Trump Centers Himself at Kennedy Center Honors

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0:41A photo, a name, an inside joke. The kind of gift that actually fits the person. That's what 30 million customers have been coming back to Zazzle for over 20 years to find. Right now, save 25 % on your first order at Zazzle.com. That's Zazzle.com. Make it Z-amazing. Welcome to The Beat. I'm Ari Melber. We begin tonight as Donald Trump is trying to use and sometimes abuse power and to enrich or promote himself. The Kennedy Center honors were last night. He made an unusual choice to host, although a president could do that, But then went farther and said he wants to shape culture in ways that the government is directly restricted from doing.

1:24As you've probably followed, we've mentioned on our air, there's a big deal to do a merger with Netflix. There's other companies launching a hostile bid to get involved. We'll get into all that. But bottom line, big picture, those things are reviewed only in a nonpartisan way by the government for the benefit of the public interest, for consumers to make sure there's not a monopoly or that you were charged double for Netflix. They don't usually involve politicians or the president directly interfering for their own interests. That's the context for Donald Trump discussing the potential merger of what are two of the largest media companies in our country and also with global reach, Netflix and Warner Brothers.

2:04Let's got to go through a process and we'll see what happens. Netflix is a great company and they have a very big market share and when they have Warner Brothers, you know, that share goes up a lot. So I don't know. That's going to be for some economists to tell. And also, I don't be involved in that decision, too. But it is a big market share. There's no question about that. It could be a problem. Fact check. True. It is a big market share. And that is a legitimate thing for the government to test. That's why we have a whole antitrust division of the DOJ. But legal check. False. It's not for Donald Trump to be personally involved.

2:39Indeed, we have the independence there at the DOJ, just like you have it in other economic areas or interest rates, because for many, many years it has been settled precedent and better practice for us, the public, to not have politicians putting their thumb on the scale. If you go back far enough, this was an issue in the first Trump term when he was seen as and widely criticized for interfering in a Warner merger involving AT &T. So some of the same players, but different now, different companies involved. And then they were denying it. Then in first term version of Trump, most people around him said he's not doing this because he's concerned or against CNN or personal reasons.

3:23They denied it. Now, Trump all but admits it, saying he'll be personally involved. And there's more. His son-in-law, Jared Kushner, is now part of the hostile bid by Paramount. That's what I mentioned. They're basically the different company backed by the Ellisons, who are very close to Trump. They want to buy Warner instead of Netflix. So this is a huge conflict of interest to have the president say he wants to be personally involved. while yet again his family pops up, taking sides and presumably being in line to make a lot of money if they win. There's also this Trump supporter, pictured here in the Oval Office.

4:00Now, the Ellisons can have a relationship with Trump or any other politician. And as long as the government is not cheating or corrupting power at the federal level to help them, The Ellisons, like everyone else in our big capitalist free speech economy, have every right to publish and broadcast anything they want. Please don't mishear me to be suggesting that there are some good billionaires and bad billionaires and all that kind of talk. We have a free market and we publish a lot of material through the airwaves, through print, through companies. The New York Times is a newspaper. It's a journalistic outlet.

4:36It's also a publicly traded company. That's fine. But it's not fine and could even be an abuse of power if the government, whoever the politician, in this case Trump, are putting their thumb on the scale trying to approve, pick winners and losers, or punish their political First Amendment-protected opponents and critics through this process. And as Trump said, we're talking about major market share. We're talking about some of the largest companies with the most media in the country. Now, as for the Kennedy Center, Trump also used that backdrop to talk about how he views himself as less of a public servant of the people with a temporary time in office and then return to being a citizen and more like a kind of autocratic self-dealing monarch.

5:22Like he would really maybe joke about or actually name institutions after himself.

5:37do you think the center of what i am going to be a i don't know i hear that i don't know

5:46well let's take a moment to remind everyone about that board that he and the structure of that answer says well it's up to them and as if they might be some independent random group but in a spirit of purging that we've seen not a crime but a type of purging that breaks all kinds of nonpartisan traditions in our government, he made a point of ousting the board to have his loyalists to try to reshape what the Kennedy Center is. And historically, it has been more of a balanced kind of bipartisan thing. You can debate their choices. You can debate anybody who's honored there, musically or otherwise.

