Donald Trump is many things, but when discussing the attacks he levels via social media, “complicated” isn’t one of them. When the President fails to get satisfaction from companies as he posts such criticism, the natural next step is to ask to see a manager.
For Trump, of course, the targets tend to be a little different. So in expressing his anger over the way he gets covered by MSNBC, the liberal-leaning cable-news channel, he frequently starts by going after the talent, a la Rachel Maddow or Joy Reid, before escalating his complaints higher and higher up the food chain.
In the case of MSNBC, that top rung is occupied by Brian Roberts, the chairman-CEO of its corporate parent, Comcast. Dispensing with subtlety, Trump used his Truth Social account to lash out at Roberts — the understated executive who has overseen the company for more than two decades since succeeding his father, the late Ralph Roberts — calling him a “lowlife” and suggesting the company should “pay vast sums of money for the damage they’ve done.”
While assaults on Roberts and others of his stature could be seen as what amounts to venting, with the levers of the presidency at his disposal, Trump isn’t your average 78-year-old heavy consumer of TV news; rather, he has gradually exposed the soft underbelly of major media giants and an unexpected down side of synergy.
In that sense, Trump’s X and Truth Social salvos have turned a familiar media playbook on its head, placing CEOs in the spotlight in a way few of them covet or likely would have readily envisioned.
For years, media companies have relied on their size to achieve various advantages and objectives, reaping benefits of scale in everything from negotiating with cable and satellite providers (the more networks, the merrier) to populating streaming platforms with a vast assortment of content from their libraries. A few years ago Comcast’s NBCUniversal even came up with a name for it, Symphony, to help define the concerted effort.
Some of those assets, however, also open conglomerates to broadsides like the ones Trump has most recently unleashed at Comcast over MSNBC (or “MSDNC,” as Trump often calls it), in the same way CBS parent Paramount and Skydance Media have fretted about Trump’s animosity toward CBS News and “60 Minutes” in terms of securing approval for their merger.
Disney, for its part, paid a sizable settlement to put Trump’s defamation lawsuit against ABC News, triggered by George Stephanopoulos’ statements about the judgment won against Trump by E. Jean Carroll, in the rear-view mirror.
For journalists, the idea of caving in and settling lawsuits that appear to be of dubious merit has been understandably alarming. Former “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd called the Disney settlement “stunning” and “absolutely a gut punch to anybody that works at a major media company.”
To the companies, though, the principles at play can easily take a back seat to more pragmatic concerns, especially when they have major regulatory issues that could run afoul of the administration. In that respect, the notion of size and synergy becomes a double-edged sword, since the more businesses in which a studio operates, the more exposure it potentially has — from mergers to broadcast licenses — should officials behave in a punitive manner.
In the case of Comcast, that includes the future of SpinCo, a proposed spinoff of the company’s cable-TV portfolio (barring a few select assets) that would include, yes, MSNBC. Although New Street Research analyst Blair Levin wrote in November that there was no reason such a transaction should warrant Federal Communications Commission review, he acknowledged the “X factor” involved whether Trump might interfere in an attempt to secure “some sort of concession for how MSNBC covers news in the future.”
Notably, Trump’s FCC has already taken aim at Comcast on another front, opening an investigation into the company’s DEI policies to ensure, as chairman Brendan Carr wrote in a letter to Roberts, that Comcast is not engaged in “invidious forms of discrimination.”
As other media observers have noted, each concession has seemed to further embolden the new administration, making Trump’s rants — on their face less the product of shrewd calculation than late-night fits of channel-surfing pique — surprisingly effective in intimidating companies and executives either hoping to avoid controversy or who simply conclude they have bigger fish to fry.
What Trump called “the damage” done by Comcast sounds nebulous, and indeed, it is, beyond perhaps bruising his ego. For years, the president’s critics have frequently reminded those parsing his words not to get fooled into thinking such pronouncements are some form of three-dimensional chess, as opposed to mere bluster.
At some level, though, Trump does appear to intuitively recognize how to exploit weakness and areas of vulnerability. By name-checking CEOs, that includes an assumption that if you want to achieve victory, one path is to go directly after your opponent’s king.