Trump Gets More Power as Warner Bros. Agrees to Merge With Paramount

Warner Bros. shareholders on Thursday approved the company’s $81 billion sale to Paramount, in a massive merger that will seriously alter the media landscape and give Trump-backed billionaire David Ellison even more control over multiple large outlets.

The deal will give Ellison’s Paramount Skydance—the parent company of CBS News, Paramount Pictures, BET, MTV, Nickelodeon, and more—ownership of HBO and HBO Max, Warner Bros.’ movie and TV studios, DC, CNN, TBS, TNT, HGTV and Discovery+.

David Ellison is the son of Larry Ellison, a Trump supporter, staunch Zionist, and billionaire founder of Oracle, which holds a significant stake in TikTok’s U.S. operations. The father-son duo have been outspoken about their desire to regulate media narratives via TikTok, CBS, and now, CNN.

The merger has been supported by both the Trump administration and the pro-Israel right for the duration of negotiations.

In November, President Trump and Larry Ellison met to discuss which CNN hosts to fire if Ellison acquired the media company in the merger. And just last month, after CNN reported the Trump administration underestimated how the war on Iran would impact the Strait of Hormuz, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth proclaimed, “the sooner David Ellison takes over, the better.”

Media literacy and awareness will become all the more crucial as the deal becomes official, and the Ellison influence spreads from TikTok and CBS to HBO, CNN, and even HGTV.

“A handful of Trump-aligned billionaires are trying to seize control of what you watch and charge you whatever price they want,” Senator Elizabeth Warren said of the merger in February. “With the cloud of corruption looming over Trump’s Department of Justice, it’ll be up to the American people to speak up and state attorneys general to enforce the law.”

This story has been updated.

The Trump family is not ashamed to bilk taxpayers in order to line their pockets.

Eric Trump appeared on Fox Business Thursday morning, openly celebrating a $24 million defense contract his company won—through business with his father’s administration.

The 42-year-old financier appeared on Mornings with Maria to promote Foundation Industries, a technology company building futuristic warfare tools such as a humanoid robot that the company has claimed could replace soldiers on the frontline. Trump, Foundation’s chief strategic adviser and a major financier, appeared alongside company CEO Sankaet Pathak.

“We better be winning this race in the United States of America,” the younger Trump told Fox, referring to the international robotics industry. “We’re the greatest economy in the world.”

“When you go up and you interact with these robots, and they fist bump you, they high five you, follow your commands,” he continued. “You bring in A.I. autonomy, it’s going to change industry, it’s going to change military application, it’s going to change hospitality. The uses are unlimited, and I think it’s a very beautiful thing.”

Trump did not get into the details on how his company secured the multimillion government contract. Time magazine reported in March that Foundation had won research contracts from the U.S. Army, Navy, and Air Force that totalled $24 million, and had also obtained an SBIR Phase 3 award, which recognized Foundation as an approved supplier for military procurement.

Practically no one in the Republican Party or the president’s entourage has spoken up in opposition to the contract, despite the obvious conflict of interest.

Yet it’s far from the first time that the Trump family has attempted to use their power and political prestige to milk money from the public. Donald Trump’s long list of election year hustles included launching a remarkably ugly sneaker and a limited edition, $60 God Bless the USA Bible co-promoted by “God Bless the USA” singer Lee Greenwood that was ultimately forced on Oklahoma public schools by its MAGA superintendent.

The populist leader also took the parent company of his social media platform Truth Social public and stamped his name on a new cryptocurrency platform, headed by his sons Eric and Don Jr., that even the president’s allies criticized as a “huge mistake.”

The grift has continued into his presidency. The president’s defunct campaign emailed an offer to his supporters last month, claiming that they could buy into a “National Security Briefing Membership” that would deliver “unfiltered updates” on the Iran war to their inboxes. And Trump’s memecoin advertised an opportunity for investors to actually meet him in person at Mar-a-Lago on April 25, offering a face-to-face connection with the president for individuals willing and able to spend millions of dollars on his cryptocurrency.

Eric and his wife Lara are also scheduled to accompany Trump on an official state trip to China next month, although a Trump Organization spokesperson said Eric would be there in a “personal capacity,” not a professional one.

Democrats are once again having hard conversations about their party’s gerontocracy, in the wake of Representative David Scott’s death on Wednesday.

Scott was up for reelection, seeking his thirteenth term in Congress at 80 years old. His health issues on the job were first reported in 2022. He is now the eleventh Democratic member of Congress to die in office since 2020, and his death comes just a day after another House Democrat, Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, resigned over corruption allegations. One anonymous House member sounded off to Axios, calling the issue of age “a liability problem.”