6:22But there was a balance to it. Now he's installed loyalists. As for the naming of these institutions, it's not just a red carpet comet. There's something called the Institute of Peace, which is one of those kind of government related institutions you might not think about all that often. He's already renamed it after himself. He's hung these banners that we see around Washington, something that would be a kind of mini scandal or at least a joke if most presidents did it. But this is maybe the least of the worries of Trump critics. And as we look at the guardrails being tested right now, today the Trump administration is before the Supreme Court, grasping for more power on a substantive matter, right?

7:01You have to look at all of this together. One joke on the red carpet, even one renaming you might put aside, but he wants to take the power to fire other independent government officials. He wants to reshape so many parts of the federal government as a personal or parochial activity, not a place for nonpartisan public sector expertise. So he would do to the media oversight I mentioned, the same thing he would do to the cultural oversight, the same thing he would do to the Fed if he can get away with it. And the Times reports It seems like the Trump-appointed justices and conservatives on the court are friendly to that argument.

7:34It's a dynamic that alarmed Justice Sotomayor, and she argues and warns that kind of approach could go further than monarchy.

7:50Neither the king nor parliament nor prime ministers, England at the time of the founding, ever had an unqualified removal power.

8:06Removal power is the legal term about who can fire and withdraw. the employees of the federal government. It is well established that the president gets their cabinet and gets to pick policy. That's not really in doubt. What we're talking about now is Donald Trump demanding these type of powers, consistent with what I just told you about in those other realms, well beyond what any president has demanded. And think about it. If you have a government that can go up and down the entire org chart and put in loyalists, regardless of their qualifications or their independence or even their legal scruples.

8:44You take an oath to uphold the Constitution and only put in all of your people, what do you end up with? Justice Sotomayor warns that that, which is not currently possible, leads you down a road to something that looks like a corrupt patronage machine that would make even the king's blush. And here we are in this no-king's era, while the would-be king sees his approval sag to historic lows. What he wants is everything. And what he has in terms of actual support in the country is ebbing towards some of the lowest periods we've seen. I want to bring in our professor Jason Johnson from Morgan State, an MS analyst, and Molly Jong-Fast, contributing opinion writer for The New York Times and also an analyst with us.

9:28Jason, these are separate points I'm pulling on, and I would forgive any politician a little banter on the red carpet. Oh, maybe I will, maybe I won't, if that's where it stopped. But in fact, it's not a joke. And the Supreme Court's looking at even more substantial power. What do you think is alarming here if we're going to be a society that still has free speech and a government that knows its place? the idea that donald trump is trying to put his name his stamp his power his face on everything right regardless of if he has any expertise it reminds me of you know the very popular documentary on netflix right now about sean combs and there's a key scene where should night stands on stage and says if you're tired of that guy trying to be all up in the videos all up on stage maybe you should go somewhere else that's what we're looking at donald trump is trying to be all up in everything and he shouldn't be involved in mercy.

10:25He shouldn't be putting his name on the Kennedy Center. And that not only chokes competition and makes life more difficult for us as American citizens, but it's also damaging to democracy. And that's why I see the larger issue is here. I'm going to let you finish, but I have a question. Are you the first person in the history of the world to compare President Trump to the accusations against Diddy at the Source Awards by Suge Knight. It is quite possible. I might have been one of the first people to make that connection. But given the criminal history of Diddy and the accusations of impropriety, there's a lot of parallels between him and the current occupant of the White House.

11:09You know, Jason brings the fire, Molly. Your thoughts here and why some of what's happening, I don't want to say behind the scenes, court is public, but out of the view of some of these controversies is as important? So I would say this. Donald Trump loves culture, and he loves it for a number of reasons. But I think the biggest reason is that he has sort of practiced this politics is downstream of culture, this Breitbartian thesis that if you get in the culture, you can get in and win. And that has worked for him two different times, right? We saw him in the 2024 cycle on the podcast in, you know, at sporting events.

11:50He wasn't doing that because he loves sporting. He was doing that to get in front of low frequency voters. So he does see and he knows that he got famous on The Apprentice. So his idea, the Kennedy Center is a sort of natural extension of his. And again, culture, I'm using the word culture very loosely. I'm not saying he wants to read War and Peace. I'm saying he wants to be in this other part of the media complex that's not politics. And so I think that's what we're seeing here. And he also does see an expansion here in the Kennedy Center situation. He gets to put his people in there. It's like a patronage thing a little bit, too.

12:26The two things we really see Trump love are sort of culture and clictocracy in varying degrees. Yeah. Yeah. And on the on the whole merger front, Jason, a lot of that stuff gets wonky. I mean, it gets complicated. But big picture, you're talking about media duopolies or monopolies and really high stakes. There's a reason why some of the most powerful people in the world, presidents, billionaires say, oh, well, you know, who owns Warner Brothers matters? Who owns the airwaves matters? Who owns the streaming wars matters? And here was a White House official, Kevin Hassett, on the meddling. Take a listen.

