It’s infuriating. The media narratives post-Nov. 5 focus on what Kamala Harris did wrong in her upbeat, mere three-and-a-half month presidential campaign. What did Democrats do wrong? How did they lose this group, that group, etc. How must they reinvent themeslves after a sufficient period of sackcloth and ashes?
“Democrats Lost Their Base and Their Message,” declares the New York Times’ Nate Cohn. Trump’s reelection means “the end of the Democratic Party as we knew it.”
Really? Millions face violent deportation, Ukrainians face losing their country, Gazans face continued slaughter, and the world faces the collapse of NATO and the rise of fascism American-style because Democrats have a messaging problem? And the 77 million Americans who chose those outcomes (by a “landslide” of 1.6 points)? Their hands are clean?
Mehdi Hasan is not buying it either. He issued this rant against media narratives that Democrats veered too far left:
The ‘moderates’ got *their* candidate in every single election in which the Republicans nominated Trump: 2016 Clinton, 2020 Biden, 2024 Harris… and they lost to Trump two out of three times. And now they’re going to blame *the left* for that? No f*cking way.
“There was nothing left-wing about Harris,” Hasan reminds YouTube.
Clearly, Democrats need to make more inroads in rural America where Republicans eat their lunch.
Democrats need to advertise their accomplishments more. MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell Tuesday night mentioned how Alaska’s state ferry system will get replacement ferries and on-ship wifi that no one will know arrived because of Joe Biden’s economic policies. Some RW commenter will complain that Joe Biden didn’t give Alaska new ferries, the American taxpayer did. Then he’ll credit Donald Trump with the stimulus checks Congress appropriated to which Trump added his signature.
Democrats’ victories in North Carolina this year came not simply because the GOP slate was so extreme, but because voters are more inclined to trust the Democratic brand with local and state matters than with national ones. That, despite national Democrats’ polices being overwhelmingly popular. Just more popular than federal-level Democrats are.
I hear the regular complaints that the left sat on its collective hands as conservative billionaires consolidated control over the media in the last few decades. Why don’t “our” billionaires fight back? Has anyone asked them?
Vox asks Democrats like Washington Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez where Democrats went wrong (by 1.6 points). She insists, “I think there’s a lot of work to be done on conveying cultural respect and regard for the people that are building our country, that are growing our food, that are keeping the wheels on the bus and conveying that respect sincerely and thinking and listening with curiosity.”
No argument there. Yes, there is a toxic and widening class divide in the country, but given the structure of the Electoral College, bridging the rural-urban divide is perhaps more proximate to Democrats winning back the White House and the Supreme Court.
Blame the notion that Democrats have veered too far left on right-leaning media narratives. But also on Democrats’ failure to recognize that marketing is more effective than messaging.
Americans who chose Trump are not off the hook for what comes next. They need to take a long look into the mirror.
Amazing how prices have suddenly turned around ever since the election and everything is more affordable now, isn’t it?
I guess the whole thing happened in just the last three weeks. We sure didn’t hear about it before November 5th.
Imagine that. I heard on Tv that the TSA says that this Thanksgiving will be the biggest travel day in history. Also, that the top ten travel days in history all took place in 2024.
Dr. David Kessler ran Operation Warp Speed and is a very well known public health expert going all the way back to the George H.W. Bush administration. He is concerned:
I was the Biden administration’s chief science officer during Covid-19. I was co-leader of Operation Warp Speed, which began in Mr. Trump’s first term to accelerate the development of Covid-19 vaccines. I worked on the purchase and rollout of hundreds of millions of vaccines and on developing antiviral treatments. One of my jobs was to assess the trajectory of the virus.
Now I am back at my job teaching at the medical school at the University of California, San Francisco. I have been monitoring the spread of bird flu, also known as H5N1, and discussing the situation with colleagues around the country. My concern is growing.
So far, there have been no reports of person-to-person spread of H5N1, though there have been at least 55 confirmed cases of bird flu in humans in the United States, almost entirely among poultry and dairy workers. Those infections are presumed to be primarily the result of contact with animals. In addition, a child in Alameda County in California with minor respiratory symptoms tested positive for H5N1 recently; it is unclear how the child became infected. There are likely other cases out there that are not being diagnosed.
