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.

There are many reasons why the second Donald Trump administration has been far more dangerous and destructive than the first. The Heritage Foundation came in ready with a playbook from day one; the tech overlord alliance with the far right infused MAGA with the “move fast and break things” ethic of Silicon Valley; eight years of Trumpification of the GOP ensured far fewer internal hurdles to reckless lawbreaking existed; a much more ideologically aligned Supreme Court paved the way to legalize what previously would have been lawless behavior; and Trump’s popular vote win provided him a greater veneer of institutional legitimacy in 2024 than he had in 2016 when he lost the popular vote. 

But perhaps the greatest boon to Trump’s effort to erect a MAGA autocracy has been the unexpected capitulation of American institutions, especially the traditional media. 

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ABC News and its parent, The Walt Disney Company, could have fought Trump’s weak defamation case over George Stephanopoulos’s technically inaccurate description of the E. Jean Carroll verdict (and very likely won) but instead agreed to pay $15 million to Trump’s future presidential library and another $1 million to his lawyer, while posting a groveling editor’s note and ducking sworn depositions. Soon afterward, Disney and ABC briefly canceled Jimmy Kimmel after Trump officials and right-wing activists demanded his firing, only reinstating him after massive public outcry. The message to the White House was clear: make enough threats and the country’s premier broadcast news brands will fold, not fight. 

CBS and its parent, Paramount, followed the same script. After initially calling Trump’s $20 billion lawsuit over a 60 Minutes Kamala Harris interview an “affront to the First Amendment,” CBS’s owners quietly settled for $16 million (again routed to Trump’s library and legal fees) just as they were seeking regulatory approval for a merger with Skydance. The newly merged company then installed Bari Weiss, a culture warrior with no broadcast journalism background, as editor-in-chief of CBS News. Within days, she was asking 60 Minutes staff why the country thinks they’re “biased,” an echo of Trump’s long-running attacks. Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post editorial board has endorsed all but four of Trump’s clearly unqualified cabinet nominees.  

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This media capitulation is partly a story about monopoly and consolidation. Most of these corporate media players want federal approval for mergers and other related business issues. 

But it’s also about attitude. 

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Under threat of imprisonment, torture, and death, Dmitry Muratov and the staff of the Russian dissident newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, continued exposing Vladimir Putin’s corruption and violent abuses of human rights. Even as their fellow journalists were manhandled into dark and danky cells, bankrupted, or “disappeared” from the waking world, they continued to report, comment, and publish.  

Novaya Gazeta strikes a humiliating contrast with the American press, as the leading journalistic institutions of the free world have subordinated themselves to the Trump regime out of cowardice, greed, or a combination of both. Motives aren’t nearly as important as the chilling effect of each surrender on dissent, critical thought, and the First Amendment.  

CBS News seems close to installing Bari Weiss, the editor and founder of conservative-leaning The Free Press, who recently gave a slobbering interview to Amy Coney Barrett, as its “bias monitor.” Under pressure from the Paramount-Skydance merger, the network of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite cancelled The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. More recently, MSNBC fired Matt Dowd, who helped lead George W. Bush’s presidential campaigns, for expressing “offensive” views about Charlie Kirk in the immediate aftermath of his murder.  

No act was so craven in its capitulation as the shocking, indefinite suspension of Jimmy Kimmel from ABC. On his September 15th program, Kimmel speculated that Tyler Robinson, Kirk’s killer, was “MAGA,” which the evidence does not support, and opined that the White House was attempting to take advantage of the awful crime, which is inarguably correct.  

Three days later, the Trump-appointed chairman of the FCC, Brendan Carr, appeared on a far-right podcast to issue a threat straight out of the script of a cliche-ridden mafioso movie, a point even Senator Ted Cruz brought to light. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” he said, before promising to review ABC’s broadcast license agreement if the network doesn’t change its ways. By the end of the business day, after affiliates seeking regulatory approval for mergers added fuel to the fire, ABC announced the indefinite suspension of the late-night host, electing to do things the easy way for profit, and the hard way for democracy.  