“I will not be here at the age of 80 and I’m not quite sure why people feel that they should, but ... normal people are going to keep asking the question.... [It is] a liability problem.... We need every fucking vote we can get to stop this war in Iran, to ... protect the right for people to vote or to hold DHS accountable,” they said. “When we’re losing a vote because someone has to resign out of corruption or someone else has died ... people should really ask themselves: Are you absolutely sure you are the only person in your entire district who can represent your district right now to the best of your ability?

“Today is going to put a lot more pressure on my colleagues who are older, because the question is going to come back, ‘why are you running again?’” they continued.

“Chairman Scott’s death is incredibly sad for his family, loved ones, staff, and everyone he inspired,” former DNC vice chair and party youth leader David Hogg said. “But … it’s also terrible for his constituents, who could go months without representation, and the Democratic caucus, which is down another vote in Congress.”

Another House Democrat stated that Scott’s passing “reinforces the need for every member to really evaluate whether they have a full, hardy two years in them with the margins as close as they are”—referring to the slim 218–212 current GOP House majority.

Yet the party’s congressional senior citizens remain bullish, and perhaps foolishly so.

“If you want to volunteer to debate Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters, Steny Hoyer, Jim Clyburn, all past the age of 85, I welcome you to do so and suffer the consequences,” a confident Representative Emmanuel Cleaver, 81 and up for reelection, told Axios.

Cleaver is a former Congressional Black Caucus chair and current member, as Scott was. The CBC is one of the oldest, most ideologically moderate bodies in the party, and Scott’s death is again calling attention to that reality.

“It’s a bit uncouth to say, but of the 16 members of Congress who have died in office since 2020, half of them have been members of the Congressional Black Caucus, which makes up 11% of Congress,” Washington, D.C.-based X user Andrew Damitio posted. “There needs to be conversations there about handing power to the next generation.”

Senate Republicans held a budget reconciliation “vote-a-rama” in the wee hours of the night to kickstart their Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol funding process. The controversial move, which wrapped up just after 3:30 a.m. on Thursday, resulted in a 50–48 vote in their favor, with zero Democrats supporting and Senators Rand Paul and Lisa Murkowski breaking rank.

“We have a multistep process ahead of us, but at the end, Republicans will have helped ensure that America’s borders are secure and prevented Democrats from defunding these important agencies,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune said.

The measure still has to pass through the House, but if adopted as is, it would give ICE and Border Patrol up to $70 billion through the end of Trump’s term in 2029. While it would end the partial shutdown of Homeland Security, it would also fund the most controversial branches of the department following national outrage over the killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minneapolis.

“America, this is what the Republicans are fighting for,” Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said on the floor of the Senate. “To maintain two unchecked rogue agencies that are dreaded in all corners of the country instead of reducing your health care costs, your housing costs, your grocery costs, your gas costs.”

A Republican representative in New Jersey facing a tough reelection fight is nowhere to be found.

Representative Tom Kean Jr. represents the Garden State’s 7th district, its most divided. President Trump carried it by one point in 2024, and Democratic Governor Mikie Sherrill won it by two points last year. But for more than a month, Kean hasn’t been in Washington, missing almost 50 roll call votes. The last time he cast a vote was March 5.

The state’s two other Republicans in Congress, Representatives Chris Smith and Jeff Van Drew, have tried to call and text him to no avail, with Van Drew telling Politico it’s been “radio silence.” New York Republicans also told the publication they’ve been getting the same results. Fellow Republican Representative Don Bacon didn’t even know Kean was missing until he tried to find him on the House floor Tuesday.

“I was looking for him,” Bacon said Wednesday. “I didn’t know it was that long.”

Kean’s staff told Politico the 57-year-old congressman is having health issues, but wouldn’t elaborate.

“I know the congressman and his family appreciate all of the well wishes and support,” a consultant for Kean, Harrison Neely, said. “Please know that he will be back on a regular full schedule very soon.”

Kean’s absence comes at a tough time for Republicans, as Trump’s unpopularity has led to election losses across the country in the past year, including in New Jersey. In Kean’s district, the Trump administration is opening an immigrant detention facility and has also canceled funding for an infrastructure project for the state’s commuters, neither of which help his reelection prospects. Amid worries about Kean’s health, his congressional seat is in a very precarious position.

