Politico’s New Owner Denies Sending ‘False’ Email Praising Trump Before Admitting He ‘Could Be’ the Sender
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The Washington Post’s Sarah Ellison is out with a fascinating profile of Mathias Döpfner, the CEO of Axel Springer, the German media company which last year bought Politico for more than $1 billion.
Döpfner, whose portfolio of publications includes right-leaning German papers Bild and Die Welt, has said he wants to position Politico as a leading nonpartisan publication.
“We want to prove that being nonpartisan is actually the more successful positioning,” he told the Post, a strategy he called his “biggest and most contrarian bet.”
But Ellison obtained an email Döpfner sent to close executives praising former President Donald Trump ahead of the 2020 election.
“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 said in the email.
According to Ellison:
His email was inspired by a news story he shared about the government’s plans to sue Google for abuse of market dominance, an animating issue of his for years. But Döpfner went on to argue that Trump had made the right moves on five of what he deemed the six most important issues of the last half century — “defending the free democracies” against Russia and China, pushing NATO allies to up their contributions, “tax reforms,” and Middle East peace efforts, as well as challenging tech monopolies — if falling short, he implied, on climate change.
“No American administration in the last 50 years has done more,” Döpfner concluded.
Ellison asked Döpfner about the email, and he denied ever sending it.
“That’s intrinsically false,” he told the Post. “That doesn’t exist. It has never been sent and has never been even imagined.”
When Ellison showed Döpfner a print-out of the email, he said he might have sent it “as an ironic, provocative statement in the circle of people that hate Donald Trump.”
“That is me,” he said. “That could be.”
Döpfner’s politics are otherwise fairly inscrutable. According to the Post, Axel Springer employees are required to sign a constitution of sorts “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.”
In an interview with the Post, Döpfner denied ever supporting Trump, and broadly described his politics:
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.
Read the full Post profile here.
