Trump’s New Threat to Revoke Broadcast Licenses is Not White Noise — It’s Deadly Serious

AP Photo/Mary Altaffer

President Donald Trump took to Truth Social Saturday evening to rage against the media — and his post made barely a ripple. The kind of attacks that once sparked institutional panic now read like just another screed in the downward scroll of digital exhaustion.

But it’s a huge mistake to ignore the president’s threats against media entities — particularly now that he’s gotten two of America’s biggest to cough up tens of millions of dollars. And now, he’s making his biggest threat of all. And it should not — and cannot — be written off as empty bluster.

He first wrote on Truth Social:

Wow, “Concast’s” NBC is down in viewership almost 28% this year. Their programming is terrible, their management even worse. They are an arm of the Democrat Party, and should be held accountable for that. Likewise, Fake News ABC!!! MAGA

He then followed up: “Networks aren’t allowed to be political pawns for the Democrat Party. It has become so outrageous that, in my opinion, their licenses could, and should, be revoked! MAGA.”

This isn’t new terrain for Trump. He’s long trafficked in authoritarian flirtation, often threatening journalists, promising to “open up libel laws,” and calling the press “the enemy of the people.”

But the ambient danger of those threats has always rested on the assumption that they were unserious. Bluff. Bluster. The standard performance of Trumpian grievance.

But what if it’s not just theater anymore?

Under normal circumstances, a president’s demand that media networks face broadcast license revocation for being politically oppositional would be treated as a frontal assault on the First Amendment. It would raise alarms inside every newsroom and boardroom in America. But we’re no longer in normal circumstances.

Because what Trump is doing—again—is less about igniting a fire than desensitizing us to smoke. And the landscape around him is shifting in ways that make his threats feel less implausible than ever before.

Enter Brendan Carr, the pro-Trump chair of the Federal Communications Commission. Carr, who appeared on CNBC Friday morning, seemed delighted when asked whether the Trump administration has been applying pressure on media companies—like the concessions wrung from Skydance as it tried to win approval for its takeover of Paramount. In fact, he bragged about it.

“What’s wrong with a presidential administration asking a company if it’s going to start covering the news fairly?” Carr said, offering a constitutional sleight of hand so deft you almost forget he’s describing state media by way of The Art of the Deal.

And herein lies the rub: In 2020, threats like Trump’s were noise. In 2025, they come amid active negotiations with media conglomerates trying to secure favorable rulings from the very regulators Trump is angling to control.

These networks—Paramount, Comcast, Disney—are not ideologically pure actors. They are profit machines built to survive. And if survival now means soft-pedaling coverage to appease a potential second Trump term? Many will quietly comply.

There is precedent, but none of it good. During Trump’s first term, the White House pushed the Department of Justice to block the AT&T-Time Warner merger, a move widely viewed as political retaliation against CNN. The courts blocked that effort, but it was an unmistakable warning shot: your corporate future depends on how friendly you are to the regime.

And yet Trump keeps testing the fences. He doesn’t need to follow through on the threat. He just needs the fear to linger. The real damage happens not in overt censorship, but in the quiet calculations of risk-averse executives who decide a softer segment is better than a regulatory fight.

The FCC, by law, does not have the authority to revoke a network’s license over content. But authority, like norms, can be bent. Brendan Carr is clearly eager to do the bending.

What Trump revealed in his Truth Social post is not new—but it is newly dangerous. Because the press doesn’t just face attacks from without. It’s being hollowed out from within—by cowardice, by compromise, and by the creeping normalization of the unthinkable.