JD Vance took a quick day trip to Montana on Tuesday afternoon to speak to right-wing media mogul Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan, who is the chief of both Fox News and its sister corporation News Corp., which publishes the New York Post and Wall Street Journal.
According to the Associated Press, the vice president’s secret meeting also included several executives from Fox News, the conservative cable giant that has largely carried Donald Trump’s water and helped staff up the president’s current administration.
A source familiar with the trip also confirmed to The Independent that the vice president spoke to both Murdochs and a group of executives from the right-wing network at the Murdoch family ranch near Dillon, Montana.
According to NBC Montana, Air Force Two landed in Butte – which is about 70 miles away from the Murdoch ranch – around 2:30 p.m. MT, resulting in a temporary flight restriction in the area. Politico Playbook would later report that the vice president’s plane would take off again shortly after nightfall, meaning Vance was only in the area for a matter of hours.
During his brief visit to Montana, though, Vance and his wife Usha did manage to find time to take a short hike while at the Matador Ranch.
It’s still not clear what the meeting between Vance and the Fox executives was about, though the vice president is the Republican National Committee’s finance chair and is therefore leading the GOP’s midterm fundraising campaign. The Murdochs are worth tens of billions of dollars, and they have long been heavily involved in the Republican political machine.
The Independent has reached out to representatives for Fox and the Murdochs for comment.
While Fox News’ coverage has been almost entirely sympathetic to the president and sycophantic, especially since his return to the White House, the Wall Street Journal has been an altogether different beast.
Throughout the first few months of Trump’s second term, the paper’s editorial board has repeatedly criticized the president’s economic policies and chaotic governing style, prompting Trump to rage at both the outlet and the elder Murdoch, with whom he’s had an on-again/off-again friendly relationship.
“So the Wall Street Journal is wrong because, very simply, every single country that you’re writing about right now is dying to make a deal because the deals they have right now are so good, and so good for them, and so profitable for them,” Trump griped in February about a Journal op-ed with Rupert Murdoch standing right next to him in the Oval Office. “I’m gonna have to talk to him about that.”
Trump has continued to blast the Wall Street Journal in recent weeks as the publication’s criticism has remained strident, calling it a “rotten newspaper” that has “truly gone to hell” while raging at one of the outlet’s reporters last month. “The Wall Street Journal is China-oriented. And they’re really bad for this country,” Trump added.
The face-to-face with the Murdochs and other Fox executives comes shortly after Vance apparently helped to broker the peace between Trump and his one-time “first buddy” Elon Musk, whose bromance splintered in spectacular fashion last week over the president’s “Big, Beautiful Bill.”
After the simmering tensions erupted publicly last Wednesday, which included Musk accusing the president of being in the so-called Epstein Files while calling for his impeachment, Vance and White House chief of staff Susie Wiles called the world’s richest man and urged him to end the feud and try to repair the relationship.
Musk would later back away from some of his most incendiary attacks and speak to Trump over the phone on Monday. The Tesla CEO then completed the de-escalation on Wednesday, tweeting: “I regret some of my posts about President @realDonaldTrump last week. They went too far.”
