Fox News founder Rupert Murdoch never wanted JD Vance anywhere near the 2024 ticket.

He lost that fight. Vance kept his head down, stuck by President Trump, and became the America First front-runner for 2028.

One sentence about a foreign election just handed Murdoch’s morning hosts the opening they’d been waiting for.

Vance Told Mark Halperin He’s Staying Out of Israel’s Race

President Donald Trump threw his weight behind Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ahead of Israel’s October 27 election. He did it the way he does most things, with plenty of capital letters and zero hedging.

“Please let this Letter serve to represent my Complete and Total Endorsement of Bibi Netanyahu in his upcoming Race for Re-Election as Prime Minister of Israel,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

Netanyahu jumped on X to thank him.

A day later, journalist Mark Halperin caught up with Vice President JD Vance aboard Air Force Two. Vance was flying to North Carolina to campaign for Republican Senate nominee Michael Whatley, and Halperin asked the obvious question. Would the Vice President match the President’s endorsement?

Vance didn’t bite. “I endorse American candidates, and that’s where I’m focused on the midterms,” he said.

But Halperin pressed him, and Vance answered with about as clean a non-answer as Washington, DC ever produces.

“I’m not anti-endorsing him, I’m not pro-endorsing him. I’m not getting involved in Israeli elections,” Vance said.

And that was the whole thing. Vance took no shot at Netanyahu and put no daylight between himself and Trump’s decision. Even Fox News’ own website ran a write-up noting Vance made a point of saying his silence shouldn’t count as a vote against the Israeli leader.

Fox & Friends Heard a Shrug and Called It Hostility

But the crew on the Fox & Friends couch heard something else entirely.

Brian Kilmeade recast Vance’s answer as a deliberate snub. “He went out of his way to say, even though the President endorsed Bibi Netanyahu, ‘I am not.’ He says, ‘I’m staying out of it,’” Kilmeade said.

Vance never said “I am not.” He said he wasn’t for it or against it. That’s a small difference, maybe. But on morning television, small differences have a funny way of growing legs.

Kilmeade kept rolling and told viewers Vance “seems to be a little bit anti-Israel.”

Co-host Lawrence Jones piled on. “Unforced error,” Jones said. “There’s no reason to say that.”

And Jones made sure the audience knew he found the whole episode disappointing.

The @AFpost account posted the clip on X, and it spread fast among America First conservatives. Plenty of them couldn’t figure out how “I’m focused on the midterms” turned into an anti-Israel confession somewhere between the studio and the commercial break.

Kilmeade did land one jab. He reminded viewers that Vance “went and campaigned for Viktor Orban in Hungary” before Orban’s party lost its election in spring 2026.

Fair enough. Vance made that trip, and anybody claiming he follows an ironclad rule against foreign elections has to reckon with Budapest.

But follow Kilmeade’s logic all the way out. His complaint isn’t that Vance dabbles in other countries’ politics too much. His complaint is that Vance picked the wrong foreigner to cheer for and kept quiet about the right one. That sounds less like a principle about foreign elections and more like a loyalty test.

And it’s a test Fox doesn’t seem eager to give President Trump. Trump clashed openly with Netanyahu over Israel’s war against Hezbollah in Lebanon, and he held off on his own endorsement for a stretch before finally issuing it. It’s hard to picture that same couch branding the President “a little bit anti-Israel” while he made Netanyahu wait.

Rupert Murdoch Lost the Running Mate Fight and Never Let It Go

Here’s where the segment starts to make more sense.

Rupert Murdoch owns Fox News. He also spent the summer of 2024 trying to keep Vance off the ticket. Murdoch personally lobbied Trump to choose North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, and the opinion pages at Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal and New York Post went after Vance by name.

Donald Trump Jr and Eric Trump pushed their father hard in the other direction. Vance got the nod, and Murdoch showed up at the Republican convention in Milwaukee anyway, smiling for the cameras.