13:10Presidents prior, I believe, have never have never at least publicly declared their involvement in these decisions. They've historically been left to the antitrust department with inside of the Department of Justice. So how different is this and how should we think about that? Well, I don't think it's, you know, just rare for presidents to have opinions about big society changing mergers. The president is just very interested in making sure that there's a lot of analysis to make sure that we make the right choice. Jason, it only raises the question, what is the right choice in their view? Because they've got an FCC chair who's literally tried to shake down Disney in public.

13:51They lost that Kimmel war. We all witnessed that. For arcane legal reasons, this deal probably matters more than ABC, at least in the number of people's households it affects us. I think a lot of our viewers know, you know, They watch Netflix. They know people watch Netflix. But because they're not technically a broadcast network, that FCC chair is not involved. Instead, it's DOJ. And there's a concern that they're trying to shake it down just like FCC did to reward Trump friendly coverage and punish everything else. and Ari we don't have to speculate on shakedowns right once Trump got into office Amazon offered 40 billion dollars 40 million dollars to Melania for a documentary million yeah I mean these media companies have already said look whatever it is that we got to do to get these deals through they find ways to privately behind the scenes backdoor offer money to this administration Ted Sarandon said hey I already had a meeting with President Trump but to your point I think The larger concern here, and I say this not just as a consumer, but as labor, as employees, this will potentially destroy the middle class of Hollywood.

15:01This limits opportunities for creators. This limits opportunities for outlets. This increased the potential cost of HBO Max and access to Cartoon Network and everything else like that. This kind of merger is precisely the kind of thing that in the past we would have immediately assumed that you couldn't get away with. But this administration, if either Jared Kushner or Trump himself or anyone associated with him and find a way to personally profit, it'll go through even if the consumer suffers. Molly, I think the problem here is that you have a situation that looks so corrupt, even if it's not, people won't necessarily trust it.

15:38For example, antitrust is a real thing. The Biden administration had mixed results with it, but they certainly tried. The problem with Trumpism is so much of it seems like every part of the federal government is a branch of the executive, right? This unitary executive theory where Donald the presidency is the most important. We see the Supreme Court thinking about doing that here again. And so we see a DOJ that serves at the really at the pleasure of Donald Trump. And so even if this is not corruption, it will look like corruption to, you know, a pretty big percentage of the population. And that's why for such a long time, the DOJ has tried to be independent and at least to to show that they were really their own branch or not branch, but their own element of the government.

16:21And what we're seeing here is there's no faith. The public has no faith that she's going to execute what's in the best interest of the American people. Right. And Jason, I emphasized most speech, what we call First Amendment type of speech that matters these days is published through companies. We're a capitalist society. So you might think of the New York Times, like I said, as this special paper. What's a company? I'm speaking to you through airwaves on a company. That's how it works. And it's fine if some companies have a view, if that's Paramount's view. OK. But when Paramount starts hiring the president's son-in-law like this is some third and they're not embarrassed.

17:06This is some third rate operation. It's not technical bribery, but it's what in other countries we criticize as graft. What does that tell us about, again, a decision that's going to affect so many people's lives? The long-term danger of everything we're seeing in this administration in, unfortunately, 10 months, Ari, is the institutionalizing of corruption. This is third-world country, banana republic stuff. The idea that I have to go into business, we've seen it with crypto, we've seen it with Hollywood, we're now seeing it with an attempt at a merger. the idea that this administration has to wet their beak somehow, that somebody personally connected to them, not just the administration, not just a friend, not a donor, but someone within the Trump family has to personally benefit from any major business deal in order to go forward.

17:54That's what I fear we're going to be stuck with, perhaps for a generation, because it'll be very difficult for any future administrations to avoid that temptation to operate the same way. And that's how business seems to work. Yeah, and it's farcical. And like I mentioned in our set up tonight that a lot of these things run together. There's all this crypto business that's with Trump's own blood relatives, his own family and children. This is one of his children's husband, obviously. And you can imagine the conversations of, oh, well, Paramount's got a meeting with a bunch of the high paid folks on the call.

18:26How do we get this message to the president? Oh, well, you know, I'm going to see him at Christmas. I'm going to see him in Barra Lago Friday. It'd be funny if it weren't so damaging. Molly, I want to play for you what MTG has just said in a widely seen interview, you know, talk about how these alliances are fraying, going after Trump. I have that when we come back in 90 seconds.

