It was a small thing, but a big thing: Skydance CEO David Ellison spent Saturday night in Miami, ringside at a UFC fight with President Trump, Ari Emanuel, Elon Musk and the whole fawning Trumpland coterie, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Cheryl Hines.
Ellison is desperate to get his deal to buy Paramount through Trump’s federal regulators. He’s a registered Democrat who a year ago gave $1 million to Biden. But there he awkwardly sat, next to TKO honcho Emanuel, who instead of spending the Passover seder with his family celebrating freedom, snuggled slavishly close to the seat of power.
It’s all so nauseating and – for what? The next day Trump launched a new tirade against “60 Minutes,” the news show that Ellison hopes to own and run in short order as the CEO of Paramount Global which owns CBS News. Ukrainian president Vladimir Zelenskyy was interviewed on the news magazine and dared to say that Trump is repeating Russian talking points when it comes to the war. Trump got SO mad.
Day by day, it feels like our crisis of democracy is deepening, as the rich and powerful fawn over our fascist wannabe president. We must ask: What will be left if all the powerful people continue to cave and give ground and kiss ass?
Will our system hold?
I’m no kind of lawyer, but it seems we have reached the point we’ve been dreading, where Trump is prepared to ignore a ruling of the Supreme Court to facilitate the return of an El Salvadoran man illegally arrested and sent to prison in El Salvador. It’s the constitutional crisis we’ve been waiting for – the executive branch defying the judicial branch.
It augurs a breakdown of our system of laws, and a crisis for our democracy. But even that was not as brutally chilling as what Trump said after meeting El Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele in the Oval Office on Monday. “Homegrowns,” he whispered. “Homegrowns are next,” referring to the prospect of arresting American citizens and sending them to El Salvadoran prisons.
I can’t believe I just wrote that sentence.
I tried to take the Passover weekend to retreat into family and thoughts of freedom. But we are ceding our freedom in this country.
This is the time that will test everyone in entertainment and media, let’s not kid ourselves. Disney CEO Bob Iger can pretend that an investigation into his company’s DEI practices is not a serious threat to his conduct of business at the head of the conglomerate, but I’m not at all sure. As we’ve written before, mollifying our bully-in-chief – as Disney did with a $15 million payoff over ABC News’ interview of Trump – only emboldens him.
Jeff Bezos and his Amazon-MGM can try to buy their way into favor with a $40 million Brett Ratner-directed documentary about Melania Trump. But none of it will end well (starting with giving Ratner the gig).
Last week Bill Maher made nice with the president. Behind closed doors, Maher tells us, Trump is funny and self-deprecating and, he says, our president gets it. But what does that matter, Bill, if in public Trump is threatening journalists, browbeating universities and promising to snatch Americans off the street and send them to El Salvadoran prisons?
As an American Jew, am I supposed to celebrate Trump’s crusade on behalf of antisemitism? I don’t trust it. That’s a fig leaf to allow him to push his way onto American campuses. The resurgent scourge of Jew-hatred is real, as the fire-bombing of Governor Josh Shapiro’s official residence in Pennsylvania makes clear. But Trump couldn’t take even a minute to condemn it.
We must wake up and take stock of the daily attacks on our fundamental freedoms. I applaud Harvard for drawing a line and declaring what is so obvious but apparently necessary to say: “No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.”
We need more of that. Let those in media locate their spines. And let none forget: this is not the end. History moves on. There will be a Day After Trump. How we choose to act today will be remembered.
