Jan. 6th marked 4 years since President Donald Trump incited a violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol that took the lives of 5 people and injured 174 police officers. After Attorney General Merrick Garland’s failure to hold Trump accountable for his crimes, this treasonous pathological liar — who was found guilty on 34 felony counts and who a jury found liable for sexual assault — was re-elected president on Nov. 5 by a narrow margin, winning less than 50 percent of the vote.
Before the election, Jeff Bezos and Patrick Soon-Shiong, billionaire owners of two of the nation’s most prestigious newspapers, preemptively surrendered to Trump by cancelling their planned endorsements of Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris.
After ABC News settled a Trump defamation lawsuit in mid-December by donating $15 million to his future presidential library, the emboldened president-elect says he’ll next sue the Des Moines Register because their poll understated his pre-election support; 60 Minutes for his criticism of their editing of an interview with Vice President Kamala Harris; and the Pulitzer Prize committee for honoring the New York Times’ coverage of allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Sasha Abramsky, The Nation magazine’s Western correspondent and author, who discusses his recent article, “Will Trump Weaponize the FCC to Crack Down on Media Outlets He Doesn’t Like?” and the alarming anticipatory obedience we see toward Trump from some of America’s most influential media companies.
SASHA ABRAMSKY: And when it comes to the FCC, which regulates media licensing essentially, you now have in the person of Brendan Carr, somebody who is absolutely committed to Trump’s agenda of going after journalists and media outlets that he views as being hypercritical. And they’ve talked about all kinds of thing, Trumpers have repeatedly talked about on the campaign trail about yanking the broadcasting licenses for major networks ABC, CBS, NBC.
If they publish stories he doesn’t like, he says he’s going to go after them. He’s repeatedly sued and/or threatened to sue media organizations and individual journalists. And we saw recently a $15 million settlement that ABC agreed to pay for something that George Stephanopoulos had said on air.
Well, you know, if you go after the media and use the courts as an intimidation tool and you use frivolous lawsuits as an intimidation tool and then you have the FCC backing you up and saying, “Well, you know what? We’re going to investigate companies. We’re going to investigate broadcasters that we don’t like. We’re going to deny their licenses. We’re going to intervene to stop them being able to buy and sell their stations.”
Once you do that, you’re on the road to what’s called an illiberal democracy. That’s a term that Viktor Orban, who’s the leader of Hungary, has pioneered, which is that you have the trappings of a democracy, but you manipulate it so extensively, you intimidate the media so extensively that in reality you’re guaranteeing yourself in power.
The sort of mechanisms, the braking mechanisms, the watchdog mechanisms to hold you accountable start to break down. And that’s both because you’re overtly threatening media companies and basically intimidating them and also because media companies are going to start self-censoring because they’re going to want to avoid getting on Trump’s bad side as sort of the stuff of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, where you have the formal trappings still of a pluralist electoral system, but you really successfully stack the decks against effective opposition.
SCOTT HARRIS: The really frightening part of your article, where you detail the possible future use of emergency declarations to punish Trump’s perceived media enemies because there is a clause within the old text of the Communications Act of 1934, I think it is, where a president can use a declaration of an emergency to shut down media organizations all across the country.
SASHA ABRAMSKY: Yeah, there are a series of communications acts from the 1930s onwards that grant extraordinary powers to the president in the event of an emergency. And the thing about our system of checks and balances and the constitutional structure and everything else is it works until you have a president who’s willing to bust through it using any means necessary.
Now, one of the sort of dirty secrets of the American political system is that in actual fact, there are a vast number of emergency powers that the president can use if he’s willing to just say, “You know what? We’ve got a national emergency. We’re in a wartime situation.”
And it’s very ill-defined what qualifies as a wartime situation. So Trump’s now saying, “Well, you know what? I can declare emergency laws to be invoked because we’re at war on the southern border against drug cartels and people smuggling gangs.”
Well, that’s a very different definition of war than, you know, World War II, for example.
But if the courts give Trump leeway on that, it opens the door to a whole range of emergency powers being used or potentially used, not just around the media, but around the invocation of using the military domestically, federalizing the National Guard and so on. All of these things Project 2025 and other advisers to Trump have been talking about quite openly in the last few months.
I mean, there’s no mystery to it. They’re aware that there are these emergency powers that they can grab out for if they want. And they’re aware that if Trump uses those emergency powers, there’s at least the likelihood the Supreme Court will be deferential to it and say, “You know what? We don’t want to tread on executive authority.”
Well, that opens up a scenario that we haven’t seen in this country, which is that you have a president who, you know, has proven his contempt for democracy. He’s proven his contempt for constitutional norms. He said he wants dictatorial powers and he believes he has access to these emergency powers that would give him dictatorial powers.
So then the question becomes, “Well, what are the braking mechanisms? Who’s going to stand up to him in his inner circle?” Probably no one. “Who’s going to stand up to him in the courts?” Well, you know, maybe the lower courts will stand up to him. Not really very clear that the conservative Supreme Court will stand up to him. “Who’s going to stand up to him in the Senate or the House?” Well, you know, Democrats will try their best, but they’re in the minority, at least for the next two years.
So there is a real risk here. And I’m not saying it’s inevitable. Nothing’s inevitable in politics. But there is a risk that Trump will reach for emergency powers that will do immense harm to the functioning of the democracy.
And if he does that, one of the canaries in the mine will be he will go after the media hard and he will go after the media early.
Listen to Scott Harris’ in-depth interview with Sasha Abramsky (24:15) and see more articles and opinion pieces in the Related Links section of this page.
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