Raging into the void?
President Trump doesn’t hold many rallies anymore. So some of the best views into his psyche come from posting sprees on Truth Social and unusual settings like the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
With an acknowledgment that many Americans prefer not to look anymore, here’s what I see: A president trying (and failing) to bully people with lines and lies that seem straight out of a time warp.
In a Sunday posting spree, he repeated some of his sexist and fatphobic insults from Friday night’s dinner; shared AI-generated memes of strikes against Iran; fantasized about an unemployed Jimmy Kimmel begging for money on the street; praised a congressman’s Fox News hit; and promoted a pro-Trump infomercial pushing people to buy gold mining and military contractor stocks.
Anti-Trump influencers tried to call attention to the posts — “Trump is having a mental health episode on social media right now,” Harry Sisson wrote — but the blitz barely registered.
As for Friday night’s awkwardness, some attendees left the event feeling like it shouldn’t continue next year, at least not in its current format. Vanity Fair’s Aidan McLaughlin quoted a DC denizen saying “it’s hard to escape the feeling that this dinner is more for Trump than the remaining journalists.”
I know many of you are thinking: Duh!
My inbox is full of criticism of the dinner, including from fellow journalists. I’ll just say there’s value in having journalists at different distances: Some on the “inside,” gaining access to and questioning people in power, while many others remain “outside,” writing and investigating without wondering if they’ll run into their subjects at a black-tie affair.
“In its own way, the performance and tepid response in the room of journalists and Washington personages may have underlined how Trump and Trumpism are entering the twilight hours,” Politico’s John Harris wrote. “At one time, the speech might well have elicited gasps and groans, but there was none of that. At one time, the scattered nature of his text — bouncing between topics with nothing by way of transition or linear logic — would have been startling. But that too is like a drug that wears off over time.”
Speak for yourself, John! Some of us are still startled…
After Trump’s appalling and absurd attack on CNN’s Kaitlan Collins during the dinner, Collins shared the perfect message on Instagram: The famous Eleanor Roosevelt line that “no one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”
Everyone from Wolf Blitzer to Gracie Abrams came to Collins’ defense over the weekend. “The 34-year-old CNN star seems to live rent-free in the president’s head,” The Daily Beast observed. I have to object to the Beast’s headline, however: “Obsessive Trump, 80, Escalates Feud With Kaitlan Collins.”
There’s no “feud” because a feud requires two participants. Collins doesn’t argue with the president; she asks questions and reports.
>> Collins will be Jon Stewart’s guest on “The Daily Show” tonight.
There was a highly entertaining performance at the WHCA dinner. Oz Pearlman roped in acting AG Todd Blanche, CBS News president Tom Cibrowski, Fox correspondent Kevin Corke, and Sen. Dave McCormick, among others. C-SPAN posted the whole thing on YouTube. It gets really good at the 7:30 mark…
>> Last Thursday, Trump asked Americans “if they remembered a massive television outage two years ago. That outage didn’t happen,” CNN’s Daniel Dale writes. “As he has before, the president who is fond of telling imaginary tales was explicitly asking people to recall something he had made up.” I appreciate that Dale takes these episodes seriously. We all should.
>> The Kennedy Center “used to be really thriving and busy and crowded,” but “now it’s a black hole,” Sandy Weiswasser says. And she knows better than most: She is among “a few dozen volunteers still showing dwindling visitors a hollowed-out building.” The NYT’s Elizabeth Williamson took the tour and came away with this heart-tugging story.
>> The Washington Post’s Hannah Natanson had her home raided by the FBI in January, so she has been largely off the beat this year. But she was back on Page One of Sunday’s paper with an apropos story about a free speech fight: “After Trump’s order, West Point curbed faculty speech. One professor said no.”
>> In its rush to track down leaks about the Qatari-gifted Air Force One, the Justice Department “reversed its own process,” a team of New York Times reporters explained here. Meantime, the NYT published an investigation full of new info about the rush to get Trump on the new plane.
>> Three out of four Americans don’t think Trump is telling them the truth about Iran. In a new CBS News poll, 60% say Trump makes things with Iran sound better than they really are, and 15% say he makes things sound worse than they really are.
>> Let’s keep an eye out for these Trump-ordered signs warning of “inaccurate information” at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. “Americans don’t exactly love being told what to do,” The Atlantic’s Kelsey Ables pointed out. “Some of them might even see these signs outside the museum and have all the more reason to walk right on in.”
The past week has totally changed the expectations about Paramount–Warner Bros. Discovery.
During the regulatory review process, Paramount exuded confidence and encouraged a perception that its WBD takeover was a “done deal.” But now that legal challenges have forced a standstill, the deal’s skeptics and critics might be getting more of a hearing.
In the coming days, we’ll hear more about the potential timeline for a trial in Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín’s courtroom.
