Netflix and Chill Out—Trump Hasn’t Decided Yet
The president alone will determine who wins the streaming wars.
Trump may have pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández, former president of Honduras, but that doesn’t mean the convicted fraudster and money launderer who helped move tons of cocaine into the United States is home free. The government of Honduras issued its own international arrest warrant for Hernández yesterday, apparently determined to administer the justice the American government suddenly has so little concern for. If that’s not a good metaphor for all this nonsense, we don’t know what is. Happy Tuesday.
Donald Owes Larry. Can Larry Collect?
by Andrew Egger
I have no strong or well-formed opinions on what it will mean for the movie industry if Netflix buys Warner Bros.—for such things you’re better off consulting Sonny Bunch. But I have watched in fascination over the last few days as the negotiations have been ensnared in the court politics of obtaining the personal blessing or disapproval of one Donald J. Trump.
Netflix’s top competitor in the bid to acquire the Warner Bros. studio and HBO Max has been Paramount, the media company owned by one of Trump’s inner-ring tech billionaire pals, David Ellison. Ellison had thought the Warner Bros. deal was as good as his, but somehow Netflix managed to outmaneuver him, announcing their deal last week.
Over the weekend, though, Trump cracked the door open. The Netflix–Warner Bros. deal “could be a problem,” he said Sunday from the red carpet at his Trumpified Kennedy Center Honors ceremony—standing in front of a backdrop conspicuously featuring the logo of the event’s main sponsor, Ellison’s CBS. Netflix already has “a very big market share” in streaming, Trump said (correctly). “When they have Warner Bros., that share goes up a lot. . . . I’ll be involved in that decision, too.”
It was the last bit—Trump’s promise to get personally involved rather than leaving matters up to his underlings at the Justice Department and/or the Federal Trade Commission—that likely caused Ellison’s heart to sing. On Monday, he seemed to take the president at his word, launching a $108 billion hostile takeover bid for Warner Bros. designed to go around the company’s board by appealing directly to its shareholders. Ellison was offering more money than Netflix, but he also offered a remarkable argument: Shareholders should go with him, he wrote, because he believed Netflix’s bid would face “a challenging regulatory approval process.”
Both Netflix and Paramount have plainly known for a while that getting Trump’s personal buy-in was key to the deal. But while both companies did what they could to curry favor—both courted former Trump adviser Jason Miller to come aboard as an adviser to the deal, for instance—there’s little question Ellison came out better in that department. Part of the financing he lined up for his bid was ponied up by Affinity, the investment group of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. And Ellison has spent the first year of Trump’s term coming through for the president in all sorts of remarkable ways—settling Trump’s ridiculous lawsuit against CBS News’s 60 Minutes, then handing over editorial control of the entire news outlet to contrarian conservative Bari Weiss.
And here, after all that, was Ellison coming to reap his reward, in plain English: Netflix, not Paramount, was the party likely to face regulatory blowback from the White House. Trump wants ME to get it, Ellison might as well have said, not THEM.
But the court politics can cut both ways. Trump loves being sucked up to, and he loves distributing head-pat rewards to the suck-ups. What Trump does not love is powerful people starting to treat those rewards as something they’ve earned. The largesse of the emperor is never earned—it is freely bestowed by his gracious will and graciously received by the unworthy! The baldness of Ellison’s pitch seems to have rankled at least some in Trump’s orbit, who offered some real howlers of complaint to Semafor: The Paramount team seems to “believe the worst tropes” about corruption in the administration, they groused. They’re “leaning into all the stereotypes.”
Where did those tropes and stereotypes come from, one wonders?
Ellison’s brazenness may have complicated Trump’s decision tree, but there’s little question the president is still the guy whose say-so will be final.
“In a normal administration, maybe the president would actually have [control of the deal], but he’d never say anything. He’d probably just, like, wink and nod—‘Well, we’ll let the enforcers do what the enforcers do’—and then not claim responsibility,” an administration official familiar with antitrust issues told The Bulwark. “In this administration, the president wants responsibility and wants everyone to know that he blocked the deal or whatever. . . . If the president is dictating, he’s gonna get what he wants. So we’ll see what he wants.”
What’s Keeping Trump Up at Night?