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20:09Behind the scenes, do they talk differently? Yes. How? I watch many of my colleagues go from making fun of him, making fun of how he talks, making fun of me constantly for supporting him to when he won the primary in 2024, they all started, excuse my language, Leslie, kissing his ass and decided to put on a MAGA hat for the first time. MTG laying it out there in a widely seen new 60 Minutes interview. Your thoughts, Molly, on this fallout from what was once a very prominent Trump supporter? Yeah. You know, look, is Marjorie Taylor Greene's, does she still subscribe to a lot of views that I do not share with her?

20:59And most of the audience here does not share with her for sure. But is she speak, you know, is she really a believer? I think she is really a believer. And that's why she's had such a difficult time with Trump's refusal to release the Epstein files. And that's where this all comes from. Remember, she was one of the women in Congress who said, why don't you want to sign, you know, you had these women signing this discharge petition going against Trump. Now, by the way, the clock is ticking on those Epstein files. We, you know, there's a there it's law that they need to be out in, you know, less than 30 days.

21:36So I do think she she is a real believer and I do think her insight is valuable. Do I think politically she's aligned with the left? Left. Absolutely not. But I do think it's interesting how quickly Trump's turned on her and how she really felt that Trump was not doing what she you know, this sort of populism that he advertised. Right. And she invokes a track record that makes her harder to dismiss on the right while voicing at times problems of Trump that relate to evidence. The Epstein failure, the secrecy, all of that. I want to turn to another update. Both our guests stay. But this is about President Trump's pattern where there are problems that he seems to create and then say he's going to fix them.

22:21The farmers are the issue right now. Trump has announced a new$12 billion package for U.S. farmers. Many of the same people suffering the consequences of Trump's erratic tariff plans, which have not ever gotten us the 90 deals in 90 days that he promised. Take a listen. This money would not be possible without tariffs. The tariffs are taking in, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars, and were giving some up to the farmers because they were mistreated by other countries for, I don't know, maybe right reasons, maybe wrong reasons. Mistreated by the other countries, the Washington Post finds over 180 farmers have already filed for bankruptcy in just the first half of this year, which is a huge jump, 60%.

23:12Jason, your thoughts on what is a very pricey investment while the safety net, I should say, in other programs are cut. The safety net is down. The bailout is up. And the tariffs apparently continue. Ari, if I run up your water bill and then come back to your house and give you a$50 Walmart discount card, right, that doesn't really solve the problem, right? You ran up my water bill. That's what the issue is. And that's what's been happening here with Trump when it comes to tariffs, especially when you're talking about agriculture. I have a student who's actually like an agricultural student in Georgia, and he was talking to me about how the cuts in the FDA, cuts to subsidies for environmental improvements in farmers are costing people so much money.

23:59Experimental agricultural practices for land preservation and everything else like that have been cut underdoge, and it's making farming so much more expensive. This is another example of Trump trying to come in and, as you said, rescue people from a problem that he created. But here's the thing. Farming doesn't go quarterly. Farming doesn't go by election years. If you lose a whole season of crops, if you don't have the opportunity to sort of replant and redo, you could be out for years. So this$12 million isn't going to fix a farmer who may have to turn over their farmer, give it to the bank by the spring because their next three seasons of crops are ruined.

24:32Yeah, and this is a big deal. And Molly, as Jason emphasizes, some of this is on different timelines, where you live in the country and how close you are to, as we say, the food you eat. You know, there's some people are on a supply chain where they're not as close to us and they don't think about it. But this is a huge deal in farming communities, both what they've already faced and now whether this help will work if you keep the same tariff program. Right. Then Molly raises the question of do you have regular bailouts? Most bailouts respond to a single event, not ongoing policy. The Journal says when Trump imposed tariffs on China the first term, the government sent$23 billion to farmers to compensate.

25:13USDA estimates soybean growers accounted for 70 percent of the losses. I don't think we need to call up Krugman or any economist, Molly, to say this doesn't sound super cost efficient. and it is our tax dollars. Yeah, and we've seen that there, you know, 90 deals in 90 days. We don't have those deals. We just have these tariffs, right? And the tariffs are affecting their attacks on the American consumer. We are all paying this tax on things that we buy from other countries because Donald Trump doesn't understand how tariffs work. And so it's punishing farmers. It's punishing people who manufacture in certain places.