How Trump could weaponize the FCC against the media in a second term

When President Donald Trump threatened in 2017 to pull licenses from television stations that scrutinized his administration, he met resistance from his own political appointee - the Republican chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, who cited the First Amendment in objecting to the idea.

Seven years later, Trump’s latest broadsides against the media are getting a much different reception.

As the former president and his allies demanded crackdowns on ABC over alleged bias in the presidential debate the network hosted and on CBS over its editing of an interview with his Democratic opponent, the agency’s two Republican commissioners, both originally nominated by Trump, appeared sympathetic.

“Not frivolous,” one of them, Brendan Carr, said of the complaint about CBS during a Fox Business interview. “Big if true. Will look into it,” said the other, Nathan Simington, in a social media post the former president shared with millions of followers.

The shift suggests how a reelected Trump could install a more cooperative bureaucracy to weaponize the FCC as part of his broader assault against the media, including taking the extraordinary step of punishing broadcasters that air unfavorable coverage.

In a little-noticed campaign announcement more than a year ago, Trump vowed to exercise more control in a potential second term over the FCC, which is headed by a five-person bipartisan board and regulates television, radio, satellite and cable.

The commission is an independent regulatory agency. FCC commissioners are nominated by the president, but the agency is overseen by Congress.

Trump has not fleshed out the details of his pledge. But Carr, who is widely perceived to be a front-runner for FCC chairman if Trump wins, wrote a chapter of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 manifesto that proposes deploying the agency to battle what conservatives see as censorship by Big Tech. Carr also has sharply criticized the FCC’s decision to pull $885 million in broadband subsidies from a satellite company run by Elon Musk, and as Trump’s FCC chairman, could help steer billions of tax dollars to the former president’s leading campaign donor.

The high-stakes battle for control of the FCC is a microcosm of Trump’s campaign against the media, which he regularly demonizes using phrases like “enemy of the people” that echo authoritarian regimes abroad that have quashed independent journalism.

“They’re so nasty. They’re so evil,” Trump said at a recent campaign rally in Michigan before repeating his signature line of attack against the media: “They are actually the enemy of the people.”

While the FCC regulates licenses for local TV stations - not broadcast networks - the commission and other federal agencies have sweeping powers over media outlets. Trump’s appointees could use those powers to block mergers of media companies whose owners anger the president or to punish social media platforms that fact-check his posts using a smorgasbord of federal agencies that extends past the FCC to the Justice Department, Internal Revenue Service and Commerce Department.

“Trump would go farther than Nixon or any other president in terms of seeking to use powers of FCC and Department of Justice to get the media to fall in line with his point of view,” said telecommunications policy analyst Blair Levin, who supports Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris but adds: “I’m not making that up. That’s what Trump is saying, and he’s very clear about it.”

Levin, who works for New Street Research, which advises investors, added, “Combined with the needs of a struggling industry to restructure, there will be plenty of opportunities for Trump to say, ‘If you don’t give us more favorable coverage, you’re screwed.’”

A Trump campaign spokesman did not respond to questions about how he would deal with the FCC and media outlets in a second term.

Trump’s plan for the FCC is welcomed by conservatives who denounce the federal bureaucracy as a left-leaning behemoth unaccountable to voters.

“The constitutionality and legality of independent agencies has long been a debated topic,” said Adam Candeub, a Michigan State University law professor who worked in Trump’s Justice and Commerce departments and could be asked to serve again. “Independent agencies have commissioners or heads over which the president has limited removal power. This makes them ‘independent’ but arguably unconstitutional.”

In what was viewed by industry experts as a test of Trump’s aggressive strategy toward broadcasters, Florida recently threatened to prosecute TV stations that aired ads promoting an abortion rights measure opposed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, arguing that the spots were false. The move provoked a rebuke from the FCC’s Democratic chairwoman and a temporary restraining order from a federal judge who wrote, “It’s the First Amendment, stupid.”

Beyond using the levers of the executive branch, Trump also could continue to target the press with potentially costly lawsuits. On Friday, the former president sued CBS News, arguing that its editing of the interview with Harris was “deceitful.” A network spokesperson said the lawsuit seeking $10 billion in damages was baseless.

“Trump will use every tool available to him to undermine the public’s confidence in the press, which he has already done,” said Martin Baron, the former executive editor of The Post, who led the newsroom when Trump was in office. “And he’ll undermine the economic sustainability of the press, which is the path that’s taken by every aspiring authoritarian.”

Targeting broadcasters

In his first term, Trump frequently attacked the media and called for making it easier to sue journalists for libel and for yanking licenses from TV networks.

Those sweeping demands went unfulfilled. But Trump saw an opportunity in 2020 to rein in Big Tech when social media companies sought to suppress false claims about the coronavirus pandemic and voter fraud, an effort some executives later regretted as corporate overreach.

