Bari Weiss, the new editor in chief of CBS News, is about to become the latest example of what you might call the Trump Boomerang Effect.

Shortly before airtime on Sunday night, Weiss pulled a piece by 60 Minutes correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi about Venezuelan migrants being sent to CECOT, a brutal Salvadoran prison. The ostensible reason was that Stephen Miller—Donald Trump’s Joseph Goebbels—was not in the piece. But CBS News, which thoroughly vetted Alfonsi’s work, had repeatedly asked the Trump Administration to provide an official to be interviewed for their side of the story.

Alfonsi wrote in a note to the staff on Sunday night that the decision was “political” and if not reversed would give Trump veto power over 60 Minutes:

If the administration’s refusal to participate becomes a valid reason to spike a story, we have effectively handed them a ‘kill switch’ for any reporting they find inconvenient.

Big props to Alfonsi for standing up.

Here’s what I’m confident will happen next: Weiss will scramble to protect her reputation. This piece will run soon—probably next Sunday—and will get monster ratings. Weiss will then learn the lesson that Bob Iger absorbed when ABC briefly bent the knee to Trump, who wanted to kill Jimmy Kimmel’s show. Trump’s intimidation boomeranged and made Kimmel bigger than ever. Just as Trump can no longer mess with late-night, he won’t be able to force Weiss to kill stories he doesn’t like. She will continue to be careful about CBS News’ coverage of Trump, but won’t want to be seen as caving again.

The Trump Boomerang Effect extends widely and will be even more powerful after he leaves office. Consider the preposterous, embarrassing, and illegal re-naming of the Kennedy Center as “the Trump-Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.” To get a sense of how crazy that is, consider that there was never a Stalin-Bolshoi Ballet or a Mussolini-La Scala Opera House. It’s clear that four or eight years from now—whenever Democrats make it back to the White House—this desecration will be removed. The same goes for “The Trump Institute of Peace” and the other government buildings he’s plastering his name on. A few years ago, tenants in a New York apartment successfully had his name removed from their building. We’ll see that in Washington.

Trump Tower will remain, of course, and he’ll eventually have his name on his presidential library and maybe a few other places that he and his family personally pay for. But even with their new billions, the Trumps are too cheap to shell out much on something that doesn’t go into their own pockets. Most of the Trump “friends” who are helping pay for the White House ballroom and other projects in exchange for government favors will disappear once pay-to-play ends. Every time he names something for himself, he’s tossing a boomerang—and lessening the odds of others naming something for him after he’s gone.

Maybe Israel, where some call him Cyrus the Great, will name a street for him. Or Russia. Or Hungary. El Salvador could rename CECOT in his memory. But that’s about it. Without the leverage of the presidency, it will take only a few determined opponents to stop something, even in red states. Is it possible we’ll see some MAGA cultist propose a “Donald J. Trump Elementary School” somewhere? Sure, but the school board will have a slight problem explaining why he’s a good role-model. Richard Nixon carried 49 states in 1972, and he had only three schools to show for it—in Iowa, New Jersey, and Liberia. All were named for him when he was still in office.

The best comparison might be to Senator Joseph McCarthy, who died in 1957. Just as “the McCarthy Era” entered the language, “the Trump Era”—the one we’re living in now—will be remembered for decades, maybe centuries. But there is nothing named for McCarthy in his hometown of Appleton, Wisconsin, where even MAGA Republicans have no interest in honoring him. At his peak, McCarthy stood at 50 percent in the Gallup Poll, higher than Trump has ever been. Then he fell. History always gets the last laugh.

Percy Bysshe Shelley got it right in his 1817 sonnet, Ozymandias, right down to the sneer:

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

This piece appeared originally on the Subtack, Old Goats with Jonathan Alter

The post The Trump Boomerang Effect: Bari Weiss, Meet Ozymandias appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Shari Redstone better change her tune, or she, her board, and her corporate officers may go to prison on bribery charges in 2029.

If you think that’s far-fetched, consider the seamy details of the fracas involving Redstone, Donald Trump, and the Trump-controlled Federal Communications Commission.

The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that Paramount offered Trump $15 million to settle his ridiculous $20 billion lawsuit against CBS News over the editing of a pre-election 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris, and that Trump wants $25 million and an apology.

