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.

President Donald Trump’s comments to White House reporters last week about the proposed Warner Bros. Discovery sale should terrify every American: 

I wouldn’t want to see the same company end up with CNN … I think CNN should be sold because I think the people that are running CNN right now are either corrupt or incompetent … I think any deal should—it should be guaranteed and certain that CNN is part of it or sold separately. 

In separate remarks, Trump said he would be “involved” in the deal, and his loyalist attorney general, Pam Bondi, said the Justice Department’s antitrust division would oversee it. In plain sight, the president of the United States is hijacking federal power to decide who owns the media that covers him. So much for freedom of the press.  

You can thwart Trump’s attempt to control the media. Donate to the Washington Monthly and strike a blow for independent media.  

Instead of raising alarms about Trump’s dictatorial behavior, the leading suitors of Warner Bros. Discovery—Netflix and Paramount—have been currying the president’s favor. Shortly before the preliminary deal struck by Netflix, the company’s co-CEO, Ted Sarandos, met with Trump in the Oval Office, most likely hoping to prevent any interference. But under the terms of that deal, Warner Bros. Discovery would be split, and Netflix would only take over half of the company, the half without CNN. That’s not what Trump wants. 

In response to the Netflix announcement, Paramount Skydance launched a hostile takeover bid. Paramount was recently bought by multi-billionaire Larry Ellison and his son, David, who added it to their Skydance Media. Back in 2016, Larry Ellison backed then-Senator Marco Rubio in the Republican presidential primaries and Senator Tim Scott in the 2024 ones. Still, like so many CEOs, he has been ingratiating himself with Trump ever since, as detailed in the April 2025 The New York Times article “How Trump Could Make Larry Ellison the Next Media Mogul.”  

When the Ellisons’ Skydance Media snapped up Paramount, it rapidly moved to make its CBS News subsidiary Trump-friendlier by tapping Bari Weiss to run it. (Trump had pressured the previous Paramount ownership under Shari Redstone to cough up $16 million and settle a flimsy lawsuit accusing CBS News’s 60 Minutes of making deceptive edits to an interview with Kamala Harris.) For good measure, the Ellisons bought a piece of the social media powerhouse TikTok.  

Now their eyes are on Warner Bros. Discovery. Unlike with the Netflix proposal, Paramount would not split the acquisition, thereby making CNN its own. The Wall Street Journal reported that “During a visit to Washington in recent days, David Ellison offered assurances to Trump administration officials that if he bought Warner, he’d make sweeping changes to CNN.” 

Yet Trump is still unhappy, because the Ellisons haven’t made CBS News a full-fledged propaganda outlet. When 60 Minutes interviewed Trump loyalist-turned-critic Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Trump raged on his social media page, “My real problem with the show, however, wasn’t the low IQ traitor, it was that the new ownership of 60 Minutes, Paramount, would allow a show like this to air. THEY ARE NO BETTER THAN THE OLD OWNERSHIP, who just paid me millions of Dollars for FAKE REPORTING about your favorite President, ME!”  

So, we have a president asserting he can decide who owns CNN and pressuring both suitors to woo him, which they seem willing to do.  

If we don’t want this craven spectacle to represent the future of American media, then we need to make sure independent media outlets continue to have the resources to operate. That’s why your donation to the Washington Monthly is so critical. 

At the Washington Monthly, we don’t seek the president’s favor, regardless of who sits in the Oval Office. We exist to help you understand Washington better and to help Washington govern better. In the Trump era, we don’t obsess about every bit of Trump rage-bait. We focus on what Trump is doing and how to fix what he’s broken. 

If Trump had his way, independent media would no longer exist. He has used personal intimidation of professional journalists, favorable treatment of propagandists masquerading as journalists, litigation, threats of lost broadcast licenses, and now interference in merger approvals to bend the Fourth Estate to his will.  

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No president likes criticism. However, Donald Trump may be the only president who has found a commercial way to suppress it.

In refusing to enjoin The Washington Post and The New York Times from publishing the Pentagon Papers, Justice Hugo Black, ever a guardian of our liberties, stated his position with characteristic eloquence: “In the First Amendment, the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors.”

Black missed the point. There is a path, however, where the press can serve the governors “by indirections, find directions out.” And it’s called money.

The televised media are in rapacious consolidation mode, and Trump is a necessary player in their achieving the objective. Trump, seasoned in making a deal, is willing if they muzzle his critics. He threatens to use the formerly independent agencies to block their expansion if they don’t.

Disney-owned ABC reminded us of this the other day when it decided to take its late-night show, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, off the air following conservative backlash to comments Kimmel made on air in the wake of the despicable murder of right-wing advocate Charlie Kirk. However you want to slice it, murder is the most heinous of crimes.

A network spokesperson did not say the show would be preempted “indefinitely.” The most prominent owner of ABC-affiliated stations, Nexstar, said earlier that Kimmel’s program would be replaced, linking the move to statements the late-night show host made about the prior week’s killing of Kirk.

“Mr. Kimmel’s comments about the death of Mr. Kirk are offensive and insensitive at a critical time in our national political discourse, and we do not believe they reflect the spectrum of opinions, views, or values of the local communities in which we are located,” Andrew Alford, president of Nexstar’s broadcasting division, wrote. Nexstar owns ABC stations in more than 30 markets.

Kimmel’s sin was that on his show, he said:

We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it. In between the finger-pointing, there was grieving. On Friday, the White House flew the flags at half-staff, which got some criticism, but on a human level, you can see how hard the president is taking this.

