At the same time, behind the network’s overwhelming success pandering to the president and supporting the Trump narrative, there was another, more crucial story. Rupert Murdoch, the man who controlled the network, detested the president. He had always detested him. The fact that Fox News had come to so depend on Trump had helped divide the Murdoch family. The fact that the network was making so much money because of Donald Trump meant it could not truly be managed, other than to acquiesce to Trump. Two of Murdoch’s children, his daughter Elisabeth and his son James, had all but turned on the family company because of Fox, sundering the patriarch’s succession plans. In 2018, Murdoch sold the bulk of his empire to Disney, in no small part blaming Trump for his family’s enmity and for ruining his dreams of an ongoing Murdoch dynasty.

But the Murdochs had been left with Fox News because it was too toxic for Disney.

Fox News had been the first network in 2018 to call the House of Representatives election for the Democrats—when polls still were open in the West, a Murdoch family guerrilla action against Trump. Ever since, Trump, as much as he needed the network, had heaped on it his frequent invective. Indeed, the marriage between Trump and the Murdochs, in some ways the foundation of the Trump movement, was quite a sadomasochistic one.

Shortly after 11 p.m., Murdoch’s son Lachlan, in direct charge of the network, got a call relayed from the Fox News election data operation: the desk was ready to call Arizona—still, by most measures, hotly contested and still a definite Trump win in the Oczkowski model—for Biden.

The Fox News election desk was a data operation run by Arnon Mishkin—“a Democrat,” Trump would always add—on the premise that it was independent of Fox News’s otherwise partisan views. But this was merely cover for the election desk to bypass the news desk and to be directly answerable to the Murdochs.

Certainly, there was every reason, if you wanted a reason, to delay the Arizona call, to yet forestall it and still have no fear of being preempted by anyone else. Lachlan got his father on the phone to ask if he wanted to make the early call.

His father, with signature grunt, assented, adding, “Fuck him.”

Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum were the Election Night anchors at Fox, with Bill Hemmer at the vote board.

At 11:15, with nearly everyone in the Map Room assuring the president about how good everything looked (the celebration in progress), Jason Miller heard from Bill Hemmer that they were going to call Arizona for Biden.