Rupert Murdoch Shows Up at Republican Convention

He confided to friends in the fall of 2020 that he thought Donald J. Trump was going “increasingly mad” and would be “a danger” in a second term — and happily predicted that by the end of that year,“Trump will be becoming irrelevant.” Two years later, he backed Mr. Trump’s chief rival in the Republican primaries, Gov. Ron DeSantis, bestowing Mr. DeSantis with the brute-force promotional heft that only he could deliver.

But on Tuesday, Rupert Murdoch, the recently retired global media titan, was in Milwaukee to take his place among the rank-and-file Republican faithful. And with that, he became one of the most prominent one-time Trump detractors to line up behind the former president and join a convention that has doubled as a resounding show of Republican unity.

Mr. Murdoch, 93, has not been a regular at conventions. And his attendance here was, in its way, another extraordinary turn in his contorted relationship with Mr. Trump, whose unshakable hold over the audience of Mr. Murdoch’s major cable network, Fox News, has kept Mr. Murdoch yoked to the former president for the better part of the past decade.

The relationship between Mr. Murdoch and Mr. Trump broke hard and seemingly inexorably in late 2020. Fox News became the first network to declare Mr. Trump had lost Arizona, and refused to reverse the call when Mr. Trump’s family and strategists insisted victory there was still in hand.

Fox’s Trump-loving audience initially punished the network by briefly taking its ratings elsewhere — and, in some cases, joining in chants of “Fox News Sucks!” at rallies and protests.

But Mr. Murdoch and his Fox News team began winning them back after offering more coverage promoting Mr. Trump’s stolen-election lies. Then the company paid