Hello it’s the weekend. This is The Weekender ☕️
To some extent, every new excess by the Trump administration is unsurprising to us, the writers and editors of Talking Points Memo, and, I imagine, to you, our readers. These guys told us what they were going to do, after all. It sounded authoritarian. Trump’s own former military leaders said he was “fascist.” But given that priming, we heavy consumers of news can, I think, sometimes lose track of how far the Trump administration has gone, even by its own standards.
Nicole on Thursday flagged an interview with CNBC during which FCC director Brendan Carr outlined his belief that both his agency and the “media ecosystem” overall are in the midst of a “massive shift” given the “permission structure that President Trump’s election has provided.”
“And I would simply say we’re not done yet with seeing the consequences of that,” Carr said.
“Will you only be pleased when none of these comedians have a show on broadcast television?” CNBC anchor David Faber asked.
“No, it’s not any particular show or any particular person,” Carr replied. “It’s just we’re in the midst of a very disruptive moment right now, and I just, frankly, expect that we’re going to continue to see changes in the media ecosystem.”
Carr and the rest of the Trump administration have tried to get a lot of mileage out of the whole idea that the 2024 election represented a substantiation of an American cultural “vibe shift” post-COVID (though Carr’s talk of a new, Trumpian “permission structure” is a particularly chilling way to articulate that idea).
But setting aside that Trump’s electoral victory was, in the end, not that large, are Trump’s leaders in government still doing what they understood themselves to have won permission to do?
“This was all in Project 2025, btw,” an actor from “Glee” tweeted, and Carr at 11:43 p.m. replied with that GIF of Jack Nicholson nodding with an ecstatic, unhinged look, a seeming affirmation that, yes, this was all the plan.
But was it? Carr, in fact, wrote the FCC chapter of Project 2025. There was nothing about revoking broadcast licenses or using the “Equal Time” rule in creative ways, as he has threatened to do with “The View,” a program that is seemingly his next ABC-broadcast target. “The FCC should promote freedom of speech,” his chapter of Project 2025 began.
That’s an ideal his party is now seemingly somewhat confused about. Early this week, Pam Bondi got in trouble for trying to distinguish anti-Charlie Kirk “hate speech” from “free speech.” “An FCC license, it’s not a right. It really is a privilege,” Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) told Semafor on Thursday. “Under normal times, in normal circumstances, I tend to think that the First Amendment should always be sort of the ultimate right. And that there should be almost no checks and balances on it. I don’t feel that way anymore,” she added. Other Republicans took the opposite side of the issue, with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) of all people calling Carr’s tactics “right out of Goodfellas.”
It’s in these moments where the Trump administration and its allies lose the plot — when they do an about-face on the same ideas they bear hugged in weeks and months and years prior, casting about for enemies to punish — that the MAGA coalition frays a bit, straining under the weight of cognitive dissonance. We saw the same thing with Trump’s short-lived war on Iran and, much more so, with his aggressive insistence that there was nothing important going on with that Jeffrey Epstein guy. The cause of ending cancel culture launched a thousand MAGA-aligned influencer careers; it is the supposed raison d’être of entire MAGA-friendly publications. Now that the government they serve has turned the page on free speech, what do they do?
It’s not just the MAGA faithful. Booting a late-night host watched by millions from the air over some muddled remarks about your slain political ally is the kind of thing that gets the attention of the “normies” who have decided to tune out from the whole lurid spectacle of American democracy in 2025. (Ditto for revising childhood vaccine recommendations while confessing you’re not even totally clear what you’re voting on.)
Ten years into this, only fools predict we’ve reached the beginning of the end of Donald Trump. And that’s not what I’m saying. But moments like these are not good for Trump’s already limited base of support, and bring us toward the next chapter of America’s authoritarian experiment, whatever that chapter may be.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/the-weekender/the-trump-admins-free-speech-struggle-session