[…]
Here is where matters stand: The most recent risk assessment from the Johns Hopkins Center for Outbreak Response Innovation, issued on Nov. 19, listed the risk of infection to farm workers as high, and the risk of infection to people in contact with affected farm workers and animals as moderate. The Hopkins report said that “while the immediate risk to the general public and health care workers is still currently low, the long-term consequences of continued, uncontrolled transmissions presents a high risk to all populations.”
California has recently seen a significant rise in detections of H5N1 in dairy herds. Experts believe that animals at as many as half the dairy farms in California are infected. That is why it is important to pasteurize milk, which kills the virus. (All milk sold across state lines is pasteurized; 30 states allow the in-state sale of nonpasteurized milk, which is labeled “raw.”) Two states, Colorado and Pennsylvania, have agreed to test pooled milk from all farms before pasteurization to monitor spread. Bulk milk testing should be mandatory in all states with dairy farms to determine the full extent of the infection on these farms and also allow us to contain the virus. As if to underline the importance of such a mandate, bird flu was detected in raw milk bought retail last Thursday from a dairy producer based in Fresno, Calif.
Without mandatory testing, bird flu will continue circulating at farms across the country, which substantially increases the risk that the virus mutates and evolves to allow a human-to-human transmission that will be hard to stop.
There will be no mandatory testing of anything under the Trump administration. Even saying it is like waving a red flag. The word “mandatory” is a curse word, particularly when it comes to pubic health. California will probably do it, if they aren’t already. But this is a big country and this sort of thing can’t be confined to any one state.
No one knows how many mutations will be required to set off human-to- human respiratory spread. That could require many mutations and may never happen. But we could also be just two or three mutations away. If the virus begins to transmit efficiently among humans, it will be very difficult to contain, according to the Johns Hopkins assessment, and “the likelihood of a pandemic is very high.”
The incoming Trump administration needs to be prepared.
That’s not happening. They weren’t prepared the last time and they won’t be this time either, particularly with the new travelling freak show at HHS.
Maybe it won’t happen. But if David Kessler is concerned we should be too.
Will this happen? Doubtful. But you never know. It’s entirely possible that some kind of civil disobedience is going to be necessary if they follow through on these plans:
Democratic Denver Mayor Mike Johnston recently said he was prepared to go to jail over his opposition to the Trump administration’s border policies. The president-elect’s pick to be the next border czar responded that he’s willing to put him there.
“You are absolutely breaking the law,” Tom Homan, Trump’s “border czar” designate, told Fox News’ Sean Hannity. “All he has to do is look at Arizona v. U.S. and he would see he’s breaking the law. But, look, me and the Denver mayor, we agree on one thing. He’s willing to go to jail, I’m willing to put him in jail.”
Stephen Miller is in charge of this project with Tom Homan as his spokesperson. Do you want to place your hopes in Stephen Miller being unwilling to push the boundaries? I’m not.
The logistics of deporting tens of millions of people are daunting. The logistics of deporting a few million, are doable. There are going to be round-ups and confrontations. And since there is a ton of grift to be made, they’re going to build out the infrastructure to make that happen. Something’s going to happen, we just don’t know how bad it will be.
The new weight loss drugs are incredibly popular and incredibly expensive. Most insurance companies won’t cover them so they end up being available only to people who can afford to pay cash which is often well over a thousand dollars a month.
The medical consensus is becoming very clear that these drugs help prevent and treat serious disease by helping people control their weight. It’s not really debatable at this point. And most people believe that if Medicare and Medicaid cover them the price will come down and insurance companies will follow. The scale will make up for whatever profits the pharmaceutical companies are making at the higher price points.
The Biden administration is taking this up and in doing so is going to put the incoming Trump administration on a collison course with a public that is clamoring for these drugs:
The Biden administration, in one of its last major policy directives, proposed on Tuesday that Medicare and Medicaid cover obesity medications, a costly and probably popular move that the Trump administration would need to endorse to become official.
The proposal would extend access of the drugs to millions of Americans who aren’t covered now.
The new obesity drugs, including Wegovy from Novo Nordisk and Zepbound from Eli Lilly, have been shown to improve health in numerous ways, but legislation passed 20 years ago prevents Medicare from covering drugs for “weight loss.”