That May, two days after Twitter fact-checked Trump for the first time over his false claim that mail-in ballots were “substantially fraudulent,” he issued an executive order calling for the FCC to impose new regulations on social media platforms “preventing online censorship.”

Trump’s order sought to narrow the scope of a federal law that protects tech companies from being held liable for material posted on their sites. One FCC Republican commissioner, Michael O’Rielly, seemed to register an objection, saying in a speech that July: “It is time to stop allowing purveyors of First Amendment gibberish to claim they support more speech, when their actions make clear that they would actually curtail it through government action.”

O’Rielly said in the same speech that his remarks were not directed at Trump. But in a sign the president would not tolerate perceived dissent, he abruptly withdrew O’Rielly’s nomination for a second term, which already had cleared a Senate panel.

“It signaled a shift among many conservatives toward government micromanagement of speech outcomes through heavy-handed regulation,” said Adam Thierer, a senior research fellow at the R Street Institute, a free-market think tank.

O’Rielly did not respond to requests for comment.

After Trump left the White House, fury over the guardrails that curbed his first-term agenda, coupled with the criminal indictments levied against him, have led to an extensive effort among his allies to plan for a more potent second term.

Last year, as part of the Project 2025 blueprint for a second Trump term, Carr wrote a plan for the FCC that departed from its long-standing focus on telecommunications in favor of cracking down on alleged censorship by tech giants like Google and Meta.

Carr, an attorney nominated to the FCC by Trump in 2017 and renominated by President Joe Biden in 2023, did not respond to detailed questions from The Post about the FCC. Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025 while endorsing its mandate to stack federal agencies with more loyalists and purge thousands of civil servants.

Around the time Project 2025 was published, Trump announced in a campaign video that he would take a much more aggressive approach to the FCC in a second term, saying he would bring the agency “back under presidential authority, as the Constitution demands. These agencies do not get to become a fourth branch of government, issuing rules and edicts all by themselves.”

Presidents already exert influence over the FCC by nominating five commissioners to oversee the agency - three from their own party - and by choosing one of the majority members to serve as chair. The chair acts as a chief executive and sets the agency’s agenda. The president can steer that agenda by speaking out on relevant issues, as Trump has done in the past.

But FCC commissioners operate with more independence than other political appointees who serve at the pleasure of the president and can be fired at will. The Senate must confirm the president’s nominations to the agency, which is subject to oversight from Congress, not the White House.

As he seeks to return to the presidency, Trump has already begun putting pressure on the commission to revoke two broadcast licenses.

In the sole presidential debate between Trump and Harris in mid-September, ABC moderators corrected five of Trump’s false claims, including his xenophobic comment that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating their neighbors’ pets. The moderators did not rebuke Harris; fact-checkers found she made far fewer misleading statements.

“They ought to take away their license for the way they did that,” Trump said on Fox News.

Pressed by House Democrats during a hearing, Carr declined to offer his opinion of Trump’s request, which exceeds the FCC’s authority over the networks. He said he would make decisions “based on the law, the facts and the First Amendment.”

ABC declined to comment for this report.

One month later, Trump lashed out at CBS after it broadcast a Harris “60 Minutes” interview that included her assessment of the Biden administration’s response to the war in the Middle East. Her remarks as aired by the newsmagazine differed from a vague, rambling snippet CBS had used to promote the interview, fueling allegations that the network had manipulated the “60 Minutes” broadcast to try to make Harris appear more intelligent.

“CBS should lose its license, and it should be bid out to the Highest Bidder, as should all the other Broadcast Licenses, because they are just as corrupt as CBS — and maybe even WORSE!” Trump said on social media. In a Fox interview, Trump said he would subpoena records from CBS.

In a statement, “60 Minutes” called Trump’s allegation false and said it used Harris’s shorter answer because it “was more succinct.”

Meanwhile, a conservative group called the Center for American Rights filed a complaint with the FCC, demanding that CBS release a transcript of Harris’s full interview.

“There’s a real trust gap with a lot of media institutions, so when you see the exact same question asked and two completely different responses, the American people understandably scratch their heads,” said Daniel Suhr, the center’s president.

In interviews with conservative media outlets, the FCC’s Republican commissioners suggested the complaint was legitimate, pointing to a rule that says TV stations cannot intentionally distort the news. Appearing on a Fox Business show favored by Trump, Carr said that while he doesn’t think “it needs to be a federal case,” CBS should release a full transcript of the exchange.

But several media experts said the request for government action has no merit. The commission’s policy says it generally does not address allegations of one-sided or inaccurate news reports because “it would be inconsistent with the First Amendment to replace the journalistic judgment of licensees with our own.” Hard evidence, such as testimony or documents, is required to prove that a newscast was intentionally slanted or falsified.

