Trump Worshipping Politico Owner Denies He Ever Asked Execs To Pray With Him For Trump’s Reelection

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This new owner of Politico is scary. Rumors have been flying about the new management of Politico since last year. The first I got wind of anything strange was an article in Puck a few months ago, about a right-wing German publisher who wanted to take over digital media. He appears to be that and that’s scary for two reasons: Politico isn’t the only major media outlet undergoing ownership/management changes, so is CNN, and most importantly, the culture war is a war on information, first and foremost. It’s a war on truth. We could end up like Russia, where Pravda means truth and is anything but that. And this is the kind of guy who might do it. Daily Beast:

The new German owner of Politico sent an email to his closest executives asking if they should meet up to pray for Donald Trump’s re-election, according to a report. Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner sent the message in the weeks leading up to the 2020 presidential election, according to The Washington Post, a year before his company’s acquisition of Politico in October 2021.

“Do we all want to get together for an hour in the morning on November 3 and pray that Donald Trump will again become President of the United States of America?” Döpfner wrote, inspired by an article about the Trump administration taking legal action against Google for abuse of market dominance.

Döpfner went on to argue that Trump had made the right call on five of the six biggest issues of the last century—including pursuing peace in the Middle East and “defending the free democracies” from Russia and China—only falling short on climate change. “No American administration in the last 50 years has done more,” he added.

When asked about the message, Döpfner initially denied it existed, going so far as to say: “It has never been sent and has never been even imagined.” When confronted with a printout of the email, he explained that he may have sent it “as an ironic, provocative statement in the circle of people that hate Donald Trump.” “That is me,” he added. “That could be.”

Interesting how he loved Trump and now he’s denying it, although I expect to see a lot more of that in the next several years. But there’s so much more about this guy that makes him sound like really bad news. Washington Post:

Despite his 2020 email to colleagues, which he describes as flippant, Döpfner insists he has never been a supporter of Trump. In an interview with The Post, he describes his own views as eclectic, calling himself a “non-Jewish Zionist” with “small-L liberal” tendencies, deeply concerned about racism and homophobia. He also worries about what he sees as cancel culture, and in private conversations, friends say, he gripes about identity politics. One of his sons works as the chief of staff to Peter Thiel, the conservative-libertarian tech billionaire turned MAGA kingmaker, but Döpfner has only met him a few times and says they are not close. He does profess a fondness for “contrarians,” though, and called provocateur Tesla founder Elon Musk, currently embroiled in litigation over his noisy attempt to take over Twitter and upend its moderation policies, “one of the most inspiring people I’ve ever met.”

While calling for political neutrality from his U.S. media properties, Döpfner comes from a tradition of European publishers who are very much at ease blending ideology with news. Axel Springer staff in Germany are required to sign a pledge committing to principles that include a disavowal of racism, sexism and political or religious extremism; but also support for a united Europe, Israeli statehood and a free-market economy.

“These values are like a constitution,” he told the Wall Street Journal last year.

Last year, Döpfner ordered the Israeli flag be flown in solidarity at company headquarters for a week after several antisemitic outbursts at demonstrations in Germany that followed a deadly eruption of violence in Gaza. Some employees bristled, seeing it as taking sides in the fraught Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Döpfner responded sharply in a staff video call: “I’m being very frank with you: A person who has an issue with an Israeli flag being raised for one week here, after antisemitic demonstrations, should look for a new job.”

Conservative pundits swooned in admiration of what they saw as a rebuke of liberal pieties. “All it takes to stop the madness is an adult willing to say: no,” tweeted former New York Times columnist Bari Weiss. But Döpfner put it in simpler terms when asked about it later by Politico staffers: After the Holocaust, how could a German company stand for anything less than the right of Israel to exist?

Intriguing, isn’t it, that he would be so pro-Trump and he also would be so politically correct about the Israeli flag? Or, to put it more simply, he’s got a right-wing paper, but he’s also making liberal-esque gestures. This guy bears watching. There are things that don’t easily make sense about him and what that tells me is that he’s testing the waters, looking for an ideological stance that sells. Who knows what he really thinks? People like that are terrifying.

Good luck Politico. We’ll see where you go. Believe me, we’ll be watching. Politico used to be flippantly referred to as “Tiger Beat on the Potomac” and those days are long gone.

 

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6 COMMENTS

  1. There is a simple and obvious solution. Delete your Politico bookmark, Don’t frequent the site, and certainly don’t click on any links that could make this guy any money. Apparently, money is the only thing this guy wants.

  2. Döpfner might want to remember that “support for Israel” does NOT automatically equal “opposing anti-Semitism.” There are millions of Israelis who do not support their own government’s anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian actions.

    He also needs to remember that Arabs are Semites and that the actions of the Israeli government in razing the homes of Palestinians is just as “anti-Semitic” and any action directed at Israelis.

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  3. Is this rube a businessman or some scared little child wanting the lightning and thunder to stop? Of course one has to admit the guy got an answer, just not the one he wanted. lmao

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