While the Trump administration continues to attack free speech, criminalize adversaries and attempt to crush liberal foundations, conservative billionaires have acquired Paramount and CBS, stand in line to own Warner Bros. Discovery and are positioned to extend right-wing control of social media platforms well beyond Elon Musk’s X.
Larry Ellison, the multibillionaire who founded Oracle — together with his son David — is building a media empire rivaling that of Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan. This gives the Ellisons extraordinary power to shape the nation’s politics and culture, just as the Murdochs have for decades through Fox News, News Corp, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post.
After winning approval from the Federal Communications Commission, Skydance Media, founded by David Ellison with financial support from his father, acquired Paramount for $8 billion on Aug. 7. The deal gave him command of one of the four major networks and one of the five major Hollywood studios, as well as of Comedy Central and Showtime.
On June 18, President Trump endorsed the Skydance acquisition while it was pending before the commission, telling White House reporters: “Ellison is great. He’ll do a great job with it.”
Skydance Media is now attempting to buy Warner Bros. Discovery. If it is successful, the acquisition would give Ellison’s Skydance ownership of a second major Hollywood studio, along with CNN, HBO Max, TNT, New Line Cinema and Turner Classic Movies.
Conservatives repeatedly argued that CBS, CNN and Comedy Central — as well as productions on HBO Max and Showtime — leaned to the left. David Folkenflik of NPR reported on Sept. 12 in “CBS Shifts to Appease the Right Under New Owner,” that there are clear signs that CBS will mute liberal voices and strengthen conservative oversight, including by hiring a right-wing ombudsman, failing to renew Stephen Colbert’s contract and pledging to reduce bias.
Francis Fukuyama, a political scientist at Stanford, made the case in “Our Coming Plutocracy” in Persuasion last week that
the Ellison father-son moves are more in the mode of Silvio Berlusconi’s takeover of Mediaset or Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter. If they succeed in creating this media empire, they will control a vast array of outlets, both legacy and new media, that will allow them to directly influence American politics.
Larry Ellison is a Trump supporter, as Musk once was; he doesn’t appear to have political ambitions, though his son may. But that’s not the point. The real issue is the impact of concentrated wealth on American democracy, where two or three individuals control so much wealth and media power that they can help swing national elections, as Musk claims he did in 2024.
On another front, Trump is personally guiding the shift in the ownership of TikTok to give control of the popular social media platform to Larry Ellison, the Murdoch family and Michael Dell, the chairman and chief executive of Dell Technologies. All three are reliably Republican.
These developments constitute a maneuver suggesting that the right has adopted the concept of encirclement, a classic military strategy used to surround adversaries while denying them resources and wresting control of their sources of support.
In this context, Fox and Skydance are part of a far more encompassing, long-term drive to challenge liberal control of both the media and many cultural institutions.
Two conservative companies, Sinclair and Nexstar Media Group, own, operate or provide services to 386 television stations, far more than any of their competitors. Nexstar has entered into an agreement to acquire Tegna, which, if approved by regulators, would push the total number of stations controlled by Sinclair and Nexstar to 450.
Nexstar currently reaches 70 percent of U.S. households, and that will rise to 80 percent if it wins approval of its purchase of Tegna’s 64 stations. Sinclair’s stations reach 58 to 66 percent of U.S. households, depending on the measure used.
At least two political science papers have reported that after Sinclair buys a television station and sets programming policy, the Republican share of the local vote rises by 3 to 5 percentage points. One is “Small Screen, Big Echo? Political Persuasion of Local TV News: Evidence From Sinclair” by Antonela Miho of the Paris School of Economics; the other is “How Does Local TV News Change Viewers’ Attitudes? The Case of Sinclair Broadcasting” by Matthew Levendusky of the University of Pennsylvania.
The Trump administration and its MAGA allies have abandoned all pretense of supporting free speech in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, using the killing to justify an accelerating drive to criminalize criticism of the president, intimidate speakers on the left and forcibly shift public discourse to the right.
This right-wing assault on the left is wide and deep.
“Donald Trump’s goal,” Larry Diamond, a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, wrote by email,
is to create a Hungarian-style pseudo-democracy, in which he and his movement can rule indefinitely through unfree and unfair elections and utter dominance of the media and civil society landscapes while still claiming that they are the democratic embodiment of the “will of the people.”
Everything Trump has been doing of late follows that authoritarian playbook of trying to eviscerate checks and balances, eliminate independent oversight actors and use state power to punish and terrify critics, so they will self-censor. He is even going after the same philanthropy — the Open Society Foundations — that Orban went after.
Trump’s favorability ratings fell from 50.5 percent during his first week in office this year to 46.1 percent on Sept. 22, but that has not deterred him. Just the opposite: He, his vice president, his aides and his cabinet members initiate daily attacks on the left — some illegal and some unfounded but all damaging and costly. Take a look at a sampling of the abuses of executive power Trump and his loyalists have perpetrated over three days, Sept. 18, 19 and 20.
