In his late-night press conference following the assassination attempt at Saturday’s White House Correspondents’ dinner, President Trump noted the relatively high rate of presidential assassinations: four out of the 45 men who’ve served as chief executive. Add in all the attempted assassinations of presidents and presidential candidates—three for Trump and two for Gerald Ford, also one apiece for each Roosevelt and George Wallace—and the calamitously successful assassination of candidate Robert Kennedy, and you have to conclude that whatever these may be, they’re not one-offs.
That said, Washington did witness a genuine democracy-disrupting one-off dinner just two nights before the attempted attack at the Washington Hilton. On Thursday night, David Ellison—whose allowance from his father Larry has enabled him to build a vast media empire—hosted a private dinner in honor of Trump at the newly renamed (by Trump) Trump U.S. Institute of Peace, several stone’s throws from the Lincoln Memorial (not named by Lincoln, btw). The Ellisons’ purchase last week of Warner Bros. Discovery, putting it under control of Paramount Skydance, which they own, must pass antitrust muster with the Trump administration’s Justice Department. Not surprisingly, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche was also a dinner guest, as were Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Deputy President and Nativist Supremo Stephen Miller. Lest that fail to demonstrate deference sufficiently, Miller and WarSec Pete Hegseth were reportedly the guests of CBS News two nights later at the Washington Hilton gala.
Papa Ellison has been a major donor to Trump’s presidential campaigns and his PAC, while Paramount has shelled out for Trump’s ballroom. Moreover, once Jr. Ellison’s purchase of Paramount gave him ownership of CBS, he responded to Trump’s lawsuit against the network for its coverage of the 2024 presidential campaign by ordering the network to pay off Trump in the amount of $16 million.
Inasmuch as the Ellisons’ dinner coincided with political journalists’ big weekend, and in case that $16 million wasn’t enough, their soiree was also intended to show Trump how much their own journalists at CBS News really liked him. CBS News chief Bari Weiss, whom Ellison had hired on the strength of her anti-woke and pro-conservative politics, sat alongside Jr. Ellison at Trump’s table, though The New York Times reported that “several CBS News journalists said they were taken aback by the existence of the dinner.” Politicized news media we have always, in varying degrees, had with us, but the network of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite was known for setting the mainstream mass media’s non-fawning, nonpartisan news coverage standards of the 20th century. And not even the fawning, partisan Murdoch/Ailes gnomes at Fox News had ever contemplated hosting a dinner honoring a sitting president. Which is to say, the norm-shattering D.C. event of last week wasn’t Saturday’s correspondents’ dinner, even with the attempted assassination factored in; it was the Ellisons’ and their CBS News underlings’ supine prostration before the altar of Trump.
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It now appears that the Ellisons’ servility must suffice not just to win DOJ antitrust approval, but also a go-ahead from the Federal Communications Commission. Yesterday, Paramount announced that nearly 50 percent of the shares in its now expanded company will be held by the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Abu Dhabi. Those will not be voting shares, the Ellisons scurried to clarify, aware that FCC rules prohibit foreign investors from owning more than 25 percent of any company that holds broadcast licenses. As the owner of CBS—and now of CNN, which was part of the Warner Bros. empire that Paramount bought last week—the Ellisons are lousy with broadcast licenses. And even if those sovereign wealth funds won’t be able to vote their shares, it’s no stretch of the imagination to believe that the Ellisons won’t look kindly on CBS or CNN news coverage that’s critical of fossil fuels.
For my part, I think approval of the sale should also go before the interdepartmental Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which vets such purchases on the grounds of national security. Even if Saudi Arabia et al. pose less of threat to national security than the Trump-loving Ellisons themselves, the precedent of major U.S. media ownership by nations opposed to democratic and republican (lowercase for both) systems of government should be cause for concern. And not only because we’re celebrating the 250th anniversary of our national repudiation of monarchial rule, which is currently more deeply entrenched in the Gulf states than it was in Great Britain in 1776.
Besides, in recent weeks, such far-right MAGA faithful as Texas Rep. Chip Roy, now running for the state’s attorney general post, have been railing against the presence of Muslims (including Muslim citizens) in the United States. If Roy and his ilk actually mean what they say, they should be pressuring the government not to approve the Ellisons’ purchase, at least as currently funded.
Of course, that would run up against Trump’s own religious faith, in which there are no other gods besides Trump himself.
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