“The predicament has put Paramount and Warner in corporate limbo,” Joe Flint writes in a new WSJ story. (Here’s a gift link.) “Rather than preparing to combine the companies, Paramount’s attention will be dominated by discovery, depositions and defending the merger in court, leaving integration plans largely on hold. Meanwhile, competitors continue investing, acquiring rights and expanding their businesses.”
It’s all rather reminiscent of 2017/2018, when the Justice Department sued to block AT&T’s acquisition of Time Warner, CNN’s parent at the time. The DOJ lost in court, but the battle delayed the deal for months, arguably putting Time Warner at a competitive disadvantage.
Flint notes that “Paramount must keep the deal’s financing intact while preparing for potentially billions of dollars in ticking-fee payments to Warner shareholders beginning in October.” Paramount stock touched a new 52-week low this morning…
“Paramount is bringing on trial attorney Beth Wilkinson to lead its antitrust trial against California,” Puck’s Matt Belloni scooped last night. “She successfully defended Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision. Current lead lawyer Jeffrey Kessler is staying on, but will take [a] backseat to Wilkinson.”
Wilkinson was also retained earlier this year by Nexstar as it contests a similar antitrust lawsuit brought by many of the same state AGs. The Nexstar case is slated to go to trial next July.
Paramount’s acceptance of a delay until trial (rather than face a loss at the preliminary injunction stage) amounts to a “small white flag of surrender,” Columbia Law School business professor Eric Talley told the LAT’s Meg James.
James writes: “The delay brings a different set of challenges, Talley said, including pushing the date of the takeover until after November’s pivotal midterm elections when control of Congress might change.” Talley noted that Democrats may try to haul Paramount execs in for testimony. And he has some questions of his own: “To what extent was the rush to get the deal done related to the midterms, and what press coverage was going to look like in the upcoming election season?”
>> Speaking of the politics here, Semafor’s Rohan Goswami writes that Paramount “made its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery political,” even as the company complains that the state AGs are motivated by partisanship. Some Paramount execs, he reports, have privately conceded “that they may have gone a little too far trying to ingratiate themselves with the president.”
The work continues. Last week, in a piece titled “The Paramount–WBD Merger Is on Hold. CNN’s Transformation Isn’t,” TheWrap’s A.J. Katz quoted a CNN executive saying, “We are confident in our strategy and focused on delivering it, regardless of ownership. Mark [Thompson] and the leadership team have deep experience building successful large-scale subscription businesses, and we are taking the necessary steps to ensure CNN thrives as a strong and sustainable business for decades to come.”
On CNN’s “Inside Politics” yesterday, Manu Raju shared the first footage from documentary filmmaker Alex Holder’s forthcoming project about Sen. Lindsey Graham. It turns out that Holder spent years behind the scenes with Graham, “recording hundreds of hours of meetings with world leaders like Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, candid moments and more.”
This project, currently titled “Lindsey’s Game,” “began in late 2021, and the project is currently in post-production,” per Holder’s press release. “No release date or distributor has been announced.”
Sen. Rand Paul, a longtime antagonist of Dr. Anthony Fauci, has released the so-called “Fauci diaries” ahead of a Senate hearing with Fauci this week. Fox says the pandemic-era notes reveal Fauci’s “bizarre fixation on fame as pandemic deaths mounted.” There are also references to his TV appearances and his relationships with news anchors and celebrities.
While MAGA media ridicules Fauci’s “obsession” with fame, the diary entries read more like someone documenting the objectively wild speed at which a government immunologist became internationally famous…
Recently retired Fox News star Janice Dean, whose in-laws died of Covid in New York elder-care facilities, unloaded on her former network yesterday, saying she was “triggered” by those Fauci diaries and by Andrew Cuomo’s appearance on Maria Bartiromo’s show earlier in the week.
Dean said that before Cuomo, once a villain of the Fox News universe, launched his 2025 mayoral bid, “he was coming into the building where I worked fairly often for some ‘meetings.’ That’s around the same time I was told I could no longer talk about him on air/social media etc,” she wrote on X. “When I asked what I should do, I was told ‘you can quit.’”
She added: “I could not believe that after years and years of being encouraged to talk about the deaths of my husband’s parents during Covid I was now being told that I could always leave if I didn’t like Cuomo being in the building for meetings and as a guest on all the shows.”
As The Guardian’s Jeremy Barr noted on X, it is “extremely rare to see someone with Janice Dean’s standing at Fox criticize the network upon leaving…”
Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” brought in another $87 million in North America over the weekend, his “best second weekend ever, not accounting for inflation,” according to the AP’s Lindsay Bahr.
“It’s a staggering turnout for a sword-and-sandal adventure that’s nearly three hours long and rated R, underscoring the fact that Nolan is the most bankable director of his generation,” Variety’s Rebecca Rubin wrote.
This edition of Reliable Sources was edited by Andrew Kirell. Email us your feedback and tips here.