Even as Redstone takes the transparently phony step of recusing herself from settlement talks, this would be a big fat bribe, the kind of illegally extorted payment that has routinely sent crooked politicians and ordinary miscreants to the slammer for years. The only thing that ironically obscures the crime is that, as with so much of Trump’s perfidy, it is happening in public view.

Why would Redstone, the heiress chair of Paramount (which owns CBS), settle with Trump when CBS News did nothing even the slightest bit wrong? Because if she doesn’t, the chair of the FCC, Brendan Carr, who literally wears a gold Trump-head pin on his suit jacket, will block Paramount’s $8 billion merger with Skydance Media.

Redstone wants her billions, “and she has told people it is her preference to settle the matter and move on with her life,” Charles Gasparino, a well-connected business reporter, wrote Thursday in The New York Post.

Dream on, Shari. The chances of you “moving on with your life” after paying off Trump are between zero and none. Senators Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Ron Wyden have already written to you, stating that they plan to investigate whether the deal involved bribery. They will soon have plenty of company in Congress in making your life miserable. That’s just a taste of what lies ahead should you choose to bend the knee. Here’s what will happen as soon as the settlement is completed:

And after that? If a Democrat is elected president in 2028, you can be sure that federal prosecutors would love to bring this case in front of a jury. The five-year statute of limitations on bribery would give them (just enough) time, and the quid pro quo they would have to prove is less complicated than in many bribery cases. While it’s true that the law gives the settlement of claims in civil cases wide latitude, it does not countenance bribery and extortion.

To help clarify why this walks, talks, and quacks like extortion and bribery, let’s go back to last December. That’s when Carr gave an interview to the New York Post where he said: “I’m pretty confident that that news distortion complaint over the 60 Minutes transcript is something that is likely to arise in the context of the FCC review of that transaction.”

Translation: “Nice merger you have there. Pity if something should happen to it.”

It helps to see exactly what is at issue here. In February, CBS News released the full transcript of the Harris interview. Here’s her 140-word answer from the promo for the interview that ran on Face the Nation:

Well, let’s start with October 7th. Because obviously, what we do now must be in the context of what has happened. And as I reflect on a year ago, and that 1,200 people were massacred, young people at a festival, at a music festival, 250 hostages were taken, including Americans, women were brutally raped.

And as I said then, I maintain Israel has a right to defend itself. We would. And how it does so matters. And as we fast forward into what we have seen in the ensuing weeks and months, far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed. And we know that, and I think most agree, this war has to end. And that has to be our number one imperative, and that has been our number one imperative. How can we get this war to end?

And here is the 56-word edited soundbite that ran on 60 Minutes:

Well, let’s start with October 7th. Twelve hundred people were massacred, 250 hostages were taken, including Americans. Women were brutally raped. And as I said then, I maintain Israel has a right to defend itself. We would. And how it does so matters. Far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed. This war has to end.

Trump’s lawyers don’t argue that the editing changed the meaning of Harris’s words, only that she looked better in the shorter soundbite. Imagine forking over tens of millions of dollars and possibly apologizing for a low-level weekend editor’s alleged motivation in choosing a newsy soundbite and fitting it to the time allotted for the promo. This is preposterous and would come across as such in court.

The bribery trial would also illuminate some basic, unarguable truths about TV news. Anyone who has ever worked in television or has any familiarity with journalism knows that time constraints routinely require quotes and soundbites to be edited. More important, under the First Amendment, news organizations have an absolute, unfettered right to do so. The only way a plaintiff could get to first base under normal circumstances would be if the editing distorted the meaning of the soundbite, which in this case it was not. Trump just thought that Harris was dumb (even though she had just kicked his ass in their only debate) and CBS was making her look smarter and crisper. Hardly the grounds for a multi-billion-dollar lawsuit.

There are also big First Amendment issues here, of course. If CBS settles it will set a devastating precedent—far worse than the ABC News case, where George Stephanopoulos may have erred in calling what Trump did to E. Jean Carroll “rape” instead of “sexual abuse,” the term employed by the jury.

There’s no conceivable error here. Redstone settling with Trump would send a message to powerful people that they can extort money out of news organizations over accurate and non-defamatory stories that merely displease them. Even if they lack the immense leverage that Trump has, these would-be litigants will feel entitled to intimidate journalists who have done nothing wrong. That would constitute a serious blow to free expression.

A bribery probe and splashy trial would send a different message: Bowing to the White House might send you to the Big House.

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