Jason Selvig & Garrison Lovely

Molly Jong-Fast (0:00)

Hi, I'm Molly Jong-Fast, and this is Fast Politics, where we discuss the top political headlines with some of today's best minds. And Florida gubernatorial candidate Byron Donalds has stripped Trump references from his campaign website. We have such a great show for you today, The Good Liars, Jason Selvig stops by to talk about Trump's crackdown on the media. Then we'll talk to author Garrison Lovely about his new book, Obsolete! The AI Industry's Trillion-Dollar Race to Replace Us and How to Stop It. But first, the news.

Jesse Cannon (0:36)

So Molly, today we had a crazy, crazy Trump UN speech and had a lot of walkouts.

Molly Jong-Fast (0:43)

Yeah, you'll be shocked to know that our crazy president is doing crazy stuff. So today was the UN and Donald Trump got up there and he did exactly the thing you thought he would. He started by bragging about looting Venezuela and threatened that Cuba may be next. Last month, we signed the largest oil deal in history, covering 65 billion barrels of oil, which will benefit both Venezuela and the United States enormously and help drive down the cost of energy all over the world. A few things about this. We know that the Venezuelan oil needs to be refined differently than some other oils. We know that a lot of the oil in Venezuela is nowhere near ready to be, you know, you don't just turn on a spigot, you have to work on the infrastructure, the oil infrastructure. So it's not so easy, it's expensive, it's time consuming. So this is just made up stuff. President Trump's campaign style speech at the UN on Tuesday was met with cheers. Just kidding, it was met with silence and rejection. Both the Cubans and the Iranian delegations walked out when he said he was going to take their countries over because that's what you do when you're being threatened by a crazy oligarch. The beginning of Trump's speech was met with awkward silences as he was waiting for, you guessed it, applause. He said, things like America is back and stronger than ever before. We are not, in case you're wondering. Later in the speech, the Iranians left, and Trump asked the audience if he should annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly and drive them into hell with no chance of survival. After that, the Cuban delegation, they left too, and that was maybe because Donald Trump called Cuba an absolutely failed state.

So it went real well.

There's a lot of traffic in New York, so that was good. And I think we can agree that Donald Trump is not using diplomacy here in any which way.

Jesse Cannon (3:00)

Yeah. So, Molly, I'm sure you are just as absolutely pissed off as I am that these attorney generals are letting the Paramount deal go through with less resistance. And to celebrate, we also get Trump TV.

Molly Jong-Fast (3:14)

So here's what happened. Donald Trump, in a desperate move to try to change the subject, has gone to war with the mainstream media. This has worked so well that he no longer has any television coverage. So now, Donald Trump has decided that he'll just start his own television station, and it's going to be called Trump TV. With Paramount and Warner Brothers under his control, Mr. Ellison, that's the son of Larry Ellison, Trump mega-donor, he will be basically Caesar Midas and Superman. Here's the thing about this Ellison merger. This guy is now going to control a fourth of all of Hollywood. He doesn't have much experience. Maybe that works, maybe that doesn't. It certainly seems like it could be problematic.

There's an ideological bent to this family. It's very right-wing. It's also very Zionist.

That is going to affect a lot of its coverage, as we've already seen with Barry Weiss at CBS. The other thing is that what Rob Bonta did, which I think was really a mistake, was that he had made it seem as if they were going to really make the Ellisons do stuff. Like they were going to make them sell CNN or make some kind of allowances that would make this thing less egregious. But instead, what he did was nothing. Basically, it's a very light prescription. They have to release 30 films, but it's sort of toothless. Ultimately, what Rob Bonta did was he showed us that Democrats and attorney generals could prevent this but didn't want to. I think that is bad. I mean, I almost feel like it would have been better if they just had let it go through in the first place. Because now we know that the attorney generals did not want to do anything. They did not want to do the right thing. There are a couple of different schools of thought into what happened. There's a theory of the case that Gavin Newsom, who has done a lot of really sketchy stuff as he's leaving office, including signing some anti-trans legislation and killing the billionaire tax. There's a theory of the case that Bonta got a lot of pressure from Gavin. There's a theory of the case that Bonta just did it himself. Either way, it just looks so terribly. It looks like the Democrats are feckless.