Disney Says No to the Lyin’ King
Mirror mirror on the wall, will this lawsuit matter at all?
On a certain level, you’ve got to feel for Sen. Darline Graham (R-S.C.). If her brother Lindsey hadn’t died unexpectedly this year, she wouldn’t be in the Senate at all—much less running in her own right. And man, has the learning curve been brutal. In last night’s GOP primary debate, she was asked whether Taiwan and the South China Sea are national security issues for the United States.
“I’m just going to be honest here. I’m not on national security that—I’m not that informed on national security,” Graham replied haltingly. “So—but I do support the military. . . . I’m not a polished politician up here, national security is not my thing, not my area of expertise, but I do support the military.” Happy Wednesday.
Join Mark Hertling and Ben Parker for Command Post live on Substack and YouTube at 10:30 a.m. EDT today.
This Aggression Will Not Stand, Man
by Sonny Bunch
One of the more depressing responses to Trump 2.0 has been the cowardly way some in the media have responded to the president’s relentlessly bullying legal tactics. They’ve often chosen to settle rather than fight the president on cases that could easily be won, just to avoid regulatory hassles for the parent conglomerates of these media companies.
But even some of the quislings seem to have had enough.
The most egregious of those early cases, of course, was Paramount’s decision to settle with Donald Trump over claims that 60 Minutes deceptively edited an interview with Kamala Harris to make her sound more intelligent than she actually was. The case was, on its face, absurd: Virtually every interview that isn’t live is edited in some form or fashion for reasons of time, continuity, coherence, etc. This is just standard practice; everyone who has ever done an interview understands that some things are likely to be trimmed. CBS itself stated repeatedly that the lawsuit was meritless. I don’t think you’ll find a single reputable scholar who thinks Trump could have won on the merits.
And yet, CBS’s parent company, Paramount, caved because it was in the process of being absorbed by Skydance, a company owned and operated by David Ellison, who bought it with the backing of his Trump-donor father, Oracle’s Larry Ellison. What’s a $16 million settlement in the face of an $8 billion purchase?
Meanwhile, ABC agreed to cover $1 million in legal fees and sent another $15 million to the “nonprofit” building Trump’s presidential library/hotel following George Stephanopoulos’s repeated insistence that Trump had been convicted of “rape”—rather than the more strictly accurate statement that he had been held liable for sexual abuse—in the E. Jean Carroll case. Truth be told, this was a trickier case than the farcical 60 Minutes suit—technically, Donald Trump has not been convicted of rape despite repeatedly being accused of sexual assault and instructing a confidante that, as a star, he can “do anything . . . grab them by the pussy”—but it’s hard to imagine Disney/ABC settling for that amount of money with someone who did not vindictively wield regulatory power.
Caving to Trump didn’t win ABC any favors from the administration. As I discussed with Robert Corn-Revere on last week’s episode of The Bulwark Goes to Hollywood, Trump and his hand-picked FCC bulldog Brendan Carr have gone after Disney and ABC relentlessly, pressuring the network to suspend Jimmy Kimmel following a crass joke he made about Charlie Kirk in the wake of the young pundit’s assassination. After Disney suspended Kimmel, Carr took a victory lap, which in turn provoked a counter-outrage, and Kimmel was quickly reinstated. When Carr and Trump again turned their eyes on Kimmel following a crack about Melania Trump glowing like “an expectant widow,” there were renewed calls to punish Kimmel—calls that were, ultimately, ignored.
Carr then escalated the attacks by announcing that ABC’s broadcast licenses would be put up for renewal earlier than expected. The network vowed to fight the action and on Tuesday filed suit against the administration on First Amendment grounds. Here’s the crux of ABC’s argument:
The day after the President objected to additional on-air comments by Mr. Kimmel, the Commission issued an unprecedented order requiring the Stations to file early applications to renew their licenses—years before any of their licenses would have come up for renewal in the ordinary course and allowing only thirty days to file applications which ordinarily take months to prepare. Until the day before that order issued, the Commission had not called for a renewal application ahead of schedule in more than half a century. Nor had it ever demanded simultaneous early renewal applications from a group of stations commonly owned with a single broadcast network.
ABC’s entire complaint is worth reading. It’s a chilling catalogue of governmental efforts to restrict speech at the behest of the president and a reminder why Trump has such a healthy friendship with dictators like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un: Like them, he does not believe in freedom of speech. He believes only in obeisance and obedience.
What makes the actions of CBS’s and ABC’s first settlement so disappointing—as well as similar capitulations by the law firms that settled with Trump and social media companies that had justifiably banned Trump following the January 6th riots—is that Trump’s suits almost always crumble when challenged. The courts have dismissed Trump’s cases against the Wall Street Journal for their reporting on the president’s intimate friendship with child-sex-trafficking kingpin Jeffrey Epstein and CNN for its use of the phrase “The Big Lie” to describe Donald Trump’s big lies about winning the 2020 election.
Bulwark LIVE: THE GOOD FIGHT TOUR with Tim, Sarah, Sam, and JVL is coming to the Southeast in October. Tickets go on sale August 21. Bulwark+ members get early access now. Click here for details and to get your tickets.
