Trump’s War With the Press Takes a Terrifying Turn
Donald Trump has announced that the next Federal Communications Commission chair would be Brendan Carr, the senior-most Republican on the FCC and a contributor to Project 2025.
“Commissioner Carr is a warrior for free speech, and has fought against the regulatory lawfare that has stifled Americans’ freedoms, and held back our economy,” Trump said in a statement Sunday. The president-elect did not mention Carr’s involvement in Project 2025.
In his Project 2025 chapter, Carr outlined his agenda for the FCC. Carr wrote that one of the goals for Trump’s administration should be reining in Big Tech’s “attempts to drive diverse political viewpoints from the digital town square,” according to Business Insider. Carr suggested that companies be unable to censor content unless it is illegal, allowing consumers to choose their own content filters and fact-checking services.
Carr’s intentions for social media are perhaps best demonstrated by X, which has been transformed into a MAGA misinformation echo chamber by its owner, Elon Musk, who seems to have permanently attached himself to Trump’s side.
Carr also pushed to ban TikTok if its parent company, ByteDance, does not sell its U.S. operations, warning that Americans were receiving their news and information from China.
In addition to addressing Big Tech, Carr also wrote that the FCC should focus on “promoting national security, unleashing economic prosperity, and ensuring FCC accountability and good governance.”
House Democrats previously called for an investigation into Carr over his partisan activity, but it did not result in formal action, according to NPR. Carr said he received approval from FCC ethics officials to contribute to the right-wing playbook.
Trump spent months on the campaign trail disavowing Project 2025, an authoritarian policy road map cooked up by the right-wing think tank Heritage Foundation, only to now welcome its architects into the fold.
Last month, Carr railed against Kamala Harris’s surprise appearance on NBC’s Saturday Night Live, calling it “a clear and blatant effort to evade the FCC’s Equal Time rule” and “biased and partisan conduct.” Trump was offered equal time on NBC, and the FCC said they had “not made any determination regarding political programming rules, nor have we received a complaint from any interested parties.”
Still, Carr took up the bullhorn on behalf of the president who’d appointed him to the FCC in 2017.
FCC rules dictate that only three commissioners can be affiliated with the same political party at any given time, and none can have a financial interest in any commission-related business. The FCC is responsible for regulating interstate and international communications by radio, television, wire, satellite, and cable. Under Trump’s first administration, the FCC repealed net neutrality rules, which were then reinstated this year.
Donald Trump has sweeping plans for his second term, and they include slashing and gutting large parts of the executive branch.
Speaking with Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo on Sunday, Trump’s nominated co-chair for the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, Vivek Ramaswamy outlined the massive agenda, revealing that the plan is akin to—or possibly more extreme than—the road map offered by Project 2025. Ramaswamy proposed that several government agencies under his helm would be “deleted outright.”
“Are you expecting to close down entire agencies? Like, President Trump has talked about the Department of Education, for example. Are you going to be closing down departments?” Bartiromo asked.
“We expect mass reductions,” said Ramaswamy. “We expect certain agencies to be deleted outright. We expect mass reductions enforced in areas of the federal government that are bloated. We expected massive cuts of our federal contractors and others who are overbilling the federal government.”
And Ramaswamy believes that he and his fellow departmental co-chair, world’s richest man Elon Musk, can expedite those changes by leaning on the highest rungs of the third branch of government: the Supreme Court.
“I think people will be surprised by how quickly we’re able to move with some of those changes, given the legal backdrop the Supreme Court has given us,” Ramaswamy told Fox.
BARTIROMO: Are you expecting to close down entire agencies? President Trump has talked about the Department of Education, for example
RAMASWAMY: We expect mass reductions. We expect certain agencies to be deleted outright. pic.twitter.com/PyavrKAHaX
From the Trump administration’s perspective, the executive branch can overstep Congress entirely to swiftly remove agencies such as the Department of Education since they were first enacted by executive action.
“It’s the unelected bureaucrats in the administrative state that was created through executive action,” Ramaswamy said. “It’s going to be fixed through executive action.”
“Think about the Supreme Court’s environment,” he continued. “Over the last several years, they’ve held that many of those regulations are unconstitutional at a large scale. Rescind those regulations, pull those regs back, and then that gives us the industrial logic to then downsize the size of that administrative state.”
After that, DOGE (the agency) would begin examining cuts to the budget. Reminder: Musk promised to trim $2 trillion from the federal budget, which constitutes more than Congress has in discretionary spending, a move that would practically defund the entire executive branch, which doles out funding for the military, national security, and federal agencies.
“And the beauty of all of this is that [it] can be achieved just through executive action without Congress,” Ramaswamy added. “Score some early wins, and then you look at those bigger portions of the federal budget that need to be addressed one by one.”
Donald Trump has his eye on yet another unqualified lightweight to lead a key agency, as the president-elect reportedly is considering loyalist Kash Patel to head the FBI.
CNN reported Friday that Trump’s right-wing allies are trying to convince him to fire Christopher Wray, whom Trump appointed in 2017 after firing James Comey for allegedly mishandling the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server.........
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