The following is a lightly edited transcript of the March 23 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Donald Trump is very angry with the news media for not treating his war against Iran as a series of world-historical triumphs. So he’s got his Federal Communications Commission chairman, Brendan Carr, threatening to use government power against media companies to keep them in line. Trump just let out a rambling tirade about this, hailing Carr’s work and in effect praising him for undertaking grotesque abuses of power.
Truthfully, Trump’s whole authoritarian project would not be possible without underlings like Carr to help advance it for him. So what are the prospects for accountability for this sort of public misconduct later? We’re talking about this with New Republic staff writer Matt Ford, who has a great new piece laying out what a real reckoning for Trump and his accomplices should look like after this is all over. Matt, great to have you on.
Matt Ford: Thanks for having me.
Sargent: Okay, so this started when FCC Chair Brendan Carr put out a tweet recently threatening broadcasters. He said they must course-correct or potentially not get their broadcast licenses renewed. He insisted that the law dictates that they must operate in the public interest or lose their licenses.
This not coincidentally came right after Trump attacked the media coverage of his war. Matt, this is confusing, but it’s really the local networks that have licenses—the big companies do have to worry about the locals losing licenses. But can you explain the basic legal case that Brendan Carr thinks he’s making here and why it’s so absurd?
Ford: Sure. I mean, what he’s arguing here is that he will use the FCC’s power to regulate the airwaves to block license renewals for broadcast stations. There’s really no precedent for that in American history—certainly not for the censorious nature of what he’s calling for. But like you say, I mean, it’s a common misconception that ABC, NBC, Fox actually own these stations themselves. What they are instead are affiliates. And the stations are often owned by other companies—companies like Sinclair, companies like Nexstar. They are the ones who own them, and each of these licenses is held by an individual station. A station in New York City has a different one than a station in, you know, Albany or Washington, D.C., or Boston. So it would be a process to go and revoke these licenses one by one—that’s the bare mechanics.
We can get into the First Amendment thing a bit later, but that’s the structural thing about how this works. It’s not as simple as rolling up to ABC and saying, hey, you air Jimmy Kimmel too many times—hand over your license. In the law, there is a public interest clause, but that’s sort of been interpreted expansively. I’m not aware of any cases where the FCC has really gone to the mat to try and deny a license on the grounds that it would be against the public interest. This is typically a much more pro forma process. And for Carr, it would introduce a lot of regulatory and legal uncertainty into a thing that’s been pretty normalized over the years.
Sargent: Well, I want to get into that in a bit—about the public interest. But first, let’s listen to Trump talk about Brendan Carr for a little bit.
Donald Trump (voiceover):
I also want to thank FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, perhaps the most powerful man in this room. You are doing some job. He’s trying to keep the fake news—trying to make the fake news real and respect it again—which is not an easy job, but you’re doing a really amazing job. First time that’s happened in 25 years. So I congratulate you, and everybody in the room, everybody in this whole country is watching what you’re doing and we appreciate it.
Sargent: Matt, that’s quite something. Everybody in this whole country supports government bullying of networks to turn them into propaganda outlets on Trump’s behalf, according to Trump. But seriously—note how Trump says Carr is doing a great job. Thing is, as far as I can tell, none of his threats have resulted in any real changes in coverage or any licenses lost, have they?
Ford: No, and I think we’ve seen that from the Jimmy Kimmel example. What he has as FCC chair is a powerful perch—he can say things that get public attention and that draw a lot of scrutiny. But directly, he doesn’t have much power to do anything with the flip of a switch. And the Jimmy Kimmel example is a great example of that for another reason: it wasn’t even him that ordered Jimmy Kimmel off the air, per se. He didn’t go down to the Walt Disney Company and say, yank this guy off the stations.
The affiliates like Sinclair declined to broadcast it, and they eventually relented amid public pressure and a lot of the backlash. So Carr can’t really do what he’s doing without the cooperation of the corporations that control these stations on an individual level.
Sargent: So let’s listen to a bit more of Trump on this. Here he’s explaining why the news organizations are not operating in the public interest.