The process for revoking licenses is cumbersome and can take years as TV stations appeal decisions in court. But even if it is unsuccessful, the process can drain a news organization’s resources.

“Even a frivolous license challenge or complaint can cost a lot of money,” said Andrew Schwartzman, a telecommunications lawyer who has testified before Congress. “Trump shows no regard for First Amendment rights for the people with whom he does not agree, and he can do things to make broadcasters’ lives very, very miserable.”

Efforts to revoke licenses over news content have been exceedingly rare. While presidents from both parties have clashed with the press, not since Richard M. Nixon has the White House targeted the media with such ferocity. Amid The Post’s coverage of the Watergate scandal, Nixon allies challenged the licenses of at least two TV stations owned in part by the newspaper. Their efforts failed.

As Trump lashed out at critical coverage of his first term by The Washington Post, he targeted owner Jeff Bezos’s other business interests, including Amazon, by threatening to raise postal rates. Amazon later alleged in court that Trump “used his office” to block it from a $10 billion cloud-computing contract. The Pentagon defended the process.

Some conservatives say Trump’s threats are a legitimate response to a news media they perceive as liberal.

“He’s channeling a general frustration with the media that 95 percent of the people in newsrooms are to the left and that they use that power to stifle stories or to slant things,” said Candeub, the former Trump appointee. “There’s a constant, very negative attitude toward conservatives and Republicans that people find very alienating.”

Conservatives also point to a separate effort to delay a license renewal for a Fox affiliate. A record-setting $787.5 million settlement by Fox over its false claims about voting machines in the 2020 election led the nonprofit Media and Democracy Project to take the unusual step of challenging the license renewal of a Fox station in Philadelphia. While Simington, one of the two Republican FCC commissioners, has not ruled out the complaints against ABC and CBS in his public statements, he has denounced the petition against the Fox station on First Amendment grounds.

As Trump and his allies prepare for a potential second term, several have publicly said they are gunning to settle the score with the people and institutions they believe have wronged the former president - including the media.

“We will go out and find the conspirators not just in government, but in the media,” Kash Patel, a former Defense Department official who remains close to Trump, pledged last year. “We’re going to come after you, whether it’s criminally or civilly.”

Major stakes for Musk

One of the people who stands to benefit the most from a Republican-led commission is Musk, the billionaire CEO of Tesla and SpaceX.

At a July rally, not long after Trump won Musk’s endorsement, the former president promised to “make life good” for the world’s richest person. Trump has suggested Musk could become his administration’s “government efficiency czar.” But there is much more at stake for Musk beyond a potential government post.

SpaceX controls nearly two-thirds of all active satellites in the world and has about 6,400 in orbit. Musk is seeking to launch tens of thousands more satellites to facilitate fast communication between them. For that he needs approval from the FCC, which controls access to the highly valuable spectrum that satellites use to communicate with one another.

Musk’s Starlink business also is pursuing billions of dollars in federal broadband subsidies. The FCC in 2022 blocked the company’s bid for $885 million in subsidies to deploy high-speed broadband internet in underserved rural areas. The current chairwoman, Democrat Jessica Rosenworcel, said that Starlink did not meet the program’s uplink and downlink speed standards and that the company’s proposal would require subscribers to purchase a $600 dish for service.

Carr attacked the decision as a politically motivated salvo from the left.

“This is part and parcel of a weaponization of the government, of a campaign of regulatory harassment,” he said in a Fox Business interview.

More broadly, Carr has condemned the Biden administration for delays in its $42.5 billion plan to expand broadband internet access. Most of that money is slated for fiber-optic companies, but Musk’s Starlink satellites could get a piece of the business by serving certain remote areas.

Media companies are likely to pursue potential deals in the coming years that will require regulatory approval, another area where Trump’s agencies could wield power.

He’s already shown willingness to put his finger on the scale.

Before Trump’s election, amid critical coverage of his campaign by CNN, he railed against an AT&T deal to buy Time Warner, which owned the cable network. While he was president, the Justice Department’s antitrust regulators tried to block a merger of the two corporations but lost in court. Meanwhile, Trump cheered on a different media deal involving a close political ally: the sale of Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox to Disney.

The press is likely to face other challenges from the right, regardless of who wins the election. Leonard Leo, a longtime Republican operative who was instrumental in helping Trump nominate conservatives to the federal judiciary during his first term, vowed in a recent podcast to use a war chest estimated at $1 billion for a sweeping assault on left-leaning institutions that would include “infiltrating the press.”

“We need the news industry to be bold … to be willing to speak truth to power,” said Harold Feld, senior vice president at the liberal advocacy group Public Knowledge. “Having a president who makes it clear that he is quite publicly vindictive about that … and a concern that there may be an FCC chair and majority who may be willing to play ball, is alarming.”

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Cristiano Lima-Strong and Aaron Schaffer contributed to this report.