Trump's Stunning Admission About CNN

What Trump said about CNN wasn't a gaffe. It was a confession.

It didn’t get very much attention, but on Sunday, Trump made a stunning admission.

On Sunday morning, Trump reacted to the death of Lindsey Graham in a way that only Trump could or would. He called into the Sunday shows to talk about Graham. Trump heard about the death of a close political ally and frequent golfing partner and saw an opportunity to get more attention for himself. In some ways, it was a fitting tribute. Graham was a mainstay on the Sunday shows (despite being wrong about nearly every consequential foreign policy issue in the 21st century) and was preparing for what was supposed to be his 64th appearance on Meet the Press when he died.

Either the White House or Trump himself told the Sunday shows that Trump only wanted to talk about Graham and wouldn’t address other issues. To be clear, this is a request, not a command, and the hosts had no obligation to follow through. In fact, they did try to get Trump to talk about some other issues, which led to this stunning exchange with Jake Tapper.

Think about this for a minute. Trump says “WE are trying to get CNN to go down a normal path.” He is admitting on live television that the FCC’s approval of Paramount Skydance’s acquisition was part of a corrupt plan to make CNN more MAGA-friendly.

Now this isn’t shocking. David Ellison, the pro-Trump billionaire who owns Paramount, reportedly made promises to Trump to change CNN’s news coverage and on-air lineup. And this is exactly what Ellison did when he acquired CBS News. He installed Bari Weiss, a conservative opinion journalist with no TV news experience, to oversee the network. Weiss and Ellison immediately began gutting 60 Minutes, the news program that has been most at odds with Trump over the years.

It seems like CNN is the next media outlet in line for a billionaire-funded MAGA makeover.

Trump’s blatant admission shows just how aggressive the right is being to remake the media in their image. It’s a warning sign for democracy, and it’s a call to arms for Democrats to get their shit together and start fighting fire with fire.

Winning the Information War

Democrats tend to think politics is a contest of ideas, or a contest to see who can knock on the most doors by election day. That may have been true at one time, but today’s politics is information warfare, pure and simple.

To be fair, Democrats have gotten better at the tactics of the new politics. They are going on more podcasts, talking to more influencers, and spending more time on the platforms that matter, like YouTube and TikTok.

But let’s be honest: Democrats are massively outgunned.

Pro-Trump billionaires currently own Fox News, CBS News, CNN, the Wall Street Journal, Roku, the Washington Post, and a huge swath of local television and radio stations. More alarmingly, these MAGA billionaires control the platforms that distribute news, including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Twitter, and TikTok.

I could write a book about this (I kind of did). The Democratic donor community and party leadership should stop putting all their money into TV, which reaches fewer people every day and is ignored by almost everyone under 40. Instead, they should invest in long-term media infrastructure that can deliver our message on our own terms. We’ve made some progress, and the pro-democracy side now has outlets like Crooked Media, Courier News, Meidas Touch, and others. But those examples are still too rare, and the number of donors willing to really invest in pro-democracy media keeps shrinking.

I don’t know how many billionaires or trillionaires (hi, Elon!) subscribe to Message Box, but if any of you do, I would be happy to sit down and talk through how and why we need to start building an arsenal to compete in the information wars.

But for every non-billionaire reading this today, I encourage you to support independent, pro-democracy media. Subscribe if you can, but if you can’t, your attention is an invaluable resource. Watch, read, share, follow. The more traffic the good guys get, the more the algorithms will share that content.

I have been arguing for Democrats to change their playbook for a decade. Six years ago, I put my money where my mouth was and launched Message Box to be a counter-balance to the both-sides, misinformed political analysis that has dominated the Trump era, and to provide people with real, actionable advice on how to fight back against MAGA. I’m not saying my newsletter is going to move mountains, but I do think it has value. I am so grateful to all of the paid subscribers who make Message Box possible. If you are not yet a paid subscriber, I hope you will consider supporting my efforts. If you sign up today, you get 20% off the subscription price for a year.

Thank you so much for reading and being part of this amazing community.