Donald Trump (voiceover):
We have to have a press that’s respected. When you can win an election where they say that I got 94 percent bad press—think of it, the other side got 94 percent good press—when they can get 94 percent and you win in a landslide, that means the press is not respected. People have no confidence. So you’re doing a fantastic job.
Sargent: So that’s really something. First, it isn’t true that Trump was opposed by the media to the degree that he claims. And second, it’s just a really insane way to determine whether the media is trusted or not. What do you make of that?
Ford: I mean, it’s legally and constitutionally gibberish. The media is not supposed to support the president. Whether it opposes the president is up to the media, but this idea that that’s the spectrum on which the media is judged is simply not true. The media is there to present information—especially the news media. And the First Amendment protects that to a very significant degree, especially when the government tries to compel broadcast networks and broadcast affiliates to not present certain viewpoints.
So what Trump is arguing for here is something that really has no basis in American law or constitutional practice.
Sargent: It’s unclear exactly what he’s arguing for. Is it basically that Brendan Carr needs to go out and yank the licenses of any affiliates of networks that don’t engage in propaganda about his war? Is that what he’s saying?
Ford: I mean, it appears to be. And, you know, it goes back to this mentality we’ve seen throughout Trump’s second term, where he’s acting like he sort of owns the country now—that all these institutions, Harvard, TV networks, newspapers, everything under the sun is supposed to answer to him personally, that he’s in charge of it. That’s not really how the country works. Even if you take an expansive view of presidential powers, there’s no reason that ABC or NBC or CBS should care what Trump says, unless of course they do something defamatory—a case that he would probably lose.
Sargent: Well, I think there’s a paradox at work here as well, which is that Brendan Carr can’t really accomplish anything real with his threats. Yet at the same time, the mere threats themselves constitute serious abuses of power. I mean, is Brendan Carr allowed by law to openly threaten to revoke the licenses—or to actually revoke the licenses—of news organizations to punish them for not being sufficiently praiseworthy of Trump? Is that allowed?
Ford: It’s a tricky question because the First Amendment case law that we have doesn’t really imagine something like this. We don’t really have many examples in modern American history, especially, of a president or his underlings applying this pressure to media outlets in ways that would violate the First Amendment. But at the same time, every indication is that the answer is no.
The First Amendment gives broadcasters broad latitude to air programs that are political in nature, that are social in nature, that express certain viewpoints and certain opinions. The idea that the president can just order them—or that the FCC even can just order them—not to do that would run into severe legal trouble if it were ever tested in a court of law. And I think that goes back to what we were saying earlier. There’s a reason that Carr isn’t actually trying to put pen to paper on any of this—I think it’s because he knows he would lose in court.
Sargent: Yes, that’s a really fascinating dimension to it. It’s the threats themselves in the public arena that are the thing—it’s not the actual carrying them out in any sense. I want to ask you about what the term “public interest” actually means in legal terms. Trump seems to be openly conflating the public interest with what’s good for Trump. Brendan Carr, the chair of the FCC, also seems to be conflating the public interest with what’s good for Trump. And yet the gray area arises because I guess Brendan Carr could say something like, okay, well, you know, we won the election, Trump entrusted me with this position of authority, I’m determining what’s in the public interest and what isn’t, right?
I mean, isn’t that the essence of it? What does “serve the public interest” actually mean in legal terms here?
Ford: Well, the FCC has traditionally used it in sort of a more classically civic sense. You know, a local station is supposed to air things that are in the local interest. It’s supposed to provide valuable information. It’s supposed to provide useful programming—not simply defamatory information, not simply obscene or unlawful information, not things inciting imminent lawless action, things of that nature. It’s supposed to be a civic good—it’s supposed to inform, enlighten, and enhance people’s quality of life. That gets conflated in what they’re talking about here, where the public interest is Trump’s interest.
They treat Trump as some sort of omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent avatar of the public will because they won one election by a few percentage points. And as a result, they believe that every other institution in America must bow to him. They do not believe in pluralism, they do not believe in multipolar democracy, they don’t believe in the autonomy of civic institutions. And I think this really reflects that—which is ironic because, you know, the term comes from a desire to have a lot of different viewpoints out there.
