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Last week, about 48 hours before The Wall Street Journal published its exclusive report on the “bawdy” birthday letter that President Trump sent to Jeffrey Epstein, the president put in a call from Air Force One to the Journal’s editor-in-chief, Emma Tucker, to try to kill the story. On the call, an obviously miffed Trump offered the categorical on-the-record denial that would appear in the report—“This is not me. This is a fake thing. It’s a fake Wall Street Journal story,” etcetera—as well as his legal threat: “I’m gonna sue The Wall Street Journal just like I sued everyone else,” he said.

On Friday, Trump kept his word, suing not just the Journal, but the two reporters who wrote the story—Khadeeja Safdar and Joe Palazzolo—as well its publisher, Dow Jones; Dow Jones’s parent company, News Corp; and, most notably, its proprietor, News Corp chairman emeritus Rupert Murdoch, for defamation. On Monday, the White House blocked the Journal from the press pool covering the president’s trip to Scotland. In a statement, Dow Jones said it had “full confidence in the rigor and accuracy of our reporting” and has vowed to “vigorously defend against any lawsuit.” On Wednesday, the Journal followed up with another instantly viral report, which revealed that Attorney General Pam Bondi had told the president in May that his name appeared multiple times in the Epstein files.

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In addition to betraying his obvious sensitivity to the Epstein story, Trump’s lawsuit against Murdoch, the Journal, et al. is the latest in what The Economist has rightly described as an attempt “to enforce a kind of lèse-majesté rule against the American media.” Disney and Paramount have each coughed up $16 million to avoid protracted legal battles with this White House, and Trump has said that he anticipates another $20 million in advertising commitments from Skydance, as well as a pledge to eliminate D.E.I. initiatives, once it secures Paramount.

In an intriguing plot twist, Murdoch—also the proprietor of the very Trump-friendly Fox News—may prove to be the one media executive with the stomach to stand up to the president. As sources at the Journal, News Corp, and the broader Murdoch universe reminded me this week, the 94-year-old media titan is a different kind of defendant. He’s not managing a multifaceted, $200 billion media and parks conglomerate through a precarious transformation, à la Bob Iger, nor is he in the sad and desperate position of Shari Redstone, whose need for F.C.C. approval of the Paramount-Skydance deal represented a nearly existential threat. Meanwhile, Trump has carefully compartmentalized his lawsuit, so as to avoid going to war with Fox News, a move that could backfire with his supporters.

Instead, Murdoch, the nation’s last real press baron, has the resources, the freedom, and the fortitude to wage a legal fight with the president—to “sack the fuck up,” as Jon Stewart put it while admonishing institutions for their fearful capitulation to the president. A few sources posited that Murdoch, whose diplomacy with Trump has never fully masked his disdain, might relish the fight. “I don’t think he has any intention of settling,” one high-level source in Murdoch World told me. “Why would he?”

Of course, Trump’s suit may very well not go that far. As my partner Eriq Gardner has noted in his excellent analysis of the case, Trump’s suit is weak. First, it fails to explain why the Journal story is either defamatory or malicious. Second, in filing the suit as quickly as he did, Trump may have violated the Florida provision requiring plaintiffs to give a five-day notice before filing suit. And, most obviously, as Eriq notes, a legal fight over an Epstein story would almost certainly expose Trump to “sustained, sworn scrutiny of his relationship with the convicted sex offender”—exactly the sort of scrutiny Trump appears so incredibly desperate to avoid. “The most likely outcome is that this just goes away,” a News Corp source said.

In the meantime, Trump’s lawsuit has at least succeeded in making life just a bit harder for the Journal, where, I’m told, every Trump-related article is now subject to additional editorial oversight and legal review. The irony here—not lost on Journal editors and reporters—is that the story in question was hardly a smoking gun, and would’ve had far less of an impact had Trump not elected to turn it into a national controversy. In any event, the Journal has no intention of going any softer on the president in light of the lawsuit, and the broad sentiment in the newsroom is that Rupert will have their backs, mainly by allowing them to continue their work without interference from above. As for getting kicked off the press pool, one reporter said, “I’m pretty sure we’ll survive.”