Murdoch Paper Hits Trump With Brutal Warning Over His New Crusade

Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal has torn into Donald Trump’s new crusade against childhood vaccines.

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The president, 80, signed an executive order in the Oval Office on Monday declaring what he calls “Gold Standard Childhood Vaccine Recommendations”—slashing the number of diseases every American child is urged to be jabbed against to 11, down from 18, per the White House’s own fact sheet.

Now the Journal—the conservative broadsheet owned by the Murdoch family’s News Corp—has warned him the whole thing could blow up in his face. In a withering editorial, its board argued that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., 72, and his trial lawyer pals profit from stoking fear of vaccines, and that targeting children’s jabs risks driving away voters who have been deserting Trump in his second term.

“Mr. Trump likes to paint a golden sheen on everything, but his proposed regimen isn’t based on rigorous science, or really any science at all,” the editorial said.

Its closing line was brutal: “The other risk: more measles.”

It is a striking intervention from a paper Trump branded a “pile of garbage” when he sued it and Murdoch, 95, for $10 billion over its scoop on his birthday letter to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. A federal judge threw out the original case in April, but Trump refiled in May, and the fight rumbles on.

Under Monday’s order, flu, COVID, rotavirus and hepatitis A and B shots are downgraded to “shared clinical decision-making” between parents and doctors, while dengue is advised only for “high-risk” groups.

Trump also claimed, offering no evidence, that the current combined MMR shot could be “quite lethal,” the Journal noted.

The paper’s board shredded the reasoning behind all of it. It questioned whether the president is trying to frighten parents off vaccinating their kids altogether. It warned that splitting the MMR means years of manufacturing changes and extra trips to the doctor, so fewer protected kids. And it asked why a president with zero interest in copying Europe is suddenly leaning on European vaccine schedules.

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The Journal is not alone in its fears. Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy, 68, a physician, posted on X: “I’m a doctor. This executive order is wrong.”

There is now legal muscle behind the order. Trump has directed Attorney General Todd Blanche, 52—his former criminal defense lawyer, sworn in at the White House that same day after squeaking through the Senate 50-49—to pursue legal action against state laws that conflict with “parental authority, religious freedom, disability accommodations, and equal protection under the law.”

The Journal warned that could mean the DOJ suing states whose school-shot rules stray from Trump’s list—the same strong-arming of states, it said, that Biden officials were guilty of over COVID.

The timing makes matters worse. The CDC has confirmed 2,465 measles cases in 2026 as of Aug. 6—America’s worst year for the disease since 1991—and the country could be stripped of its measles elimination status, held since 2000, when officials review it in November.

The Journal’s political alarm is backed by hard numbers too. Trump’s job approval has slumped to 34 percent, lower than almost every modern president at the same stage, according to Pew Research Center polling published Aug. 6.

The move has not come out of the blue. Kennedy has spent his tenure chipping away at America’s vaccine system, and the White House told him to back off the issue earlier this year before Trump began pressing him over the lack of progress, Axios reported.

Last August, the Daily Beast reported how Kennedy’s close friend and adviser Dr. Aseem Malhotra believed the administration planned to pull the COVID vaccine off the U.S. market “within months.”