdoch appears unlikely, Trump has set his sights instead on wooing perhaps the only media executive who wields as much firepower among Republicans: Roger E. Ailes, the chairman and chief executive of Fox News.

As the creator of the cable news channel, the highest-rated cable news channel in the country (even surpassing ESPN in total viewers on some nights) and one of the most profitable assets in Murdoch’s film and television company, 21st Century Fox, Ailes has been given the freedom to operate largely outside the purview of Murdoch.

Trump and Ailes, whom Trump has called “one of the great geniuses in television history,” had a private lunch last month in New York.