Dr. Oz waved off national concerns Wednesday about Donald Trump’s health, claiming that the president is “healthy as a bull.”

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services administrator told the New York Post podcast that Trump’s “success to longevity as well as good health is his incredible passion for what he is doing.”

Oz further claimed that Trump’s testosterone was “great,” recalling an instance in which Trump was on his daytime TV show and shared what the president claimed was a doctor’s note. “The one problem was his weight, which to this day he gives me a hard time about,” Oz said.

But America is not convinced. Trump’s decision to drag the country into another popular Middle East war, his extreme threats to annihilate Iranian civilization, and his recent public errors, discoloration on his skin, repeatedly falling asleep during critical meetings, inability to maintain his focus, and amnesia on even the most basic details have collectively alarmed the public regarding the 79-year-old’s mental health and his continued aptitude for the country’s biggest job.

Just last week, Trump forgot when Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, and that one of his most fervent GOP critics—North Carolina Republican Thom Tillis—is still in the Senate. Trump also opted to go to a UFC tournament instead of overseeing his administration’s peace talks with Iran, and DoorDashed McDonalds to the Oval Office in a P.R. stunt that even he retroactively admitted was “tacky.”

Even his own advisers have anonymously admitted that Trump’s extreme mood swings have derailed peace talks with Iran.

His behavior has elicited a cultural shift on the ideological left and right. A group of MAGA thought leaders—including Alex Jones, Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, and Megyn Kelly—have denounced Trump’s recent behavior as it relates to the war in Iran. Trump’s response, which involved completely disavowing his political acolytes, drove a deeper wedge in his movement.

Liberal lawmakers, meanwhile, have invoked the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, formally challenging Trump’s mental acuity. Fifty House Democrats have filed legislation to create a commission that could shove Trump out of power and install Vice President JD Vance as his replacement.

Other Democrats have called for the president to have his brain tested by the end of the month. House Judiciary Committee ranking member Jamie Raskin demanded that Trump undergo a cognitive test by April 25, citing Trump’s escalating aggression toward Iran.

Meanwhile, the majority of the voting public has assessed the situation and determined that the House should impeach Trump. That statistic includes one in five of his own supporters, according to a poll published Wednesday by Strength in Numbers.

Republicans have found a new way to conduct the Epstein investigation. Democrats insist it’s just another attempt to sweep the whole scandal under the rug.

Democrats on the House Oversight Committee flamed House Oversight Chair James Comer in a congressional memo for “running scared,” accusing the Kentucky Republican of changing the Epstein investigation proceedings into informal “roundtables” that lack any rules.

In this format, there’s no opportunity to consider subpoenas, and no recourse for Democrats to force votes on transparency measures, according to the memo shared among Democratic lawmakers last week.

Perhaps worst of all, the roundtables are designed to look and feel like “regular committee hearings,” according to the memo, but don’t require witnesses to speak under oath. That will effectively void the investigation of any value, giving potential witnesses an opportunity to lie before Congress without consequence.

“In a development with little precedent in modern Congressional history, Oversight Republicans have suspended the use of traditional committee hearings in favor of” the roundtables, the memo reads. “Oversight Republicans are avoiding hearings to block bipartisan subpoena motions they are losing. This shift doesn’t just affect Committee procedure—it limits Congress’s ability to uncover the truth and hold powerful actors accountable.

“By holding roundtables, Republicans are denying Members their basic rights as lawmakers,” the memo states. “Oversight requires transparency, rules, and accountability. Republicans are abandoning all three. Instead of holding real hearings, they are choosing forums designed to avoid scrutiny—because they are losing when the facts are on the table.”

The transition to hosting roundtables appears to be an attempt by Republican leadership to curtail the subpoena power of both parties. For months, Republicans and Democrats alike have hijacked committee hearings in order to vote on subpoenas that would require high-profile figures to speak on the Epstein investigation.

Several prominent figures were named as Epstein associates in the millions of recently released case files. They include Bath and Body Works co-founder Les Wexner, American financier and investor Leon Black, disgraced British former prince Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, and Donald Trump.

Trump is mentioned more than 38,000 times in the Epstein files, and was flagged in more than 5,300 files in the document cache. Those include instances in which Trump was accused—by both victims and witnesses—of abusing children, such as one instance in which he allegedly attempted to force a girl between the ages of 13 and 15 years old to give him oral sex before he punched her in the head for biting his penis.

President Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed to have obliterated Iran’s navy and air force—but it seems that Iran has maintained far more military capabilities than his administration is willing to let on.

