Look beyond the petty celebrity feuds, and you’ll see a plan to transform American media companies into outlets for MAGA agitprop.
President Donald Trump hosts Fox CEO Rupert Murdoch and Skydance backer Larry Ellison at the Oval Office.
(Craig Hudson for The Washington Post via Getty Images)
Last weekend, Late Night host Seth Meyers became the latest comic to draw fire from our beleaguered president. Donald Trump knew by then that he was taking a large and embarrassing undeniable “L” on the Epstein files. He had played all his best cards, and nothing worked. Trump officials tried bullying Representative Lauren Boebert, a traditional MAGA stalwart, by meeting with her in the Situation Room to sweatbox her into reversing her vote in favor of the files’ release. Trump launched new nicknames and insults, usually a Trump slam dunk. He dubbed Marjorie Taylor Greene, who had also broken ranks in supporting the release of the files, “Marjorie Traitor Greene.” During an Air Force One Q&A with the White House press corps, Bloomberg’s Catherine Lucey asked about his resistance to releasing the files, and he replied, “Quiet, piggy.” Nothing worked. All weekend long, he lashed out at women who refused to be intimidated by him. Instead, they kept going, forcing on him the humiliating public documentation of his close friendship with the world’s most notorious pedophile.
In the midst of this furor, Trump resorted to another favored tactic: changing the subject. He went after a comedian—a pastime that’s played out more favorably for him than his campaign to get his base to forget about Jeffrey Epstein. On Saturday afternoon, he took to Truth Social with this lament: “NBC’s Seth Meyers is suffering from an incurable case of Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS). He was viewed last night in an uncontrollable rage, likely due to the fact that his ‘show’ is a Ratings DISASTER. Aside from everything else, Meyers has no talent, and NBC should fire him, IMMEDIATELY!”
Meyers’s offense the previous night was simple: He made fun of Trump. On Friday, Meyers aired a segment in the show’s “A Closer Look” series that explored why so many of the MAGA faithful were now forsaking Trump. It turns out that MAGA supporters very much want to know more about the Epstein files—and are also up in arms over Trump’s recent declaration that the country needs a high quotient of HB-1 visa holders to sustain a skilled workforce. Trump ran for president as the crusader who would expose the elite cabals like the one Epstein had cultivated, while also liberating American workers from the globalists who had taken their jobs out from under them. Meyers’s segment stressed that as Trump dodged the release of the Epstein files, he also sat for an interview with Laura Ingraham on Fox News and told her that, er, um, actually, MAGA should learn to code.
But why single out Seth Meyers? Seemingly every comic on TV tells Epstein jokes. Later that night, Saturday Night Live loaded the show with them. Colin Jost said, “Trump’s like the Forrest Gump of meeting famous pedophiles.” Here’s a clue: Like SNL, Meyers’s Late Night is owned by NBC Universal, which is owned by Comcast, which announced Friday that it planned to bid against the Ellison family and Skydance for Warner Brothers Discovery (WBD).
Trump likes Skydance and quickly approved of the idea of its proposed buyout of WBD. Trump has many reasons to be a Skydance fan. When the deal for Skydance to buy Viacom and Paramount went through, Trump got a $16 million extortion payday out of Viacom’s CBS News to settle his meritless suit against 60 Minutes for edits made to an interview with his 2024 opponent, Kamala Harris. Skydance also made woke-baiting pundit Bari Weiss the editor in chief of CBS News, despite a résumé that remains free of any television news (or really any) reporting. And prior to all this post-merger Trump-pandering, CBS announced this summer the cancelation of Stephen Colbert’s Late Show just days after Skydance leader David Ellison met with Trump’s head of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr. CBS executives claimed financial issues determined Colbert’s cancelation—but if so, why announce it that week?
Skydance has so far made three bids for WBD, with Trump delivering his advance blessing on the latest offer. If Skydance acquires WBD, it will also gain control over CNN, a cable news network that Trump has long hated, dubbing it “the broken broadcasting disaster known as CNN.” The Trump White House has already met with the tech billionaire Larry Ellison, Skydance’s financial grandparent, and discussed which CNN reporters should be sent packing under Skydance’s ownership. Topping the list, not surprisingly, were two women, Erin Burnett and Briana Keilar.
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Comcast’s emerging as an alternate suitor, one that can easily compete with Skydance, complicates such plans. Trump has called Comcast CEO Brian Roberts a “a disgrace to the integrity of broadcasting,” since Comcast had overseen MSNBC’s transformation into a 24-hour outlet for Trump-bashing punditry. CNN coming under Comcast’s management is not a scenario Trump wants at all.
Larry Ellison has had Trump’s back for years. Trump trusts him. Beyond Trump’s ongoing vendettas against the individual journalists and comedians who refuse to cower before him, it’s clear that he wants to remake the American media industry in his own image—the same way Vladimir Putin and Victor Orbán, the autocratic leaders he most admires, have controlled the media in their home countries. By consolidating media companies, Trump hopes to use a Putin-style media oligarchy to determine who gets to report the news and tell the jokes.
Trump made that clear a few days ago, when ABC’s Mary Bruce threw hardball questions at the president and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman at a press conference in the Oval Office. “Your Royal Highness, the US intelligence [community] concluded that you orchestrated the brutal murder of a journalist [Washington Post writer Jamal Khashoggi]. 9/11 families are furious that you are here in the Oval Office. Why should Americans trust you? And the same to you, Mr. President.” Trump brusquely dismissed the Post journalist’s murder with the callous phrase “things happen” and then told Bruce, “I think the license should be taken away from ABC because your news is so fake and it’s so wrong. And we have a great [FCC] commissioner, the chairman, who should look at that because I think when you come in and you’re 97 percent negative to Trump. And then Trump wins the election in a landslide. That means, obviously, your news is not credible.” In Trump’s perfect media world, anyone questioning him would not only be abruptly fired; entire networks would also lose their licenses.
Brendan Carr sent a pretty clear signal about getting Meyers fired when he reposted Trump’s Truth Social broadside at Meyers on X.com. Carr has already proven himself highly effective at moving toward an Orbán-Putin style makeover of American media. Not only did he meet personally with David Ellison to close the Skydance deal; he also publicly urged ABC affiliate stations to silence Jimmy Kimmel for a monologue he delivered after Charlie Kirk’s murder—one that ridiculed Trump’s response to it, not Kirk. The affiliates obliged, which in turn led ABC’s parent company, Disney, to suspend Kimmel’s show, and leave his return an open question. (The suspension lasted six days, after viewers began canceling their Disney subscriptions in droves.)
Yes, Trump hates comics who ridicule him, but Colbert, Kimmel, and Meyers are just comedy collateral damage in Trump’s pursuit of his bigger goals. Trump’s brain operates simultaneously at the pettiest and grandest levels of venality and scheming. He could have Brendan Carr make private calls to Comcast executives to let them know what’s coming. Instead, Trump went after Meyers to show he’s always in there slugging—but also to remind Comcast of what he’d already done to Colbert and Kimmel.
It’s easy to get distracted by Trump’s celebrity feuds, but we should never lose sight of Trump’s master plan: to push our media world so far to the far right that he’s never again asked about his sexually predatory or homicidal friends.
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