The new proposal sidesteps that restriction, specifying that the drugs would be covered to treat the disease of obesity and prevent its related conditions.
“We don’t want to see people having to wait until they have these additional diseases before they get treatment,” said Chiquita Brooks-LaSure, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or C.M.S., noting the growing medical consensus that obesity is a chronic health condition.
RFK, the former heroin dealer and obvious steroid abuser doesn’t believe in them:
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his choice to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, has suggested that obesity should be tackled through healthy eating, not drugs.
“If we just gave good food, three meals a day, to every man, woman and child in our country, we could solve the obesity and diabetes epidemic overnight,” Mr. Kennedy said on Fox News before the election.
He’s an idiot. But there’s another Dr. in the mix who’s been a big proponent:
Dr. Mehmet Oz, Mr. Trump’s choice to lead C.M.S., has been more enthusiastic; he featured patients who took the drugs on his old television talk show. Dr. Oz’s portfolio would include Medicare and Medicaid policy, but he would report to Mr. Kennedy.
Oz isn’t going to do anything RFK and Trump don’t want him to do, obviously. So I would expect the incoming adminstration to nix this idea immediately over costs and because it’s a Biden initiative. (Trump makes most of his decisions based upon whether the previous administration was for it or against it.)
I would hope that Democrats or patient advocates or someone will make sure that the public knows about this because if he nixes it it’s not going to be a popular decision. People desperately want these drugs and have been waiting now for a few years for them to be covered by Medicare and then private insurance. Best case, Trump goes ahead and approves it and if he doesn’t people should know that Biden wanted to provide it and Trump denied them.
What’s this all about? Well, yesterday the Times published this story in which people in Trump’s orbit are obviously trying to get rid of Boris Epshteyn:
President-elect Donald J. Trump’s legal team found evidence that a top adviser asked for retainer fees from potential appointees in order to promote them for jobs in the new administration, five people briefed on the matter said on Monday.
Mr. Trump directed his team to carry out the review of the adviser, Boris Epshteyn, who coordinated the legal defenses in Mr. Trump’s criminal cases and is a powerful figure in the transition. Several people whom Mr. Trump trusts had alerted him that Mr. Epshteyn was seeking money from people looking for appointments, three of the people briefed on the matter said.
David Warrington, who was effectively the Trump campaign’s general counsel, conducted the review in recent days, the results of which were described to The New York Times. The review claimed that Mr. Epshteyn had sought payment from two people, including Scott Bessent, whom Mr. Trump recently picked as his nominee for Treasury secretary.
Boris was a top adviser throughout the Trump exile at Mar-a-lago. Somebody’s not happy about it.
President-elect Donald J. Trump has always demanded loyalty from his aides, but few have answered the call quite like Natalie Harp.
A 33-year-old former far-right cable host, Ms. Harp is nearly always at Mr. Trump’s side. She has written him a series of devotional letters, including one that said, “You are all that matters to me.” Once, when Mr. Trump was playing golf in Scotland, she ran behind his cart to keep him up to date with positive stories and social media posts.
Little known beyond Mr. Trump’s immediate orbit, Ms. Harp is now poised to play a potentially influential role in his White House, sitting right outside the Oval Office and acting as the conduit for a largely unsupervised flow of information to and from the president and helping him with his social media feed.
She has no official title, but during the campaign, colleagues referred to her as the “human printer” because she followed Mr. Trump around with a portable printer and a battery pack to charge it, so she could hand him information in hard copy, as he prefers.
But Ms. Harp also established herself at the center of a fast-moving carousel of text messages, articles and tidbits directed at Mr. Trump. This has generated concern among other aides who feel she has been far too willing to serve as a funnel for conspiratorial information at a moment when Mr. Trump appears more contemptuous than ever of attempts to manage or control him. One of her go-to news sources, people who have observed her say, is the website Gateway Pundit, which frequently disseminates conspiracy theories embraced by the far right.