Bill Kristol
We’ve all seen Donald Trump dozing off at cabinet meetings. One reason may be that he’s not sleeping well at night.
At 2:37 a.m. today, the president of the United States was wide awake. How do we know? Because he took to Truth Social to sound the alarm: “The biggest threat in history to United States National Security would be a negative decision on Tariffs by the U.S. Supreme Court. We would be financially defenseless.”
Wow. You can’t blame a guy for being awakened in the middle of the night by “the biggest threat in history to United States National Security.” And you can’t blame him for not being able to go right back to sleep.
Eight minutes later, Trump felt compelled to add this thought: “Because of Tariffs, easily and quickly applied, our National Security has been greatly enhanced, and we have become the financially strongest Country, by far, anywhere in the World. Only dark and sinister forces would want to see that end!!!”
(It happens to be the case that under Trump’s tariff regime, the value of the dollar has fallen by nine percent, which is not what happens when you are “the financially strongest Country, by far, anywhere in the World.” But whatever.)
Is it the prospect of a setback for his beloved tariffs that so disturbs Trump? Or is it the reminder that the Supreme Court isn’t entirely in Trump’s control? That he has not succeeded in entirely killing the rule of law? That this could encourage others to stand up to him?
Was it that thought that made Trump unable to get back to sleep? Did it prompt what one might call a Macbeth moment?
Methought I heard a voice cry ‘Sleep no more!
Macbeth does murder sleep’, the innocent sleep,
Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleeve of care,
The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,
Chief nourisher in life’s feast,—
Or are the sources of Trump’s Macbeth moment deeper still? Are there other things than tariffs and the Supreme Court keeping Trump awake?
Earlier yesterday, a reporter prefaced a question to Trump with this comment: “You said you would have no problem with releasing the full video of that strike on September 2 off the coast of Venezuela.” Trump interrupted her. “I didn’t say that. You said that. I didn’t say that.”
But five days ago, on December 3, Trump said precisely that. In answering a question about releasing the full September 2 video, he remarked, “I don’t know what they have, but whatever they have, we’d certainly release. No problem.”
Could the prospect of the truth coming out about the massacre at sea be keeping him awake? It’s surely not the fact of the killings themselves, about which Trump would only care if he had a functioning human conscience. But could he be worried that this signature policy of his could be politically backfiring?
Or could it be the looming December 19 deadline for the release of the Epstein files that, like Banquo’s ghost, suddenly rises up to disturb our president? Does Trump sense that if he releases the files—or if he fails to release all the files, or tries to tamper with them—the political damage will be even greater than from a Court decision on tariffs, or the release of the boat strike video? Is it a sense of foreboding about matters relating to his old pal Jeffrey that’s been disturbing Trump’s sleep?
We can’t be sure. Trump may not even know just what problem it is that’s keeping him awake. But if he’s disturbed, we should be cheered. If he’s alarmed, we should be heartened.
AROUND THE BULWARK
Grift, Graft, and Groveling: Life in Trump 2.0… JOHN PRIDEAUX of the Economist joins MONA CHAREN on The Mona Charen Show to talk about lavish gifts and other forms of corruption in Trump’s Washington.
This Is Not Democratic Government… On the flagship pod, BILL KRISTOL joins TIM MILLER to discuss racial profiling in Louisiana, the mounting DHS infighting, and the administration’s opaque handling of the Venezuela killings.
New National Security Strategy Is Heavy on Rhetoric, Light on Detail… Without explaining how national means can be used to achieve desired ends, the strategy is just empty rhetoric, writes MARK HERTLING.
Supreme Court Poised to Vastly Expand Presidential Power, Again... Based on yesterday’s oral argument, writes KIM WEHLE, the 90-year-old precedent protecting independent agencies is on the way out.
The J6 Pipe Bomber Arrest Only Made the Conspiracy Theories Worse… MAGA has had the most predictable response to learning the suspect is an election truther, reports WILL SOMMER in False Flag.
Ukraine Stands Firm… Attacks on its infrastructure and a major corruption scandal have rocked the country. But President Trump is wrong that Ukraine is destined for defeat, argues TAMAR JACOBY.
