Watch former Aussie prime minister lay into 'addicted to power' Rupert Murdoch
Former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull laid into right-wing media tycoon Rupert Murdoch on MSNBC's "The ReidOut" Friday.
Turnbull, of the conservative Liberal Party, railed against Murdoch for empowering former President Donald Trump and radicalizing his supporters into storming the U.S. Capitol — and opened up about how Murdoch, who also runs right-wing outlets in his country, worked to remove him from power.
"You were prime minister from 2015 to 2018," said anchor Joy Reid. "Rupert Murdoch is — he runs a media empire. But what he does is very political. He was involved even in your ouster."
"Rupert Murdoch, his media organization was very involved in the right-wing coup that brought my leadership down," said Turnbull. "Rupert, himself, was very actively involved. He proposed another proprietor and said, we've got to get rid of Malcolm. Stokes said, that is crazy, why would we want to do that? Rupert said — Stokes said to him, if we do that, the Labor Party will win the election. Rupert said, three years of Labor would not be so bad. He was determined to get rid of me. Largely because I was not deferential enough."
"Rupert is a narcissist. He is vain," Turnbull continued. "This is why he cannot bring himself to say that he believed Trump's lies. He does not want to seem stupid. He is addicted to power for its own sake. He knew — he sat with me and my wife, with Jerry Hall. He told us what an utterly unfit person Trump was to be president. He talked with us before Trump was elected, obviously. He knew Trump. He knew him fairly well."
"Once he saw that Trump could win, he thought, 'I can have a guy in the White House that will take my calls and suck up to me and flatter me,'" added Turnbull. "I have been with Donald and Rupert Murdoch. I have never seen a politician suck up to Rupert the way Trump did. I have seen dozens of politicians with Murdoch over the 50 years that I have known him. Yes, it is ideology, I think his son is more generally ideological and right wing than Rupert. To Rupert, what gets him out of bed in the morning is power."
Watch the segment below or at this link.
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