In recent weeks, people with knowledge of her performance say, she has been more willing to operate within the transition team’s chain of command. Still, her role over most of the past three years speaks to Mr. Trump’s desire to maintain open channels to a wide assortment of people and unvetted sources of information. And it underscores his tendency to surround himself with people who tell him what he wants to hear. A top adviser to Mr. Trump used to say he would ask 49 people what they thought of something, stopping only at 50 if the last person told him what he wanted to hear.
Ms. Harp fits well inside those patterns, people who work with Mr. Trump have said. They have described her as a conduit, rather than a filter, and an instant enabler of his impulses. She types up his thoughts as he dictates them and she quickly dispatches them onto social media. She has sometimes arranged media interviews for him without the knowledge of Mr. Trump’s press team.
He calls her “sweetie” and treats her like his own daughter (which we know is a little weird as well…) She goes with him everywhere and does everything he wants. If anyone’s looking for a guardrail she isn’t it. She has no discretion and often enables his worst instincts on social media.
She’s a “devout Christian,” whatever that means these days, and Trump first spotted her on Fox news where she said he saved her life by signing legislation allowing experimental treatments. She was an anchor at OAN when he scooped her up to work for him in 2022. He believes that she’s the only staffer who really cares about him.
In 2023, Ms. Harp sent a series of letters to Mr. Trump that unnerved people around him, according to a half-dozen people with knowledge of them.
“You are all that matters to me,” she wrote in one of the letters, which were seen by The New York Times. The letters’ authenticity was confirmed by two people with direct knowledge of them. “I don’t ever want to let you down,” Ms. Harp wrote, thanking Mr. Trump for being her “Guardian and Protector in this Life.”
In another letter, she told Mr. Trump that she wanted to get back to “that synergy” she used to have with him, where “we’d talk about everything and nothing.”
“I want to bring you joy,” she wrote, “to feel like we can get through a day without ever having to talk ‘work.’”
Oookay. That sounds perfectly innocent…
Apparently nobody on the staff can stop her and considering Trump’s angry tweet (probably dictated to Harp) this morning.
This stuf is part and parcel of a Trump administration and it’s mostly just a distraction. On the other hand,it does show that Trump is still the ridiculous fool he’s always been and in some ways it’s our best hope that we’ll get out of this horrific four years alive. His shallowness and ineptitude are the only guardrails left. (Of course, they can be lethal as well…)
The good news for Trump is that if there’s one thing the American people really don’t mind it’s high prices, eight?
Two-thirds of Americans think Donald Trump’s tariff plans will only add to rising costs if implemented, and many are planning purchases ahead of his inauguration anticipating higher prices, according to a Harris poll conducted exclusively for the Guardian.
Trump declared on Monday evening that he would impose 25% tariffs on all goods from Canada and Mexico, and an additional 10% on China, if they did not stop what he claimed was illegal immigration and fentanyl smuggling.
But although he has called tariffs the most “beautiful word in the dictionary”, about 69% of Americans think tariffs on imports will lead to higher prices, according to the poll.
The majority of Democrats (79%), independents (68%) and Republicans (59%) all believe that tariffs will increase the prices of the goods they pay for in the US. Nearly the same percentage of respondents said that tariffs will have a significant effect on what they can afford.
[…]
The poll also showed some voters do not know how tariffs work. Though 78% of Americans felt confident they understand what a tariff is, only 48% correctly answered that American companies pay the tariffs. Nearly half of Republicans (47%) incorrectly said that foreign countries are responsible for paying tariffs, compared with 32% of Democrats.
Though tariffs appear to be more popular among Republicans, just 51% of Republicans said tariffs will have a positive impact on the economy – 27% of independents and 20% of Democrats thought the same.
I’m not sure Trump cares. He’s drink with power and doesn;t have to face voters agaib anyway. But Trump conditioned his tariffs on them stopping illegal immigration and fentanyl so there;s a fair chance he’ll just say once he’s inaugurated that his threats led to much improvement and cooperation so it’s not really necessary to actually put them on. He’s got such huge hands that these other countries folded.
But who knows? He just might do it anyway. He loves his tariffs.
Guacamole and tequila aren’t the only items set to get substantially more expensive once Donald Trump reenters the White House on Jan. 20.
The Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell schools a CNN panel on the coming impacts of Trump’s proposed 25 percent tariff on goods imported from Mexico and Canada. As the clip cuts off, a panelist asks, “What about tequila?”