Quick Hits
GOLDEN AGE WATCH: In recent weeks, Donald Trump has spent a lot of time ordering Americans to disbelieve their lying eyes about the state of the economy. We’re in a “golden age,” he insists, adding that this is “the richest, strongest, and most respected the USA has ever been.” All those polls showing deep-seated economic anxiety, all those concerns about affordability, all those data showing warning signs for employment and prices—one Democratic hoax after another, says our president.
All of which makes Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins’s comments yesterday on Fox Business seem like something of a turning point. “Gas is down. Lumber is down. Eggs are down. . . . Really everything is coming down,” Rollins said.1 “But listen, we’re not tone-deaf. We know that America, or a lot of Americans at least, are like, ‘Well, we’re still not feeling the relief.’ The relief is coming. . . . It really is a golden age just right around the corner.”
Now, we’re no golden-age experts. But it sure seems like a golden age that was here just moments ago, but is now just around the corner, is getting farther away. On that same note, Trump announced yesterday a $12 billion bailout of U.S. farmers hurt by his trade wars—news that probably came as a surprise to anyone who spent the entirety of his first term in a coma. “We love our farmers,” Trump said, “and as you know, the farmers like me.”
HABBA BOWS OUT: Alina Habba is throwing in the towel. One week after a federal appeals court ruled she was not validly serving as New Jersey’s U.S. attorney, Trump’s former personal lawyer announced yesterday that she would “step down in her role.” This was not technically true, since the court had ruled she had long since ceased to be even an acting U.S. attorney in the first place, but it comes to the same thing: As of yesterday, Alina Habba and the courts agree that she is no longer serving in that role. Even more inaccurate was Habba’s description of how things had come to this: “Judges in my state took advantage of a flawed blue slip tradition and became weapons for the politicized left.” That’s a funny way to say “the Senate decided not to confirm me, leaving the statutory responsibility to pick my interim successor with the judges of my state.”
Here’s something Habba did get right in her statement: “This decision will not weaken the Justice Department and it will not weaken me.”
Certainly it is unlikely to weaken Habba, who throughout this process has played the role of Trump lackey unimpeachably. No doubt the president will find some other important job for which he needs an under-qualified sycophant. It will also come as little loss to the Justice Department, particularly its office in New Jersey, whose line attorneys have been suffering in a kafkaesque “who’s in charge here” limbo throughout the long twilight of Habba’s tenure.
GROWING THE WORLD’S TINIEST SPINE: Congress, peeved by the Pentagon’s subpar response to its oversight requests about the now-infamous September “double-tap” strike on a Venezuelan boat, is shortening Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s leash—at least a little. Politico reports that the final draft of the annual National Defense Authorization Act contains language that would “withhold a quarter of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s travel budget” until the Pentagon provides lawmakers with “unedited video” of the strikes it has conducted off the shore of Venezuela this year.
Some top lawmakers—the chairs and ranking members of the House and Senate national security committees—were allowed to view the footage of the second strike against the incapacitated boat last week. But Democrats have pushed for broader access to the video—and judging by the travel budget provision in the NDAA, apparently their Republican colleagues would like to see it too.
However, the likelihood of the public seeing the full video of the strike seems to be shrinking. Last week, Donald Trump said the White House would “certainly release” the footage. Yesterday, he insisted he’d said nothing of the sort: “I didn’t say that. This is ABC fake news. Whatever Hegseth decides is okay with me.”
Cheap Shots
Well, lied.
He will decide about the merger when he figures out which buyer will prove more lucrative to him and his family.
“The largesse of the emperor is never earned—it is freely bestowed by his gracious will and graciously received by the unworthy! The baldness of Ellison’s pitch seems to have rankled at least some in Trump’s orbit, who offered some real howlers of complaint to Semafor: The Paramount team seems to “believe the worst tropes” about corruption in the administration, they groused. They’re “leaning into all the stereotypes.””
All true Edward, but this is part of Project 2025; consolidate all critical industries, especially the media into the hands of a select few, who will gladly or reluctantly do Trump’s bidding, or at the very least, downplay the significance of Trump’s worst policies and instincts.
Therefore, while there may be some in the administration appalled by what’s happening, they will ultimately do nothing since Trump, and his family are the worst offenders when it comes to monetizing the presidency for their own personal gain!
And where is Congress you ask? Let’s just say this bunch of useless invertebrates will never grow a spine; they’re cowering in fear from the mob! IMHO…:)