The following is a lightly edited transcript of the July 31 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.It’s been a while since we checked in on Donald Trump’s use of government power to silence networks that displease him, and there’s a new development. ABC just put out their challenge to the Federal Communications Commission’s vile efforts to punish it by going after its broadcasting licenses. And something funny happened. Trump’s own tweets and declarations have become evidence of his corrupt intent to use the FCC as a weapon of censorship. And this captures something really essential about Trump’s open corruption and whether our institutions are capable of constraining it.So we’re talking about all of it with one of our go-to people on these things, University of Michigan law professor Leah Litman. Hey, Leah, always good to have you on.Leah Litman: Glad to be back.Sargent: So at the center of this sordid story is FCC Chair Brendan Carr, who’s one of Trump’s most slavishly devoted accomplices. Whenever Trump gets upset about networks telling the truth about him, Carr is right there in the background. In the spring, Carr launched an early review of broadcast licenses at eight TV stations owned by ABC, which is a network Trump hates because of Jimmy Kimmel and other things. Leah, can you just bring us up to date on this, and what Carr is really all about?Litman: Yeah, so Carr has been basically attempting to use the Federal Communications Commission’s power over these media companies in order to get them to ensure there is favorable coverage for the president, and coverage that the president likes. And sometimes he does this by threatening to review licenses that allow these companies to distribute their programming onto other channels. Other times he uses the FCC power by threatening investigations into the companies that might impose regulatory sanctions on them. And so this is not the first time this has happened. You know, we saw, for example, the FCC kind of try to coerce Disney to cancel Kimmel. We saw them trying to strong-arm CBS to cancel Colbert. And they do this, again, by threatening the agency’s regulatory authority to award benefits or impose punishments on companies that are subject to their control.And these agencies, particularly the FCC, have huge power, right? If they don’t grant licenses, that’s the end of the company. They don’t have business anymore.Sargent: Yeah. And we should note here that the FCC claimed that its review of the broadcast licenses of these stations was about looking at their DEI policies. And I think we know that’s bullshit, right?Litman: Yeah, I mean, I don’t know what this administration thinks DEI stands for. You know, on our podcast, we’ve joked that it’s “dicks, ex-husbands, imbeciles.” In light of the diarrhea—it’s “diarrhea for everyone, because of incompetence,” right? Like, I don’t know. But they kind of use that word as their go-to for saying, we don’t like something that you’re doing, and so we are just going to target you.Sargent: Yeah. There’s almost like a Soviet quality to it. It’s like they really just say it, and they’re visibly full of shit, and they know it. And that’s part of the exercise of power.Litman: Yes, indeed. We can just toss this label out and use that to go after anyone we want. Sargent: And there’s nothing you can do about it. So ABC put out its formal response to the FCC’s review, and it’s scathing stuff. I’m going to read one line. ABC says, “The retaliation against ABC is a signal to every media company in the country: Accommodate the administration’s view of what news coverage should look like, or pay the price.” Leah, that’s the plain truth, isn’t it?Litman: No, absolutely. And I think the president has taken this approach to many different regulatory initiatives or prosecutions. You know, he’s tried to indict, for example, former FBI director James Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James. And it’s clear that those prosecutions also serve as a warning, right? Like, do our bidding, or stand down, or you will face the penalty. And so this attempt to bully ABC is just another example of that. I think another manifestation of this is the president’s litigation against different media companies. He sues them for running a story that he doesn’t like. And here he’s leveraging the immense power of the federal government to serve the same purpose.Sargent: Now, here’s the really good part. In order to show that the FCC is trying to punish ABC for its “content and its viewpoints”—punish it for its reporting and its speech—ABC cites one of Trump’s own tweets, in which Trump says this directly. The tweet says: “Why is it that ABC and NBC Fake News, two of the worst and most biased networks, aren’t paying millions of dollars a year on license fees? They should lose their licenses for their unfair coverage of Republicans.”Now, NBC doesn’t seem to be a part of this right now, but you get the point. There, Trump said openly that ABC should be punished for what it says about Republicans. And ABC is now using this against Trump. Can you tell us what ABC has to establish here to push the FCC off its back, and whether there’s a real chance that citing something like this thing here works?Litman: Yeah, so one of the claims that ABC is making is that the administration is targeting them for exercising their First Amendment right—for deciding what to publish and what to air. And so if the administration, if the federal government, is targeting someone because of views they express, because they don’t like the viewpoint they express or the content that they are publishing, that is a violation of the First Amendment. And so because the reason for the enforcement action, the reason for the investigation, could potentially make it unconstitutional, ABC is trying to establish why this investigation