View on Threads
But surely, Mexico will pay for the tariffs the way it paid for Trump’s border wall? <snark>
Rampell filled in the tariff details on Bluesky:
Tfw you forget you’re the one who signed the USMCA (oops!)www.reuters.com/world/us/tru…
If you voted out the incumbent because you thought grocery prices were too high, I got some bad news from you. For example, 90% of our avocados come from Mexico. Guac is REALLY gonna cost extrawww.cnbc.com/2024/08/17/w…
If you voted out the incumbent because you thought housing prices were too high, got more bad news from you. We import $105B in cement/lime/minerals and $28B in lumber/paper from Canada. We also *already* tariff that lumber to deathExpect construction costs to go through the roof (so to speak)
If you voted out the incumbent because you thought gas prices were too high, I have yet more bad news for you.The petroleum industry is well-integrated across North America. In the American Midwest, most refined petroleum products come from Canadabsky.app/profile/gasb…
Patrick De Haan (@gasbuddyguy.bsky.social) has more for Rampell: “Also, I’d guesstimate the impact would be billions of dollars to U.S. motorists on a yearly basis. Perhaps $6-$10 billion per year.”
If you voted out the incumbent because you thought he’d help the US auto industry, I have even more bad news from you. As trade expert @kclausing.bsky.social observes, auto parts cross NA borders many times in the process of making a car/truck. This will wreak havoc on the US auto sector
Not to mention that we import a ton of other inputs/intermediate goods from Canada and Mexico (machinery, metals, wood) that then get used by US manufacturers to make higher-value products. So the downstream US firms that depend on those firms will be screwed too.
And all that is before the retaliatory tariffs take hold, Rampell warns.
Fun fact: “The average American eats about 20 pounds of fresh tomatoes per year, two-thirds of which now come from Mexico.”asmith.ucdavis.edu/news/mexican…
Timothy Noah recalls perhaps the “pithiest summary of Donald Trump’s last presidency” came from comedian John Mulaney:
He compared it to a horse being set loose in a hospital. “No one knows what the horse is gonna do next,” Mulaney said, “least of all the horse. He’s never been in a hospital before!”
This one has. He’s just as clueless on his second visit. Perhaps more.
Noah writes, “Whatever practical knowledge Trump picked up in the first term is outweighed by the accelerating cognitive decline he displayed over the past year. He was a weak president before, and he may be an even weaker one this time.”
N.C. Republicans to write Americans out of America
MAGA Republicans are no angels … unless they’re avenging.
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow opened her show Monday night with how North Carolina Republicans in the lame-duck session retooled a dentistry bill into one that would strip power from incoming Democrats who defeated GOP candidates for governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, secretary of state, and superintendent of public instruction. The ploy is an obvious power grab, N.C. state Senator Dan Blue told Maddow. But there is more to it.
N.C. Republican legislators have among other things voted to strip the power to select State Board of Elections members from the incoming governor, Democrat Josh Stein, and reassigned it (and BoE budget control) to the incoming state auditor.* What’s the state auditor got to do with controlling the Board of Elections, you ask?
Dave Boliek is a MAGA Republican who won a seat in North Carolina’s executive branch. When in 2016 the lame-duck GOP legislature passed a series of bills to transfer executive powers to itself from the incoming governor, Democrat Roy Cooper, the state Supreme Courtstruck them down for violating the state constitution’s separation-of-powers provisions. But Boliek the auditor was elected on Nov. 5 to the executive branch. Problem solved!
Among the key state races North Carolina Republicans lost to Democrats this fall is the state Supreme Court seat held by Justice Allison Riggs, a former voting rights attorney who’s argued cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. Her GOP opponent, Jefferson G. Griffin, led on Election Night by over 7,000 votes. But after counting absentee and provisional ballots in the days after Nov. 5, Riggs led by ~622 votes. Her statewide lead shrank minimally after a majority of counties completed their machine recounts on Monday. A hand recount is expected to begin the first week in December.
But Griffin is not done. In over 300 protest documents he filed a week ago, he demanded more:
Griffin requested a recount, which the State Board of Elections granted on Tuesday, saying it should be finished up by Nov. 27, the day before Thanksgiving. The results could change if state officials decide there’s merit to formal protests Griffin also filed on Tuesday, alleging that more than 60,000 people’s votes should not have been counted at all.