Sargent: Right. The core point you’re getting at is that Trump fundamentally differs from the constitutional model that you and I think is a good thing—in the sense that we think having a lot of independent institutions out there, and the push and pull and the tug of these institutions against each other and against power, produces things that are better than having everything controlled by one man. Trump does not think that. Brendan Carr does not think that. Isn’t that the essence of the difference?
Ford: Yeah, I would say so. I mean, I think the core theme of all American political philosophy is that power has to be divided—it can’t be concentrated in one man or one institution. That’s why we have three branches of government. That’s why we have 50 states and a federal government, neither of whom enjoy absolute power over the other. It’s why we have 100 senators and 435 lawmakers. We Americans inherently [distrust] any concentration of power, whether public or private, and our system of government is designed to forestall that.
Sargent: Well, let’s just imagine that something like this did go into court. Let’s just say Brendan Carr actually went ahead and started revoking the licenses of a bunch of affiliates of a network that said something not perfect about Trump’s war, right? So what it would then turn on is Brendan Carr declaring that the public interest had been violated—and is that how the legal battle would unfold?
Ford: Well, I want to start off with a caveat that it would depend heavily on the facts of a specific case. I don’t want to say with absolute certainty that courts would do one thing or another when they approach this, but I’ll give a broad answer that I think will help. The Roberts Court has done a lot of things that have frustrated and aggravated liberals—I could go on for the rest of this podcast about all the things they’ve done. And I have done that in past podcasts.
One thing that the Roberts Court has not done is really chip away at or undermine the nation’s First Amendment legal precedents—things that developed in the 1950s, the 1960s, and the 1970s under the Warren Court that protect freedom of speech and expression as we broadly know it today.
I think that’s important, because if we have to assume that’s going to be the baseline in future legal challenges, the Roberts Court will look at something and say, hey, this would be violating the First Amendment’s prohibition on viewpoint restrictions by the government. There are areas where the government can regulate speech—if something is obscene, if it’s imminently lawless or violent. But this wouldn’t fall into those exceptions. And so as long as they maintain that framework, I would be highly optimistic if I were a broadcaster staring down the barrel of a legal threat from Trump’s FCC.
Sargent: Brendan Carr really is abusing his powers by simply making these threats, even though he can’t actually carry them out. Like, he’s perverting the law to try to bully news organizations into functioning as propaganda outlets for Trump—or suppressing negative information about Trump—even though he can’t actually win it in court. And that’s a serious abuse of power. And Matt, one of the points you make in your great piece is that Trump’s subordinates have helped him push the country toward fascism and oligarchy.
It seems like what Carr is doing is a really good example of that, but we’re kind of in this situation where he can abuse his powers this way and just skirt running afoul of any laws himself, making accountability harder. Is there any hope for accountability for someone like Brendan Carr?
Ford: Well, I think that if there is, it will have to come from private actors—from society’s ability to shun and express its displeasure toward people who act in immoral and unconstitutional ways. Certainly nothing that I’ve seen has been linked to any allegations of criminal activity. You never know with this administration—I’ll just say that I haven’t seen any such allegations seriously made yet.
But I think one area of the law where intervention might be justified is when it comes to antitrust regulation. One of the key mechanisms that the Trump administration has used to support and buoy favorable media outlets—places like Paramount, run by the Ellisons, who also now own CBS News, and who are trying to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery; places like Sinclair—what they’ve tried to do is use their ability to approve or disapprove mergers to steer them in a friendly direction. And that knife cuts both ways.
I think that if the merger is completed by the time the next Democratic president takes over, there is a strong chance you could see a challenge on antitrust grounds to the combined Ellison media empire for controlling two of America’s major film studios, a whole raft of broadcast networks, CNN, CBS, things like that. I think you could see a strong antitrust case made there. I know that they’re currently seeking regulatory approval from the Justice Department—they’ll have to seek regulatory approval, I believe, in the European Union as well. So that’s one avenue that can be used to ensure that people who participated in abuses of power are held accountable.