Republican parrots immediately launched into their defense, insisting that ABC, and its parent company, Disney, merely made a “business decision” in the interest of its “fiduciary responsibility.” Kimmel offended too many viewers, and therefore, would hurt the bottom line. Pretending as if the timing of the suspension with Carr’s ultimatum was a mere coincidence is absurd enough, but reporting from the Daily Beast confirmed that ABC executives initially supported Kimmel. They only reversed themselves after hearing the ultimatum from the commissioner of the FCC. A later report indicated that when Bob Iger, the CEO of The Walt Disney Company, ABC’s parent company, heard that Kimmel planned to dig in on his critique, he and ABC executives decided to suspend Kimmel indefinitely which is where things stand. 

Carr’s first response to the news was to share a popular meme of characters from the sitcom, The Office, celebrating with the “raise the roof” dance move. The world’s oldest democracy is now under the rule of malevolent 13-year-olds.  

While we’re on the subject of democracy, it appears as if it is on life support in a hospital under the authority of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. One of the most troubling lessons of the past eight months is the extent to which avaricious self-interest, short-term thinking, and apathy have made our society weak. Michel Foucault titled a series of lectures, “Society Must Be Defended.” Who is defending our society? 

The Fourth Estate is paralyzed, big law firms cave to Trump’s demands, and universities cut deals to save their federal funding. Even Trump-friendly Republicans are revealing how intimidation is the principal generator of obsequious submission. Indiana Governor Mike Braun recently explained his willingness to call a special legislative session to redistrict the congressional map in Republican favor, in the middle of the decade, with the self-damning admission, “If we try to drag our feet as a state on it, probably, we’ll have the consequences of not working with the Trump administration as tightly as we should.”  

ABC didn’t drag its feet. It leapt at the chance to demonstrate obedience to the thought police. The problem is not only timidity, but also media conglomeration. Nexstar, a media company owning 28 ABC-affiliated stations, is acquiring local media company, Tegna. The $6.2 billion merger requires FCC approval. The Kimmel debacle follows ABC settling a ridiculous lawsuit that Trump filed after George Stephanopoulos asserted that Trump had been found civilly liable for raping E. Jean Carroll (the jury found him liable for sexual assault), and firing journalist Terry Moran for tweeting that Stephen Miller is a “world-class hater.” It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to deduce that Nexstar, Disney, and ABC executives want to remain in Trump and Carr’s good graces, even if it means sacrificing an independent press and freedom of speech.  

In 1983, 50 companies controlled 90 percent of the U.S. broadcast media market. Now, it is down to six. In such a narrow landscape, conformity becomes a virtue. The recently deceased academic and media critic, Robert W. McChesney, summarized the crisis with the title of his study of corporate journalism, “Rich Media, Poor Democracy.”  

The expanding reach of the corporate octopus’s tentacles is likely why even the superstars of so-called “liberal Hollywood” have failed to defend their friend Jimmy Kimmel. George Clooney, who couldn’t raise his head fast enough to sabotage Joe Biden’s reelection campaign has remained silent since the Kimmel incident, is one particularly illustrative example of how cowardice is contagious.  

The White House’s assault on free speech is pitched as a necessary discouragement of “political violence,” a term that the mass media has appeared to just discover in the wake of Kirk’s murder. Even those dubious grounds crumble when one learns that most of those who have lost their jobs, including Kimmel, never celebrated the murder. They certainly did not advocate violence. They either criticized Kirk’s politics or those who used Kirk’s horrific killing to pursue their own agendas.  

Meanwhile, under a reasonable interpretation of the English language, the actions of ICE constitute “political violence”—raiding peaceful neighborhoods and places of business, abducting and assaulting immigrants (in some cases, American citizens) and holding them in allegedly abusive conditions without due process. Fourteen migrants have died in ICE detention facilities since the inauguration of Donald Trump.  

The Department of Homeland Security has advanced its attack on free speech, warning “the media and far left” to “stop the demonization of President Trump, his supporters, and DHS Law Enforcement.” Representative Jasmine Crockett, Illinois governor JB Pritzker, and Boston Mayor Michelle Wu are three officials the statement targets as guilty of “demonization.” One should reply to the admonition with the obvious question, “Or what?” 

The answer will determine to what extent Americans still live in a free society. Trump and Carr have both promised action against other television networks and personalities who display more critical thinking than the court jesters at Fox News.  

Another question: How much degradation will the American people tolerate?  

After the forced closure of Novaya Gazeta, Dmitry Muratov said, “In Russia, political repression will continue against all opponents of the regime.” He added that his hope rested in the “people who see the world as a friend, not an enemy.”  

His words echo close to home.  

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