Votes by felons and voters who died before Election Day or who had registrations denied, Griffin argued, had been counted improperly, reports the Raleigh News and Observer:
While some of Griffin’s protests fall under more traditional categories for challenging voter eligibility, a substantial portion of them rely on legal theories put forward by Republican lawyers that have so far been rejected by state and federal courts.
But wait! There’s still more. Attorneys for Griffin on Monday filed public records requests with local Boards of Elections demanding “a list of voters who self-identified as having never lived in the United States” and who submitted “a Federal Write-in Absentee Ballot.” (I obtained a copy of the letter.)
Let’s be clear. North Carolina Republicans want these Americans’ votes thrown out, whatever black-letter law says about their eligibility to cast them and have them counted.
A U.S. citizen who has never resided in the U.S. and has a parent or legal guardian that was last domiciled in North Carolina is eligible to vote in North Carolina.
The NC state statute is 163-258.1. Griffin and state Republicans are fishing for a loophole so they might disenfranchise enough expats — American citizens — to win the state Supreme Court seat Griffin just lost.
For reference: OUT OF THE 2.8 MILLION OVERSEAS CITIZENS ELIGIBLE TO VOTE, 3.4% VOTED IN 2022. That’s over 95,000 votes. North Carolina is the 9th most-populace state, 3 percent of U.S. population. If the percent of Americans living overseas and voting in N.C. is proportional to N.C. population, that’s potentially almost 2,900 votes. I don’t know how many expat voters claiming N.C. have never lived in the U.S., but Griffin and his colleagues are not above robbing them of their votes. Griffin trails Riggs by ~622 votes.
The state’s Uniform Military and Overseas Voters Act (UMOVA) grants voter eligibility to voters who may not already be protected by Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA), a federal law granting some U.S. citizens overseas the right to vote. One provision of UMOVA allows individuals born overseas to parents or guardians who were North Carolina residents to vote in the state. These overseas voters are not required to have lived in North Carolina or the United States themselves. The plaintiffs argue this provision grants non-residents the right to vote, in violation of the state constitution, which grants the right to vote only to residents of North Carolina. They ask the court to permanently block the provision of UMOVA and declare it unconstitutional. They also request an order requiring election officials to stop processing ballots from any UMOVA voters suspected of non-residency, remove the option for these voters to request an absentee ballot, reject any new registrations from them and ensure none of their ballots are counted in any future elections unless they can provide identification that proves their residency. On Oct. 21, 2024, the trial court denied the plaintiffs’ motion for preliminary injunction. On Oct. 22, the plaintiffs filed their notice appealing this decision to the North Carolina Court of Appeals.
STATUS: On Oct. 29, 2024, the North Carolina Court of Appeals denied the plaintiffs’ petition for writ of supersedeas appealing the trial court’s denial of their motion for preliminary injunction. Individuals born overseas to parents or guardians who were North Carolina residents will be allowed to vote in North Carolina in the November election.
On Nov. 1, the Republican plaintiffs asked the North Carolina Supreme Court to pause the lower court’s ruling pending appeal and take up the case for review.
“If Plaintiffs prevail on appeal, their constitutional claim threatens to strip untold numbers of voters — including military service members serving outside the State — of their right to participate fully in our State’s elections,” the elections board’s court filing continued. “This Court should reject Plaintiffs’ damaging request, just as the Court of Appeals did last week.”
“Plaintiffs’ petition asks this Court to throw out the ballots of U.S. citizens who cast their votes in compliance with the Uniform Military and Overseas Voters Act (UMOVA), a state statute passed unanimously by our General Assembly in 2011,” lawyers representing the state elections board wrote Monday. “Plaintiffs insist their challenge is limited to a small group of U.S. citizens who have never actually lived in the United States. But Plaintiffs’ legal argument cannot be so easily contained.”
DNC lawyers also asked the state Supreme Court to reject Republicans’ request.
The NC GOP means to win by any means necessary, no matter whose rights they violate.
Watch your backs, Dear Readers. They will stop at nothing.
