In case you didn’t know, our dear President Snowflake Donald Trump is waging his own battle against the media. Whether it’s Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski or Megyn Kelly, Trump likes to pick fights with the so-called “fake media.” A large portion of his ire has been directed towards news outlet CNN, to the point where their reporters have been threatened with expulsion from White House news briefings.
But the fact of the matter is that Trump has few legal options to hit back at CNN, thanks to that pesky thing called the Constitution. As the administration considers whether to approve AT&T’s bid to purchase the CNN parent company Time Warner, Trump can’t strike back at his media nemesis without legal basis. Most experts agree that there is no real antitrust basis to deny the merger, despite Steve Bannon’s comments that they might do so. Rich Greenfield, a media and tech analyst at the investment research firm BTIG explains:
“Just because you don’t like CNN doesn’t mean you can block a merger… “You still need a legal basis, and calling CNN ‘fake news’ or ‘FNN’ doesn’t make the transaction illegal.”
Even Trump’s pick to head the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division previously said that he sees no legal basis to deny the merger under antitrust law. That’s about as clear as it gets.
Despite this, Trump’s hatred for CNN hasn’t wavered. He even took time out of his busy schedule being the President of the United States to complain about them, again, while in Poland this week. This along with the wrestling meme debacle means that CNN just continues to get wins against Trump and his supporters.
So CNN continues to be the bane of Trump’s existence, and it looks like they’re going to be laughing all the way to the bank.
Free press for the free press? It doesn’t get much better than that.
