Trump’s Chilling Threat After Harris Interview Catches the FCC’s Eye

Donald Trump’s call for CBS’s broadcast license to be revoked has quickly drawn a rebuke from the chair of the Federal Communications Commission.

“While repeated attacks against broadcast stations by the former President may now be familiar, these threats against free speech are serious and should not be ignored. ​​As I’ve said before, the First Amendment is a cornerstone of our democracy. The FCC does not and will not revoke licenses for broadcast stations simply because a political candidate disagrees with or dislikes content or coverage,” said Jessica Rosenworcel in a statement on Thursday.

Trump has been complaining all week about Vice President Kamala Harris’s interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes Sunday. On Thursday, he escalated his attacks, calling for the network’s broadcast license to be revoked and for Harris to drop out of the presidential race because of an edited teaser clip used by the network.

“TAKE AWAY THE CBS LICENSE. Election Interference. She is a Moron, and the Fake News Media wants to hide that fact. An UNPRECEDENTED SCANDAL!!! The Dems got them to do this and should be forced to concede the Election? WOW!” Trump posted on Truth Social Thursday morning, and then repeated the demand in remarks to the Detroit Economic Club later in the day.

The former president and convicted felon bucked a 56-year tradition by backing out of an interview with 60 Minutes, with his campaign giving conflicting excuses, including that he didn’t want to be fact-checked. The show exposed each and every one of those excuses on Sunday, giving him a brutal fact-check anyway.

Trump has long complained about news networks that slight him. After his presidential debate with Harris on ABC last month, he complained that it was rigged and called for that network’s broadcast license to be revoked. It’s pretty clear that Trump is trying not only to undermine critical coverage of himself but to intimidate news networks into giving him positive coverage. In his view, all media outlets should fawn over him like Fox News, even to the point of giving him favorable edits.

Kamala Harris’s campaign didn’t hold back Thursday after Donald Trump had yet another major meltdown about not debating the vice president.

Fox News announced Wednesday that it had sent both candidates letters inviting them to an end-of-October debate. Hours later, Trump posted a wild, all-caps rant to Truth Social, making it clear he has no intention of returning to the debate stage.

“I WON THE LAST TWO DEBATES, ONE WITH CROOKED JOE, THE OTHER WITH LYIN’ KAMALA,” Trump wrote.

“I ACCEPTED THE FOX-NEWS INVITATION TO DEBATE KAMALA ON SEPTEMBER 4TH, BUT SHE TURNED IT DOWN,” Trump ranted.

In reality, Trump has offered several excuses as to why there was no need for him to debate Harris again. Harris had previously accepted CNN’s invitation to appear in another presidential debate on October 23, but Trump claimed that it was “too late” for another presidential debate because early voting had already begun in some states.

The Republican nominee has also compared himself to a fighter with nothing left to prove, a claim he repeated in his rant Wednesday.

“THE FIRST THING A PRIZEFIGHTER DOES WHEN HE LOSES A FIGHT IS SAY THAT HE ‘DEMANDS A REMATCH.’ IT IS VERY LATE IN THE PROCESS, VOTING HAS ALREADY BEGUN—THERE WILL BE NO REMATCH! BESIDES, KAMALA STATED CLEARLY, YESTERDAY, THAT SHE WOULD NOT DO ANYTHING DIFFERENT THAN JOE BIDEN, SO THERE IS NOTHING TO DEBATE,” Trump fumed.

Trump also shoehorned another outlandish claim into his winding social media tirade: “I AM ALSO LEADING IN THE POLLS, WITH THE LEAD GETTING BIGGER BY THE DAY—AND LEADING IN ALL SWING STATES.”

A national New York Times/Siena College poll published Tuesday found that Harris held a slim lead over Trump. In swing states, Harris and Trump are in a dead heat, mostly within the margin of error, according to Emerson College Polling. Trump, of course, reportedly only checks the conservative-leaning Rasmussen Reports polls, which found that he had a two-point lead over Harris.

After Trump turned down Fox News’s debate offer, Harris’s campaign announced that she had accepted an invitation to do a CNN town hall on October 23.

In a statement Thursday, Harris’s campaign co-chair Jen O’Malley Dillon tore into Trump over his unwillingness to appear onstage with his opponent.

“After backing out of 60 Minutes and doing 27 straight interviews with conservative media, unfortunately it is clear Trump would rather cocoon himself in safe spaces and avoid real questions about his harmful plans and failed divisive leadership,” O’Malley said. “Trump fears another debate where Vice President Harris would hold him accountable in front of tens of millions of Americans.”

“Trump may want to hide from the voters, but Vice President Harris welcomes the opportunity to share her vision for a New Way Forward for the country. She is happy to accept CNN’s invitation for a live, televised town hall on October 23 in Pennsylvania.”

Georgia’s slate of pro-Trump election regulations are barreling forward, but their implementation is causing statewide problems that threaten to actually undermine the security of Georgia’s voting process.

With just 26 days until the election, finding people to actually enforce the new regulations remains one of the state’s biggest challenges, NOTUS reported Thursday.

“We actually, just yesterday, had a manager and an assistant manager quit,” Anne Dover, the election director in Cherokee County, told the outlet. “So yeah, it’s kind of challenging.”