Kimmel then played a clip of Trump’s response to a reporter who asked how the president was holding up after Kirk’s death. Trump answered: “I think very well. And by the way, right there you see all the trucks, they just started construction of the new ballroom for the White House, which is something they’ve been trying to get, as you know, for about 150 years, and it’s gonna be a beauty.”

Tyler Robinson, the suspect in Kirk’s shooting, does not appear to be ideologically conservative or a supporter of President Donald Trump. Kimmel got it wrong there. According to charging documents from prosecutors released earlier this week, Robinson sent a message to his transgender roommate revealing the twisted motive that he “had enough of [Kirk’s] hatred.” The motive may not have been political at all. From all that appears, it was a crime of pathological passion.

Kimmel’s contract with ABC was set to expire next year, and there was speculation about whether it would be renewed, particularly after the announcement in July that CBS owner Paramount would cancel its top-rated late-night show, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

Trump had a dubious precedent. Nixon sought to pull broadcast licenses of affiliates of The Washington Post, which was threatening him on Watergate. As Nixon learned, removing the license of a national network for political reasons is no easy matter, not only because of the First Amendment but because there is no single license for a national television network. Licenses are granted to individual local stations, and ABC doesn’t even own most stations that broadcast its content across the country. It is highly unusual for any station’s license to be taken away for any reason, much less for a political vendetta.

But, in the last analysis, it’s all about money. Trump’s Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr criticized Kimmel earlier Wednesday, suggesting the federal agency could pull broadcast licenses owned by parent company Disney.

Carr said on a right-wing podcast that Kimmel’s words were part of a “concerted effort to try to lie to the American people” and that the FCC was “going to have remedies that we can look at.” “Frankly, when you see stuff like this,” he said, “I mean, look, we can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there will be additional work for the FCC ahead.”

Carr elaborated: “There’s actions we can take on licensed broadcasters. And frankly, I think that it’s really sort of past time that a lot of these licensed broadcasters themselves push back on Comcast and Disney and say…’ We’re not gonna run Kimmel anymore…because we licensed broadcasters are running the possibility of fines or license revocation from the FCC.’”

Sinclair Broadcast Group, which owns ABC affiliates in about 30 markets, including Washington, was soon to read the handwriting on the wall, criticizing Kimmel and calling upon the comedian to apologize to Kirk’s family.

The largest operator of ABC affiliates, Nexstar, said it would stop airing Kimmel’s show on its stations, and then ABC suspended it.

The FCC is set to review Nexstar’s proposed $6.2 billion acquisition of Tegna, another local television behemoth. That deal, which is expected to close by the second half of 2026, would also require the FCC to relax the national ownership cap that limits how many stations one company can own in the United States. Carr has suggested that he is willing to raise or eliminate the cap.

Trump has been spoiling for Kimmel. When CBS pulled Stephen Colbert off the air in July, Trump told reporters that comedians Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel would be “next. They’re going to be going. I hear they’re going to be going.”

On July 18, in a Truth Social post celebrating Colbert’s cancellation. “I hear Jimmy Kimmel is next. Has even less talent than Colbert!” His reaction to Kimmel’s firing last week bristled with relish: “Great News for America! The ratings challenged Jimmy Kimmel Show is CANCELLED. Congratulations to ABC for finally having the courage to do what had to be done. Kimmel has ZERO talent, and worse ratings than even Colbert, if that’s possible.” Having tasted blood, he then savored more: “That leaves Jimmy [Fallon] and Seth [Meyers], two total losers, on Fake News NBC.” Then, his coda, “Do it NBC!!!”

It’s not a bridge too far. CBS and ABC have “bowed and sued for grace with suppliant knee,” and NBC may be next.

Trump said Kimmel was fired because of poor ratings during a news conference on Sept. 18 in Buckinghamshire. In fact, Chris Hayes of MSNBC pointed out that Kimmel has one of the top late-night television shows, attracting younger viewers in the 18–49-year-old demographic. He delivers Trump-skewering monologues. His YouTube channel has more than 20 million subscribers.

ABC’s capitulation is likely to be seen by the network’s critics as another display of cowardice. In December, the company agreed to put $15 million toward Trump’s presidential library to settle a defamation lawsuit involving a statement by George Stephanopoulos about Trump that channeled one made by a federal judge.

Libel suits, that potent weapon against press freedoms, abound. Trump filed a $15 billion lawsuit against The New York Times for what he said was its “decades-long method of lying about your Favorite President (ME!), my family, business, the America First Movement, MAGA, and our Nation as a whole.” Trump has had it in for the Times for decades, and the Times has returned the compliment. This is but another foray by Trump to take a major media organization to court, following his lawsuits against ABC and CBS that led to favorable settlements and his action against The Wall Street Journal, arising out of the Epstein scandal. A judge tossed out the suit, and the Times is unlikely to cave if an appellate court overrules them. The Supreme Court precedent, New York Times v. Sullivan, argues that proving libel against a public official is a heavy lift. But Clarence Thomas and some of the other hard-right justices have suggested that the Court take another look at the Sullivan case. If they could overrule the super-precedent Roe v. Wade, Sullivan should be easy peasy.

George Orwell famously critiqued the misuse of the word “fascism” in his 1946 essay Politics and the English Language, stating it had “now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable.’” His concern was not that real fascism ceased to exist, but that the term was so carelessly and widely applied that it became a meaningless term of abuse. 

Trump has, through artifice, shredded the First Amendment, and this is more troubling than “not desirable.” Political satire on late-night television is one of the most effective counters to autocracy. Satire gets under Trump’s skin. The country’s Founders anticipated that someday someone might try to abridge press freedoms, so they gave us the First Amendment. What they did not expect was that in a more technologically advanced society, someone might get away with it.    

The post Jimmy Kimmel, Broadcast Media, and Free Speech 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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