Sept. 18:
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Trump threatened to fire Erik Siebert, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, who had informed senior officials at the Department of Justice that there was insufficient evidence to criminally charge New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, and that the case against a former director of the F.B.I., James Comey, was weak. James and Comey ranked high on Trump’s list of enemies. The next day, Siebert resigned.
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The Department of Defense (Trump has issued an executive order renaming it the Department of War) issued new rules to reporters covering the Pentagon that included an apparent attempt to control and potentially censor stories: “D.O.W. remains committed to transparency to promote accountability and public trust. However, D.O.W. information must be approved for public release by an appropriate authorizing official before it is released, even if it is unclassified.”
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Trump complained to reporters on Air Force One that the TV networks “give me only bad publicity or press.” He then suggested, “Maybe their license should be taken away.”
Sept. 19:
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Trump escalated his threats against the media. “They’ll take a great story, and they’ll make it bad,” he told reporters during a meeting. “I think that’s really illegal.”
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A Washington Post story quoted Brendan Carr, Trump’s appointee as chair of the Federal Communications Commission, boasting: “NPR has been defunded. PBS has been defunded. Colbert is retiring. Joy Reid is out at MSNBC. Terry Moran is gone from ABC, and ABC is now admitting that they are biased. CBS has now made some commitments to us that they are going to return to more fact-based journalism.”
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The Department of Homeland Security announced the arrest of nearly 550 men and women over two weeks in the Chicago area by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in an operation called Midway Blitz.
Sept. 20:
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Carol Leonnig and Ken Dilanian of MSNBC disclosed that “in an undercover operation last year, the F.B.I. recorded Tom Homan, now the White House border czar, accepting $50,000 in cash after indicating he could help agents — who were posing as business executives — win government contracts in a second Trump administration.” The inquiry was shut down after Trump took office. The White House has denied that Homan was caught taking the money.
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The Wall Street Journal reported that after the enactment of major cuts in the food stamp program, the Department of Agriculture is canceling its annual survey of food insecurity.
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Trump angrily warned Attorney General Pam Bondi in a post on Truth Social that she has failed to bring criminal charges against his political adversaries. The Justice Department is “all talk and no action,” he wrote, contending that “they’re all guilty as hell, but nothing is going to be done,” citing the Democratic senator Adam Schiff; Letitia James, the New York State attorney general; and Comey.
What is the underlying strategy behind Trump’s claims?
“You don’t have to look too hard to see why many see parallels between Donald Trump and the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orban,” Yphtach Lelkes, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote, replying by email to my queries.
Lelkes said that civil society, “an essential safeguard of democratic life, is under attack.” He continued:
Threats to revoke broadcast licenses or to not approve media mergers and confrontations with universities are widely interpreted as attempts to discredit or discipline independent voices. More recently, the suggestion of using state power to investigate progressive-leaning foundations has raised concerns about efforts to deprive political opponents of financial support.
Lelkes argued that “the echoes of Orban’s model don’t seem coincidental, given Trump’s repeated public praise for the Hungarian leader, the admiration for Orban’s governing style expressed within Trump’s circles and the close ties between the Heritage Foundation — the primary sponsor of Project 2025 — and Orban’s allies at the Danube Institute in Budapest.”
For Richard Pildes, a professor of constitutional law at N.Y.U., the crucial factor pushing the administration to take extreme steps is the belief on both left and right that political outcomes have life-or-death consequences:
When people perceive politics as existential, they believe the country will never be the same, in a fundamental way, if the other side prevails. The other side is not merely the opposition but an existential threat and not just in the political realm but even at the personal level.
For parts of the right, the Charlie Kirk assassination is going to further fuel that belief. Politics becomes totalizing. All the different institutional domains of a liberal society are swept into the maws of the political: the entertainment sphere, the universities and even elementary education, the private sector (such as law firms), civil society and much else. There is no limit to the political.
Another motive driving the Trump forces is the thirst for revenge.
Justin Gest, a professor of public policy at George Mason University, argued in an email:
It is important to view the Trump administration’s attempts to silence its critics in a context wider than the last three months. In 2021 the president and several of his most prominent supporters — Michael Flynn, Sebastian Gorka, Sidney Powell, Ali Alexander, Nick Fuentes, etc. — were suspended from a number of top social media platforms for their incitement of violence and proliferation of misinformation.
Trump administration officials perceive those suspensions by private companies as a form of censorship, and see their actions against [Jimmy] Kimmel and Colbert as fair game. The key difference, of course, is the role of the state. In threatening ABC/Disney and extorting CBS/Paramount, Trump is using the power of the U.S. government to curtail speech and setting a dangerous precedent that could open Republican voices to retaliation or escalations by future administrations.