Some of the new regulations—which passed with a 3–2 election board vote along MAGA lines and was fueled by a “wishlist” of documents from conservative county election officials—include handing county boards the authority to delay the certification of election results. The rules also mandate investigations into every vote count inconsistency, and, perhaps most troubling for the staffing problem, order all votes to be hand-counted after they’re electronically scanned.

“People don’t want to participate or even work in elections,” Cathy Hagans, the election director of Washington County, told NOTUS, which noted that finding people to hand-count ballots at the end of what will be an excruciatingly long day has become a serious concern for counties across the Peach State.

“Around here, in a little small town, it’s hard to recruit poll workers,” Hagans said.

On Wednesday, local Democrats lost their legal challenge against the swath of new “election integrity” rules, with a judge dismissing their effort to force Georgia Governor Brian Kemp to open an ethics investigation into the committee that crafted the regulations.

The new election certification rules set the stage for bedlam come November, especially considering that at least 70 election officials across 16 counties in key swing states, including Georgia, have been identified as pro-Trump election deniers.

Donald Trump praised the MAGA members of Georgia’s election board days before the August vote, describing Janice Johnston, Rick Jeffares, and Janelle King as “pit bulls fighting for victory.”

According to the state election board’s website, the body is “entrusted with a variety of responsibilities and authority to protect all Georgians’ right to cast a ballot.”

Georgia has had the largest number of certification refusals since 2020 of anywhere in the country. The five-person board has been accused of other ethics violations, including one instance in which its Trump-friendly majority failed to give proper notice to their Democratic colleagues about a meeting that they used to advance changes to state election rules.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on Thursday got angry at a reporter who asked him about a Wall Street analyst’s estimate that Hurricane Milton could cost the state over $50 billion.

“How the hell would a Wall Street analyst be able to know? It’s been dark all day. What, you just going to know that you’re gonna do? I mean, give me a break on some of this stuff,” DeSantis said.

“I’m not saying there’s not going to be damage, there will be, [Hurricane Milton] cut across the state in a way that Helene did not,” DeSantis added.

Earlier this week, the discussion on Wall Street estimated the hurricane as having a “mid-double-digit billion dollar loss.” DeSantis downplayed the storm’s impact compared to Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Ian in 2022, while noting that certain areas did suffer heavy damage.

“In terms of just right now, the morning after, if I think back to, like, Hurricane Ian, I don’t think that you’re looking at similar amount of damage to Ian, and then, with Helene, there may end up being more overall damage, there may not, I don’t know, but definitely the surge did not reach Helene levels,” DeSantis added.

Earlier this week, DeSantis refused to speak on the phone with Kamala Harris, saying such an overture “seemed political.” The vice president called out the Florida governor for engaging in “political gamesmanship instead of doing the job that you took an oath to do, which is to put the people first.”

DeSantis does seem to be keeping politics in mind in his response to the storm, staying away from outright praising the Biden administration’s help even as he boasts of being able to “leverage any resources available to us.” But it’s puzzling as to why he would get upset at a reporter for a legitimate question regarding the financial impact of the hurricane.

After spending days calling for CBS to release a full transcript of Vice President Kamala Harris’s interview on 60 Minutes, Donald Trump woke up bright and early Thursday with a new idea: leverage the public appearance as a reason to call for the Democratic presidential nominee’s concession in the race.

“A giant Fake News Scam by CBS & 60 Minutes,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Her REAL ANSWER WAS CRAZY, OR DUMB, so they actually REPLACED it with another answer in order to save her or, at least, make her look better.”

“A FAKE NEWS SCAM, which is totally illegal,” he continued, baselessly claiming that a network choosing to make its own edits is akin to a crime. “TAKE AWAY THE CBS LICENSE. Election Interference. She is a Moron, and the Fake News Media wants to hide that fact. An UNPRECEDENTED SCANDAL!!! The Dems got them to do this and should be forced to concede the Election? WOW!”

Attached to the post was a clip of Harris’s interview on the show compared to a teaser clip distributed by the network. The teaser clip spliced a section of another answer the vice president gave to a question related to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Between the edited and unedited version of Harris’s response to the original question, the two answers are starkly different.

But ultimately, that choice was not Harris’s.

“We do not control CBS’s production decisions and refer questions to CBS,” an unidentified aide for the Harris campaign said in a statement to Variety.

And, at minimum, at least the vice president actually engaged in the sit-down interview with the legacy network. During its Monday night broadcast, CBS News’s Scott Pelley said that Trump backed out of his own scheduled interview with 60 Minutes at the last minute—the first time a presidential candidate had rebuffed the long-standing October tradition since 1968—revealing that the Trump campaign had “complained that we would fact-check the interview.”

“We fact-check every story,” Pelley said.

Meanwhile, Trump has threatened to pull the broadcast licenses of major networks when he disagrees with their coverage of himself or his campaign. But that doesn’t mean his perspective on editing and censorship is buttoned up: Trump has enjoyed more than his share of selectively edited interviews on Fox, some of which have gone so far as to swap out his answers when discussing heavy topics such as serial sex offender and human trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.