Last week, Trump claimed that Iran’s navy was “laying at the bottom of the sea, completely obliterated,” with the exception of a fleet of “fast attack ships” that the U.S. military did not consider a threat. However, multiple U.S. officials told CBS News Wednesday that roughly 60 percent of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’s naval arm still existed. In fact, several ships in the Strait of Hormuz were attacked by Iranian gunboats Wednesday.

That’s not all. Roughly two-thirds of the Iranian air force is still believed to be operational, U.S. officials told CBS News. Nearly half of Iran’s stockpile of ballistic missiles and associated launch systems was also still intact at the beginning of the ceasefire in early April, three U.S. officials told the outlet. Two weeks ago, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declared that “Iran no longer has any sort of comprehensive air defense” capability.

The Pentagon’s internal intelligence agency recently told lawmakers that Iran still maintained significant military capability, including thousands of missiles and one-way attack drones, NBC News reported Wednesday.

In a post on X Wednesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt dismissed CBS’s reporting as propaganda, before spouting some of the adminstration’s own. “The truth is that under President Trump’s leadership, the U.S. military decimated the Iranian regime’s capabilities in just 38 days,” she wrote.

President Trump’s Food and Drug Administration has decided not to approve a skin cancer treatment that could save lives, drawing backlash from doctors.

On Wednesday, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told Congress that he had nothing to do with the decision to withhold approval for Replimune’s drug, RP1, which treats melanoma, shifting responsibility to FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary.  

“This decision comes out of FDA, and we trust ​the process there. And I’ve been told by Marty Makary that every panel that looked at that drug unanimously voted against it … because it does not appear to work,” Kennedy said to the Senate Finance Committee. 

This is disputed by many oncologists, who pointed out in a Wall Street Journal op-ed this week that an initial panel approved the drug before being overruled by the head of biologics, Dr. Vinay Prasad. They also disputed Kennedy’s claim at a House hearing last week that Replimune did a “one arm trial, and all the people who were tested also received a chemotherapy drug, so we don’t know what the effect was.” 

In reality, none of the patients in the trial received chemotherapy; instead they received a different form of immunotherapy, the oncologists noted. A longtime melanoma researcher who worked on the trial, Dr. Anna Pavlick, told the Journal, “Honestly, there was no doubt in our minds whatsoever when we completed this study and we saw the results, that this was going to be approved as a wonderful alternative for our patients because they have no options.

“I have patients who have been treated with this drug that are still alive today who would otherwise be dead,” Pavlick added. 

Dr. Eric Whitman of the Atlantic Health System Cancer Care backed up Pavlick’s statement. 

“When you talk to the melanoma experts, people who treat lots and lots of melanoma patients like myself, it’s obvious that this is beneficial to patients and it’s saving lives or it has potential to save lives,” Whitman said. “The community of patients and doctors don’t understand the reasoning” for the FDA’s rejection. 

Under Kennedy’s leadership, HHS has made several questionable decisions to hurt public health, including blocking a Centers for Disease Control study showing that the Covid-19 vaccine significantly reduced emergency room visits and hospitalizations this past winter. RP1 shows significant potential in combating a fatal cancer, and its rejection fits into a shocking pattern of decisions from the Trump administration that seem to encourage the spread of cancer.  

National Republican Congressional Committee Chair Richard Hudson wouldn’t back up President Donald Trump’s gerrymandering scheme Wednesday after it backfired and gave Democrats a boost.

Virginians voted Tuesday to redraw their state’s congressional district map, potentially netting Democrats an additional three to four seats in the November midterm elections. The success of the measure could potentially see Democrats seize an edge over Republicans’ own gerrymandering efforts in red states, and MAGA is already flipping its lid.

Asked the morning after whether he felt the mid-decade redistricting effort was worth it, Hudson replied: “Not for me to decide that, wasn’t my decision,” Punchbowl News reported.

Hudson doesn’t seem interested in taking credit for his party’s political gamble. The North Carolina lawmaker appeared hopeful that Virginia’s Supreme Court will weigh in on a case against the new measure, in which the NRCC is a plaintiff.

“This close margin reinforces that Virginia is a purple state that shouldn’t be represented by a severe partisan gerrymander,” Hudson said in a separate statement. “That’s exactly why the courts, who have already ruled twice to block this egregious power grab, should uphold Virginia law.”

So far, five red states—Missouri, North Carolina, Texas, Ohio, and Utah—have moved to redraw their congressional maps at the president’s behest in order to hand a potential nine additional seats to the Republican Party.