This wasn’t Murdoch’s first try at steering the party past Trump, either. After the 2022 midterms, the New York Post splashed “Trumpty Dumpty” across its front page, and Murdoch’s outlets spent months talking up Florida Governor Ron DeSantis as the next big thing. Republican voters ignored the memo. Trump steamrolled DeSantis in the primary.

Then there’s the policy record, which explains a lot.

In 2010, Murdoch teamed up with former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg to launch the Partnership for a New American Economy, a business coalition built to lobby Congress for comprehensive immigration reform. Murdoch said at the time that the country needed policies that would “provide a careful pathway to legal status for undocumented residents.”

Strip away the polish and that’s amnesty for illegal aliens, the same scheme to flood the labor market with cheap foreign workers that establishment Republicans keep trying to sneak through. Murdoch cheered on the Senate’s Gang of Eight amnesty bill in 2013 too, urging Congress to rewrite immigration and visa laws in a hurry.

And Murdoch’s papers beat the war drums for Iraq in 2003, back when the neoconservative wing ran Republican foreign policy and nobody in the green room wanted to talk about the bill coming due.

Amnesty, cheap labor, and open-ended foreign wars. That’s the pre-Trump Republican Party Murdoch’s empire grew up alongside. Vance stands against all three, which might explain why a shrug about Israeli ballots lit up a morning show.

The 2028 Fight Fox Won’t Admit It’s Already Picking

Vance hasn’t hidden where he stands on the Middle East. In June, he sharply criticized members of Israel’s government for opposing President Trump’s push to wind down the war with Iran. That’s America First restraint, the kind of diplomacy-first instinct the interventionist crowd has never forgiven in anyone.

The Wall Street Journal opinion page has already started building its case against Vance as Trump’s successor, according to Axios. The same Axios report noted Murdoch lobbied Trump not to pick Vance in the first place.

So when a Murdoch morning show takes a midterm-focused non-answer and spins it into an anti-Israel storyline, it’s fair to ask whether the hosts are reacting to the clip or to the man in it.

Maybe it’s just three hosts riffing before the coffee kicks in. Television does that. But the pattern keeps pointing in one direction, and it points straight at 2028.

Expect more of it. Every time Vance puts American voters ahead of a foreign leader’s campaign, somebody cashing a Murdoch paycheck will call it a blunder. Every time he backs Trump’s diplomacy over another war, the same voices will start asking whether he’s really one of them.

Vance went right back to North Carolina and the midterm map. Israeli voters will pick their own Prime Minister without any help from Air Force Two.

Fox & Friends can keep chewing on that. The voters Vance is courting seem a lot more interested in their own ballots.

Sources: The Washington Post, “Vance declines to endorse Netanyahu for reelection as Israeli leader”; CNN, “Vance declines to endorse Netanyahu’s reelection bid, breaking with Trump”; PBS NewsHour, “JD Vance declines to endorse Netanyahu for reelection, says he’s focusing on midterms”; The Globe and Mail, “Vance declines to endorse Netanyahu’s re-election bid, despite Trump backing the embattled leader”; The Hill, “Vance declines to offer endorsement in Netanyahu election”; Fox News, “JD Vance declines to endorse Netanyahu despite Trump’s strong backing”; Time, “Vance Declines to Endorse Netanyahu for Re-Election, Breaking With Trump”; Sunday Guardian, Trump endorsement letter text; The Western Journal, “‘Fox and Friends’ Turns on JD Vance After He Declines to Endorse Benjamin Netanyahu”; The Gateway Pundit, Fox & Friends segment transcript; Axios, “Pre-Trump GOP is coming for Vance”; ABC News, “How Trump landed on JD Vance as his VP pick”; NPR, Murdoch at the Republican National Convention; Mediaite, NBC report on Trump’s running mate deliberations; The Daily Beast, “‘Retired’ Rupert Murdoch Makes Surprise RNC Appearance”; NBC New York, “The Powerful Go for Immigration Reform”; Partnership for a New American Economy, 2013 co-chairs statement on Gang of Eight legislation.