* Sitting Gov. Roy Cooper will likely veto the measure just as surely as Republicans will try to override that veto before they lose their veto-proof majority in January.
Elon Musk has called MSNBC “the utter scum of the Earth.” He has said the channel “peddles puerile propaganda.” Just a few days ago he said, “MSNBC is going down.” And now he is posting memes about buying the channel.
Conventional wisdom holds that Musk — the world’s richest man and key Donald Trump ally — and his friends are just joking. But Musk’s posts are adding to the anxiety that MSNBC staffers are feeling about the reelection of Donald Trump and the recently announced spinoff of Comcast’s cable channels.
I spent Sunday on the phone with sources to gauge what might be going on. I learned that more than one benevolent billionaire with liberal bonafides has already reached out to acquaintances at MSNBC to express interest in buying the cable channel. The inbound interest was reassuring, one of the sources said, since it showed that oppositional figures like Musk (who famously bought Twitter to blow it up) would not be the only potential suitors.
But contrary to claims that Trump’s allies are posting on X, Comcast has not put a “for sale” sign on MSNBC’s door. If Comcast chief Brian Roberts really wanted to sell the liberal cable news channel, he could have done that already. Instead, he is moving MSNBC and a half dozen other cable channels into “SpinCo,” a pure-play cable programming company. The hope is that spinning off the pressured-but-profitable channels will boost shares of both Comcast and “SpinCo.”
Comcast says the transaction will take about a year. At that point, could someone swoop in with a bid for MSNBC? It’s complicated. “SpinCo” is structured as a tax-free spinoff, and immediately divesting an asset would have tax implications that could forestall any such sale.
“Typically, we would expect a two-year waiting period before any potential further strategic action by the SpinCo to preserve the tax-free nature of the spin although we believe there are scenarios where industry consolidation including SpinCo could happen earlier,” analyst Benjamin Swinburne of Morgan Stanley wrote in a note to investors last week. (Morgan Stanley is a financial advisor to Comcast.)
Plus, “SpinCo” executives may well conclude that offloading MSNBC is not in the best interest of shareholders, since the channel’s loyal audience is a form of leverage in negotiations with cable distributors. Executives involved with the spinoff say they intend to be predators, not prey – buying new channels, not selling off old ones bit by bit.
According to Stelter, a lot of people at MSNBC are excited about the possibilities which comes as a relief to me because whatever your thoughts about it are, they are one of the only bulwarks against the onslaught of right wing television dominance.
He also reports on the right’s trolling about this including dumbro Joe Rogan saying he’d like Rachel Maddows job: “I will wear the same outfit and glasses, and I will tell the same lies.” Jackass… And Trump Jr is all in on this as well, of course.
Stelter talks about the bigger problem of media capture:
While Musk and his friends trade memes and crack each other up, there’s a serious undercurrent here. It’s known as “media capture.” This happened in Hungary when far-right prime minister Viktor Orbán’s “close allies also purchased private television and radio outlets to convert them into pro-government outlets,” CNN reported earlier this month.
“Media capture” is a subset of what Protect Democracy executive director Ian Bassin calls “autocratic capture,” where “the government uses its power to enforce loyalty from the private sector.” On a recent episode of Vanity Fair’s “Inside the Hive,” Bassin said “I think we are in danger of seeing that happen across the American marketplace in all sorts of sectors.”
Gábor Scheiring, a former member of the Hungarian parliament, wrote in a new essay for Politico Magazine that Orbán “consolidated media control through centralized propaganda, market pressure and loyal billionaires.” In the US, he wrote, “liberal-minded billionaires should not sit idly by as they did in Hungary, watching the right take over the media.”
Stelter spoke with Mark Cuban about that who said he doesn’t think it’s a good investment. Thanks a lot.
The truth is that we’ve already seen that happen in radio and terrestrial TV (Premiere, iHeart, Sinclair…) Newspapers are dying and from the looks of it the ones that are hanging on have decided to play ball. So I don’t know where any of this is going. My hope is that the new media and the internet, including streaming, will provide some counterbalance. In the meantime, we realy can’t afford to lose MSNBC. It’s all we’ve got in that part of the media ecosystem and abandoning it would be a very big mistake.
