Sooner or later, Republicans will learn to regret the precedents they’re enabling today.
Sooner or later, Republicans will learn to regret the precedents they’re enabling today.
P erhaps it’s because the president has quarantined himself on his own proprietary social-media platform. Maybe it’s because his posts on that venue rarely reflect his administration’s policies. Regardless, in Donald Trump’s second term, it has become easier to ignore his late-night online musings.
Just last night, for example, the president typed out a missive in which he called for the prosecution of Beyoncé Knowles, Oprah Winfrey, and Al Sharpton based on his claim that they were paid enormous sums by the Kamala Harris campaign for their support — expenses he claims were “incorrectly stated in the books” and “illegal.” Trump has said as much before. In fact, he’s previously leveled that same accusation against Bruce Springsteen and U2 frontman Bono, even though the latter didn’t even endorse Harris in 2024.
The president’s obsession with his political adversaries in media and entertainment may not be of interest to the general public, but his subordinates appear to hang on his every word. Indeed, there may be no better way to earn his attention than to try to give heft to the threadbare conspiracy theories he retails or to fix a target onto the backs of his opponents. We’ve seen indications of that from a variety of administration officials, but the Federal Communications Commission is taking that mandate to an extreme.
The FCC and its commissioner, Brendan Carr, are increasingly focused on the content produced by media entities and personalities — specifically, the sort that the Trump administration finds politically disagreeable — in what appears to be an intimidation campaign.
Last week, Carr was asked by Fox News anchor Bill Hemmer whether ABC’s “The View is now in the crosshairs of this administration.” The question arose when Trump warned that the program could be “next to be pulled off the air” after co-host Joy Behar accused the president of being “jealous” of Barack Obama (remarks that led the White House to declare Behar an “irrelevant loser”).
The very premise is one that a bureaucrat with a sense of civic propriety should reject outright. But Carr did not. “Look, it’s entirely possible that there’s issues over there,” he speculated. “And stepping back, this broader dynamic, once President Trump has exposed these media gatekeepers and smashed this façade, there’s a lot of consequences. I think the consequences of that aren’t quite finished.”
Carr later clarified that what he meant by “consequences” was declining ratings and lower trust in anti-Trump media venues, but broadcast professionals were not convinced. “As much as it would be nice to think about, like, ‘Oh, The View’s gonna go away. Whew, that sounds nice!’ We also have to consider this isn’t the only administration that’s going to be there forever,” said Fox News Channel senior correspondent Alicia Acuna in a wise and candid admonition.
“A tool that can be used by this administration can very well be used by the next,” she continued. “And if they were able to do away with The View, they could very well — the next administration that comes in that doesn’t like Fox — could do the same.” Republicans would do well to heed Acuna’s warning and consider that the precedents Trump’s FCC are establishing could be trained against conservatives.
The View isn’t the only venue that has found itself in the administration’s sights over content.
“Comcast outlets spent days misleading the American public,” Carr wrote in April of the firm that owns NBC News. He accused the outlet of broadcasting inaccurate — really, incomplete — information about one of the administration’s deportation targets: Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whom the administration admitted it accidentally deported to El Salvador because of a clerical error (he was belatedly repatriated to the U.S. to face a proper deportation procedure). “News distortion doesn’t cut it,” Carr continued. Comcast “knows that federal law requires its licensed operations to serve the public interest.”
Carr’s threats conspicuously coincided with a Trump Truth Social post in which the president warned of lawsuits against NBC News and MSNBC over its coverage choices. That’s hardly an idle threat. ABC News, for example, agreed to pay $15 million to the president after anchor George Stephanopoulos incorrectly accused the president of having been found “liable for rape” in the case against him brought by the author E. Jean Carrol (the jury found Trump “liable for sexual abuse” but “not liable for rape”). Stephanopoulos’s error might have been egregious, even intentional, but CBS’s offense was far less clear.
CBS News’s parent company, Paramount Global, paid the president $16 million to settle the claim that it had engaged in some impropriety after 60 Minutes broadcast an interview with Kamala Harris it claims to have edited for time. Trump and his supporters claimed that CBS was hiding something. When CBS released the full, unedited interview with Harris, many MAGA pundits contended that the vice president’s responses were trimmed to hide her penchant for “word salad” responses. That is a subjective judgement that neither the FCC commissioner nor the president should be adjudicating.
The president’s critics are right to worry that CBS’s settlement with the president’s personal attorneys is a sop to power — a small price to pay if Paramount hopes to avoid raising the ire of federal regulators, who might use their authority to mete out vengeance.
Carr doesn’t seem interested in tamping down the suggestion that the president, in both his personal capacity and as the head of the executive branch, aims to intimidate Trump-critical broadcasters.
“One of the things they’re going to have to do is put an ombudsman in place for two years,” Carr said of CBS during an interview with Newsmax host Greg Kelly. “So, basically, a bias monitor that will report directly to the president.” Once again, Carr spoke imprecisely. He meant the president of Paramount, not of the United States. Nevertheless, the “bias monitor” scheme seems to have been the FCC’s idea — a condition that would help facilitate its approval of a proposed merger between Paramount and Skydance Media.
Nor is Carr content with the FCC’s limited jurisdiction over just the nation’s electromagnetic spectrum. “The social media companies got more power over more speech than any institution in history,” Carr warned back in February. “And I think they’re abusing that power. I think it’s appropriate for the FCC to say, let’s take another look at Section 230.” That section of the Communications Act, which allows social-media firms to moderate user speech and content as they see fit, has long bothered those on the right who would wield state power to promote speech they like and discourage what they don’t. “The FCC should issue an order that interprets Section 230 in a way that eliminates the expansive, non-textual immunities that courts have read into the statute,” Carr wrote for the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025.”
If nothing else, Carr seems set on raising the costs that media companies invite by broadcasting content that cuts against the president’s political interests. That is an ugly thing to write of any American regulatory agency chair, much less a conservative Republican who is — or, at least, should be — properly wary of state power.
Acuna is right to worry that progressives will one day wield the weapons that Trump and company are fashioning for use in the culture wars against the right. Conservatives who defend these actions sacrifice principle to political expediency, and perhaps in service of nothing loftier than the preservation of the president’s public image. Sooner or later, Republicans will learn to regret the precedents they’re enabling today. After three more years of this, the backlash they are courting may not be so easily contained.