'Stuck in the 80s': Conservatives mock MAGA billionaire for buying CNN

President Donald Trump reportedly played a key role in guaranteeing Warner Brothers Discovery (WBD) was sold to the pro-Trump Ellison family rather than Netflix — yet some conservatives think Trump overestimates what he won in that bargain.

“Trump’s head is stuck in the 80s so he may not have noticed that cable is dying,” conservative commentators Tim Miller and Amanda Carpenter wrote in their Friday podcast episode for The Bulwark. “All he can think about is getting his greedy little hands on CNN so he can make them say nice things about him. But independent outlets—like The Bulwark— are changing the media space and are beyond the reach of a corrupted FCC. Nevertheless, our screens are going to be filled with vast quantities of pro-MAGA propaganda.”

Later in the podcast, Miller speculated that even if Trump prevails in saturating the media landscape with his point of view, his narrative ultimately will not prevail. Instead Miller speculated that kids are “gonna be in high school, and there's gonna be a picture of people storming the Capitol with Confederate flags and Trump flags. And it's gonna be two paragraphs in the chapter. And it's gonna be like, ‘Donald Trump tried to overturn democracy. They stormed the Capitol. Police officers died.’ That's what your kids are gonna learn.”

Trump reportedly played a critical role in making sure Warner Brothers Discovery was sold to the Ellisons, including meeting privately with Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos at the White House earlier this week shortly before Sarandos pulled Netflix out of the deal and publicly demanding he fire UN ambassador Susan Rice from the Netflix board or else “pay the consequences.”

“President Donald Trump is not the sort of old-fashioned Republican who believes businesses should operate unfettered from government interference,” reported The Week at the time. “Instead, he is now telling Netflix to fire a prominent board member who once worked for the Obama administration.” Indeed, the White House has made it clear since last year that it wanted the pro-Trump Ellison family, led by father Larry and son David, to take over CNN.

CNN now joins a long list of news media and social media platforms owned by people actively supportive of Trump, including Amazon and The Washington Post (Jeff Bezos), Facebook and Instagram (Mark Zuckerberg), Twitter/X (Elon Musk) and TikTok (a consortium of pro-Trump billionaires including the Ellisons). It is well known that Trump wanted the Ellisons to purchase CNN so hosts who regularly criticize Trump, including Erin Burnett and Brianna Keilar, can be fired.

“The question nobody is asking is the one that keeps me up at night: what has already been arranged for the one asset the president demanded change hands, in the one company where someone quietly built the legal infrastructure to make it happen, five months ago, before anyone was looking?” business journalist Audrey Henson wrote on her Substack shortly before Netflix’s withdrawal was announced. Her post included extensive documentation regarding the details of the business deal.

She concluded, “I do not have the final answer yet. But I know where the documents are. And now, so do you.”

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