Sargent: Well, let’s talk about the big picture that you laid out in your piece. I mean, what we’re seeing here from Trump and Brendan Carr is like an Orbanization of the news media, sort of a similar playbook that other dictators and authoritarians have used, in which they leverage state power in whatever way they can to try to control whatever institution is in their sights at any moment. You did a sort of 30,000-foot view of how all this stuff is moving the country into fascism and oligarchy, and talked about the ways Trump can be held accountable down the line. But it looks to me like the accomplices are not going to be held accountable, and that’s a pretty serious problem. Is it not?
Ford: It is. And I will say that it depends on the accomplice. If I were Greg Bovino or some of the other people at CBP or ICE, if I was former Secretary Kristi Noem, or if I was nominee Markwayne Mullin, who’s about to take over that hornet’s nest as well, I would certainly worry about legal ramifications that could arise. I think one thing that we have to note here is that because of the presidential immunity decision, short of a sudden change in the Supreme Court’s membership—and perhaps size—that ruling isn’t going away. So that won’t be the primary vector for accountability in the next Democratic administration.
But as I pointed out, there are other ways to hold people accountable. Democrats are set to take over the House and potentially the Senate after this year’s midterms. Obviously a lot can happen between now and then, but if you’re a Democrat, you’re probably pretty happy about the trajectory of the polling.
Impeachment is a viable tool—it’s one that has a lot of power and a lot of promise, even if it doesn’t secure a conviction. I think that Carr will be a natural target for oversight. I will withhold judgment on impeachment. But certainly—we think about impeachment mainly in the presidential sense, because that’s what we’re most familiar with, but you can impeach any federal official.
Sargent: Just to circle back to kind of where we started—Donald Trump is out there praising Brendan Carr for doing this fabulous job of keeping the media in line, and yet at the same time, Brendan Carr is actually not doing anything except making a bunch of public threats that he never acts on, which may or may not be having some sort of chilling effect, but certainly aren’t having anything close to the effect that Trump would actually like. So here’s the question, Matt—
Ford: Can I just add one point there? I don’t think we fully touched on this, but Brendan Carr isn’t actually doing a good job of that at this moment. It’s not like CNN and NBC are reporting that the Strait of Hormuz is open and gas prices are going down and that Trump has won the greatest war in the history of wars and that Iran is a Jeffersonian democracy. They’re not doing that. Brendan Carr hasn’t managed to bully anyone into doing anything. And so I think that underscores Trump’s detachment from reality. I don’t know how Carr sits there and hears somebody say that he’s done all these great things that he hasn’t done. On some level, that has to create some sort of psychic fission in him.
Sargent: You’d think. But I think that actually gets at the point I want to close on, which is Carr isn’t actually having the impact Trump claims. And so it sort of seems like this is really about putting on a show for this weird kind of MAGA audience out there that wants to think Trump is knocking the heads of institutions together and owning the libs in every way and crushing every enemy in his path—especially the news media wants to believe that—but it isn’t actually happening. So is this just a show for those people? Or is the fact that Brendan Carr is making these threats such an abuse of power in and of itself that this actually is kind of part of this drift into authoritarianism that we’re talking about?
Ford: Well, you know, we could spend another hour on the sort of interplay between Trumpism and reality. In a lot of cases, there are very real consequences to what Trumpism is doing—I think of the siege of Minneapolis as the prime example of that. And in a lot of cases, they seem to just be making it up out of thin air. And I think a lot of this falls into the latter. But at the same time, just because it’s not real doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter.
It’s deeply concerning to see any public officials—people paid by our tax dollars to act in our best interest—carrying out these whims and trying to enforce some sort of ideological vision upon the rest of the country through these broadcast networks. I think it is important to note that they don’t seem to be succeeding, but the fact that they’re trying, and convincing themselves of that, is in and of itself very disturbing and very scandalous.
Sargent: I couldn’t agree more. You really captured the hall-of-mirrors atmosphere to all this. Folks, if you enjoyed this discussion, make sure to check out Matt Ford’s great piece—it’s called “There Will Be No Post-Presidential Peace for Donald Trump.” Matt, thanks for coming on. Great to talk to you.
Ford: Thanks so much for having me.