If nothing else, the events of recent weeks have been clarifying. “Donald Trump is using the murder of Charlie Kirk, which was tragic, as a pretext for an authoritarian crackdown,” Brendan Nyhan, a Dartmouth political scientist who studies democratic erosion, said to me last week. The pressure that the chair of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, put on ABC and its parent company, Disney, to suspend the late-night comic Jimmy Kimmel was the most visible manifestation of this Trumpian initiative, but Carr himself made clear that the blitz isn’t over. “We’re not done yet,” he told CNBC, alluding to further changes in the media ecosystem.
There’s another clarifying takeaway: as long as Trump continues to abuse his executive power with the presumptive backing of the legislature and the Supreme Court, the titans of American capitalism can’t be relied on to push back against him. This was evident not only in Kimmel’s suspension but during the recent dinner at the White House attended by more than twenty tech moguls including Apple’s Tim Cook, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, and Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai, who took turns praising Trump and thanking him for his leadership.
Given the President’s long-standing support for corporate tax cuts and deregulation of industry, this pusillanimity is perhaps not so surprising. Still, during Trump’s first term, business leaders did occasionally mount some opposition. In the summer of 2017, after Trump said there were “very fine people” on both sides of a clash between white supremacists and counter-protesters at a rally in Charlottesville, many members of a White House business advisory council quit, and the body ended up collapsing. On January 6, 2021, the day of the Capitol insurrection, the Business Roundtable, a group that comprises C.E.O.s from major companies, issued a statement calling on the President to “put an end to the chaos and facilitate the peaceful transition of power.” But, these days, business leaders are largely staying silent as the second Trump Administration ramps up its attacks on the media and other targets.
Of course, some prominent entrepreneurs who are, or at least were, aligned with Trump are themselves media owners or investors. In December of last year, Elon Musk, the owner of X and a self-professed champion of free speech, remarked on his platform, “Legacy media must die.” The following month, shortly after Trump was inaugurated, the President said he’d like to see Larry Ellison, the co-founder of Oracle, buy the American operations of TikTok, the Chinese social-media app. According to news reports, Ellison, who is one of the world’s richest men, is now part of a consortium looking to do just that. Meanwhile, Skydance Media, a company run by Ellison’s son, David, recently merged with Paramount, the conglomerate that owns CBS, and is said to be considering a takeover bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns CNN. The elder Ellison helped finance the Paramount merger, and he certainly has the means to fund a run at Warner Bros. Discovery, too. “America could end up with two of its major social-media companies, plus CBS News and CNN, in the hands of Trump supporters,” Nyhan noted.
This outcome would resemble what happened in Hungary after Viktor Orbán, another nationalist strongman, was elected as Prime Minister, in 2010. “Trump is really following Orbán on this one because Orbán pressured media company owners by threatening their other businesses and their bottom lines, harassed them with libel actions, and arranged to have his friends buy up troublesome media outlets that did not comply,” Kim Lane Scheppele, a professor of sociology and international affairs at Princeton who has taught at two universities in Budapest, wrote to me, in an e-mail. In a subsequent phone conversation, Scheppele pointed to Orbán’s effort to gut the state broadcaster and to place his allies on the national media board, which is meant to insure political neutrality in state-run outlets. Orbán also exerted control over the country’s newspaper industry, which had previously been a vibrant one, with at least nine print titles in Budapest alone. Scheppele recounted how the Hungarian leader exploited the fact that the newspapers were heavily dependent on government advertising. He cut this financial lifeline, and then his associates bought some of the papers and flipped their politics. “He left a few small liberal publications in Budapest so he could point to them and say, ‘Hey, I’m not a dictator,’ ” Scheppele said. “But, when you get outside the capital, the media is pro-Orbán all the way down.”
Things haven’t gone that far in the U.S., but Scheppele noted that Trump, like Orbán, is weaponizing the central government’s financial and regulatory power, which, in the hands of a vengeful man, can be a fearsome prospect. “The universities are caving to him because they realize that the Administration has the ability to cripple them financially,” Scheppele commented. “Ditto the law firms. Ditto the media companies.”
ABC’s decision to suspend a late-night comic over a few throwaway comments he made in the wake of Kirk’s murder follows a string of similarly submissive moves in the industry. This past December, ABC agreed to donate fifteen million dollars to Trump’s Presidential library to settle a defamation lawsuit he brought against one of the network’s hosts, George Stephanopoulos, for on-air comments Stephanopoulos made regarding the E. Jean Carroll verdict. In July, Paramount reached a sixteen-million-dollar settlement in another Trump lawsuit, which involved the CBS News show “60 Minutes.” That same month, CBS announced its plans to cancel “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” which frequently lampooned Trump. At the time, CBS’s parent company, Paramount, was looking to complete its merger with Skydance, which required approval from Trump’s F.C.C. Subsequently, the deal went through.
After Kimmel’s statements on Kirk, Disney, which was already facing an F.C.C. investigation into its diversity practices, came under renewed pressure. Last Wednesday, on a conservative podcast, Carr, the F.C.C. chair, said Kimmel’s remarks were a “very, very serious issue for Disney,” and that it was time for the owners of local television stations that broadcast the comedian’s show to “step up.” Hours later, Nexstar Media Group, a company that owns more than twenty local television stations affiliated with the ABC network, announced that these stations would stop airing Kimmel’s show indefinitely—a step that upped the commercial threat to ABC and Disney’s C.E.O., Bob Iger. Nexstar had an urgent reason to curry favor with the F.C.C.: it’s looking to buy out one of its competitors, and that deal needs the agency’s approval.