Along similar lines, Gest wrote, “the administration views its regulation of universities and D.E.I. programs in the context of those entities’ previous policing of conservative speech in the 2010s — a decade characterized by cancel culture and political correctness principally on the far left.”
For Sean Westwood, a political scientist at Dartmouth, Gest’s argument rings true. Westwood explicitly placed a large part of the responsibility for the increasingly destructive character of our current politics on Democrats and the left: “The uncomfortable truth is that Democrats helped build this culture of speech control by normalizing the use of institutional and corporate pressure to silence opposition, inadvertently forging the very weapons of censorship that the right is now gleefully wielding against them.”
This does not, however, exonerate Trump and his MAGA allies.
Trump’s actions, Westwood wrote, “are now escalating into a direct assault on the institutional infrastructure of the left.” However, he continued, “this is more than a rhetorical move; threatening the 501(c)(3) status of these foundations aims to choke off the financial lifeblood of a vast network of opposition groups, effectively criminalizing dissent.”
As the administration’s attacks have become more venomous and dangerous, “the Democratic Party has failed to mount a coordinated defense of these institutions,” Westwood wrote. It is led, he added, by “an ossified leadership seemingly incapable of communicating with, let alone mobilizing, the majority of Americans who love this country and the freedoms that define it.”
One of the scholars I contacted for this column, Jack Goldstone, a professor of public policy at George Mason, has a legitimate claim to prescience in the case of this president.
On Oct. 17, 2016, three weeks before Trump was elected to his first term, Goldstone and Thomas Homer-Dickson wrote “How Donald Trump Would Reshape America” in The Globe and Mail, a leading Canadian newspaper.
They disagreed with the view among “the political cognoscenti” that “the U.S. government’s checks and balances are strong enough” to prevent serious abuses of power. They elaborated:
The cognoscenti overlook two critical facts. First, U.S. government institutions are not as strong as many seem to believe, because today a significant fraction of the U.S. public thinks that these institutions don’t have a shred of legitimacy.
More important, Trump would quickly reshape the context within which his presidency operates by generating a new political and social reality — an “emergency” in America and around the world — that justifies and even demands attacks on democratic institutions.
In this context, Goldstone and Homer-Dickson said, Trump will traffic “in anger and fear.” He will reveal “a world of flagrant injustices, implacable enemies and dark, evil forces. He will portray himself as “the destroyer of the status quo, righter of wrongs, protector and savior.”
Trump, they continued, will “pick fights with China, Iran and Mexico and with allies he identifies as freeloaders.” He will portray his domestic enemies as a fifth column — as fundamentally disloyal and therefore mortal threats to the Republic,” signaling to his more radical supporters “that they need not respect the rule of law.”
As disorder, or the perception of it, grows, Trump will “sharply expand surveillance and police presence” and “use the powers of the federal government to harass anyone publicly critical of him.” Ultimately, Trump will “claim authority under either the National Emergencies Act or the Insurrection Act to issue executive orders to deploy troops, federalize the National Guard or suspend basic rights.”
Goldstone and Homer-Dickson’s predictions did not come true until Trump’s second term, but come true they did. How did Goldstone assess developments since Trump’s second inauguration?
“Trump has been determined to eliminate every possible person and point of opposition within the government that prevented him from hiring and firing whomever he wanted, spending or not spending on whatever he wanted and profiting from his actions however he desired,” Goldstone wrote.
No language or action, he added, “is too extreme in pursuit of this vision.”
Witness Stephen Miller’s comments on Sean Hannity’s Fox TV show:
The Democrat Party does not fight for, care about or represent American citizens. It is an entity devoted exclusively to the defense of hardened criminals, gangbangers and illegal alien killers and terrorists. The Democrat Party is not a political party. It is a domestic, extremist organization.
How successful has Trump been this time around?
Goldstone responded:
We are now a country in which people can lose their jobs for making the wrong joke; where universities, media and law firms have to defend themselves against lawsuits and investigations that threaten to bankrupt them; where people in America (even American citizens) can be rounded up, arrested and put in detention if they have the wrong accent or work at the wrong kind of job; and where masked ICE agents and uniformed national military patrol the streets of our major cities.
Trump, the man behind Goldstone’s dismal view of America, has a different vision of where the country stands. Speaking at the memorial service ceremony for Kirk in Arizona on Sunday, Trump told the crowd:
The election of, oh, that beautiful day, Nov. 5, 2024. Do you remember that day? It was nine months ago. What a day that was. I mean, we had a pretty good day in the first term. And I must tell you, on the second term, we had a phenomenal day, but a lot of bad things happened. And now that’s not even questioned. They cheated like dogs, but we got them back then.
We have got them back.
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Thomas B. Edsall has been a contributor to the Times Opinion section since 2011. His column on strategic and demographic trends in American politics appears every Tuesday. He previously covered politics for The Washington Post.
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