AROUND THE BULWARK
Todd Blanche’s One Promise: Dishonesty… I would trust him on that, writes MONA CHAREN.
The Real Danger of Russia’s Fake Elections… The anti-war, anti-government sentiment was apparently more than Putin bargained for, observes CATHY YOUNG.
The Seedy Side of MAGA’s D.C.… TIM MILLER is back in D.C. and he joins WILL SOMMER to find it’s somehow crazier than he left it.
Melania May Be Behind MAGA’s Natalie Harp Freakout… ANDREW EGGER joins JVL and TIM on The Next Level to discuss the faux outrage over the human printer.
Quick Hits
MIDTERMS VIBE CHECK: Florida, Alaska, and Wyoming all held their primaries yesterday, with many of the most interesting results coming out of the Sunshine State. A sampling:
Cory Mills lost. The Trump-endorsed congressman, who has faced a blizzard of sexual-misconduct and campaign-finance accusations, was defeated by former local-TV anchor Ryan Elijah, who had campaigned hard on Mills’s personal baggage risking losing the seat to Democrats. Elijah will face former NASA Chief of Staff Bale Dalton in November.
Byron Donalds won—but not as overwhelmingly as he’d hoped. The three-term congressman had hoped his strong name ID, Freedom Caucus credentials, and Trump endorsement would clear the field in his race to succeed Gov. Ron DeSantis. But he ultimately took only 48 percent of the primary vote, with 25 percent of voters pulling the lever for current Lt. Gov. Jay Collins, 10.5 percent supporting groyper shock jock James Fishback, and 8.5 percent voting for anti–data center campaigner Paul Renner. Donalds has some work to do to unite Florida Republicans ahead of his matchup with the Democratic nominee, former Republican David Jolly.
Democratic establishmentarians and iconoclasts traded blows. Rep. Jared Moskowitz fended off a progressive challenger in his newly drawn 25th District, as did former DNC Chair Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz in the 20th. But the biggest prize went to DSA candidate Angie Nixon, who knocked off a far better funded moderate contender in Alex Vindman to capture Florida Democrats’ Senate nomination. Nixon now heads to a showdown with Republican Rep. Ashley Moody in a contest to close out the last two years of former Sen. Marco Rubio’s term.
BLUE WAVE VIBE CHECK: Are you a Democrat looking for a jolt of hopium? Feast your eyes on the last special general election until November, a sleepy Pennsylvania state House race in the 12th District, which a Republican won in 2024 by 30 points—and in which Democrat Brandon Dukes may have just pulled out a stunning upset over Republican Scott Timko. Carolyn Fiddler reports on her Substack This Week in Statehouse Action:
As of this writing, Dukes has pulled out a shocking win—he leads Timko 50.26-49.74%, which comes down to 88 votes.
Provisional ballots and some overseas ballots likely won’t be counted until next week, so this number may yet shift.
But even if Timko makes up that deficit, the safe R nature of this seat makes this outcome a huge L for his party.
And it’s a final upward-trending data point in terms of the dramatic Democratic overperformances that have characterized the vast majority of special elections this cycle. . . . Across 109 contested special elections over the past 21 months, Democrats have improved on Kamala Harris’ performance in these same seats by an average of 12.5%.
NO EXCUSE FOR CENSORSHIP: The terrible story of Jason Arday, the British academic and author who died in an apparent suicide shortly after resigning his Cambridge University professorship under scrutiny for offenses ranging from plagiarism to extensive fabulism about his life story, has produced dramatically polarized narratives. Many progressives see a talented black scholar hounded to death by racist detractors and media vultures. Many conservatives and centrists see fraud enabled by a diversity-fixated academic institution. Perhaps the most provocative essay, by Substack blogger Sam Kriss, argues that Arday’s self-invention should have been treated as a work of genius far above conventional academic toil.
The complications of the story, though, haven’t stopped some people from going absolutely bonkers. There’s a Change.org petition for a UK law limiting “the number of news articles published about a single individual within a defined time frame” to minimize “mental anguish.” Obviously, anyone can start an online petition. But dozens of British academics and other public figures, including members of Parliament, have signed an open letter to the British government urging a public inquiry into the media’s supposed racist harassment of Arday and declaring that “self-regulation of the press has comprehensively failed.”
British law, especially on libel, already allows far more suppression of speech than American law. And before the scandal broke, Arday actually used threats of litigation to squash journalistic inquiries into his record. Thankfully, in the United States, the First Amendment largely prevents such abuses. But some left-wing American commentators such as Ibram X. Kendi are now joining the media-bashing chorus with accusations of a “lynching.”
This would be disturbing in any circumstances. At a time when a right-wing administration would love nothing more than to gut the First Amendment, progressive sympathy for censorship is not only wrong but grotesquely self-sabotaging.
—Cathy Young
Cheap Shots
The big guy’s seal of approval ain’t what it used to be:
Soooo.... is Graham just winging it? No debate prep to even trot out a canned answer? She might as well just answer every question with, "I will vote as I'm told."
One of the best headlines ever!