Ex-GOP strategist deeply concerned by MAGA-friendly merger: 'Worse than a banana republic'

Former Republican strategist Tim Miller slammed the emerging deal for the Trump-friendly media giant Paramount-Skydance to take control of the parent company of HBO and CNN in a panel on MS NOW Friday evening — and called it an affront to how anything should be working in a fair and competitive media market.

"Tim Miller, your thoughts on where this stands this afternoon?" asked anchor Nicolle Wallace.

"We could do about an hour on this, Nicolle. There's so many layers," said Miller. "Because, you know, I think that the initial reaction everybody has is right, which is I think that with concerns about the consolidation of media corporations in the hands of Trump's allies, right? And what that means for CNN, that matters to a lot of people. I feel pretty happy that The Bulwark is independent."

"There are elements of the corruption of this deal that I think are kind of, get lost a little bit in this that I just want to talk about," said Miller. "I mean, for starters ... this is not how things work in a functioning democracy. This isn't how things work in a functioning capitalist system either. Like this isn't really capitalism, right? It's an oligarchy, right? Yeah. What about this? Discovery has a ton of debt, a massive amount of debt ... and more debt than Paramount has in money. So how is Paramount buying this, right? Netflix has enough money to buy this. How is Paramount buying it? Well, they're debt financing it from the dad of the nepobaby, Larry Ellison, the friend of Trump, one of the richest guys in the world, and from a bunch of foreign countries, Qatar, the UAE and Saudi Arabia."

What this means, he said, is "it's a bunch of foreign entities and Trump's oligarch buddy that are debt financing this company because they want to control the media outlet like that."

"It is not as you know, it's not as if, oh, Trump just put his thumb on the scale, you know, and kind of an Even-Steven situation because he liked one owner better than the other," Miller continued. "That would be bad, you know, that would be a banana republic type situation. But it's far worse than that. This, the scale of it. And then you lay in the free speech side of this, that how are you going to act if you're a board member of some other multinational who might have issues before the government over the next year or two, after you've just watched what happened this week where Susan Rice talks on a podcast and the next thing you know, the President of the United States threatening her to get fired and, you know, helping the end of the rule of law, which is essentially what Trump ran on."

Miller hoped his co-panelists were correct that state attorneys general, like California's Rob Bonta, would still step in to investigate the deal. But don't expect anything federally, he added, because "Trump makes clear in news cycle after news cycle that the DOJ in Washington works for him."

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