or review of the licenses is happening.Sargent: And could this work? I mean, there you have ABC citing Donald Trump saying, in his own words, they should lose their licenses for their unfair coverage of Republicans. Could that be effective for ABC in making this argument?Litman: I would certainly hope so. And these kinds of arguments have been effective, at least in the lower federal courts, where there’s a big OMG, he admitted vibe to a lot of what the lower courts are doing. In cases challenging the president’s revocation of temporary protected status, lower courts said, this is unconstitutional, it was driven by racial discrimination, because look at the vile racist smears you—the president—directed at Haitian nationals. This has also come up in the cases challenging the ban on transgender service members. Look at all the awful things that the president has said about transgender individuals. This has also come up in some other First Amendment cases, challenging the president’s and administration’s rescission of federal grants to organizations that were engaged in advocacy that the president didn’t like. And lower federal courts have often pointed to presidential statements and effectively presidential admissions that, of course he was retaliating against them, of course he was doing this because of an individual’s race, of course he was doing this because of some impermissible reason.But the big question is: Is the Supreme Court ever going to allow that to happen? Because, of course, the Supreme Court said that the president’s awful statements about Haitian nationals were not overtly racial—they excused that racial discrimination. And they have allowed the administration to implement the ban on transgender service members, despite the horrific smears and transphobic statements. And so there’s right now, I think, a disparity between lower federal courts saying, the president said what he said, we can’t ignore that, and the Supreme Court saying, no, actually, we can and we will, and we’ll just pretend it didn’t happen.Sargent: Well, I want to come back to the Supreme Court in a sec, but first, ABC’s filing goes on to quote numerous other examples of Trump making this threat explicit, especially during the 2024 campaign. In one case, he says ABC is corrupt and the FCC “ought to take away their license.” In another, he says, “ABC should lose its license because of what they’ve done.” So here you have Trump blurting out on Truth Social, and even in one case at a campaign rally, that he wants to weaponize the FCC against the network to censor it. It was basically an open campaign promise: Elect me and I’ll censor ABC. And now he and Carr are trying to do that. Right?Litman: Yes, no, absolutely. But so too was the president’s promise for a “complete and total shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” And yet when the challenge to the president’s travel ban—that applied to individuals from several Muslim-majority countries—reached the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court said, well, we’re not actually sure if campaign statements are even relevant, and in any case, we’re just going to say there is a reasonable, non-racial, non-religious reason why the president might have done this. Now, of course, they relied on the fact that that was an immigration policy where the president receives additional deference. But I am not at all convinced that they would take even, again, this specific promise to do the very specific thing that his administration is now trying to do, for a very specific unconstitutional reason, seriously and literally, and actually hold him to that, even though they absolutely should.Sargent: Point taken on the Supreme Court and how corrupt it is and so forth. And we should note here that Leah Litman wrote a very good book about that. So check it out, folks. It’s all about the Supreme Court. What’s the title again?Litman: Lawless: How the Supreme Court Runs on Conservative Grievance, Fringe Theories, and Bad Vibes.Sargent: Well, there you go. That sums it up pretty neatly. But I want to ask you, though—I’ve got to think that administration lawyers would prefer that Trump hadn’t said this stuff explicitly, right?Litman: Of course. They have to be desperately begging the people around him to shut down his phone and tell him to shut the F up, because it’s making their jobs that much harder. It’s hard to say, well, of course we should presume that the government is acting normally. There is this presumption of regularity that courts traditionally afford to the federal government, and that administration lawyers will often invoke. But that’s just supposed to be a presumption. And you should be able to rebut that presumption if you have an administration and a president just outright saying, of course, we’re doing this for unlawful reasons, here’s what we’re doing.We’re not actually following these processes and procedures, I just promised to penalize ABC because I didn’t like them.Sargent: One last question about the Supreme Court. I’ve got to think they’re going to be a little more sensitive here, because it’s First Amendment and it’s broadcast licenses. It’s so clear. As opposed to something like TPS, which, you know, the president has a lot of power over immigration and so forth. And it feels to me like the Supreme Court might—let’s hope, anyway—want to be a little more solicitous of the First Amendment rights of news organizations than they might be in other cases. No?Litman: I mean, perhaps. On the other hand, this is the Supreme Court that often protects the First Amendment rights of some but not others. You know, it has said, for example, nonprofit corporations, they have a First Amendment right not to disclose their donors, in part because when they disclose their donors, their donors are heavily criticized for contributing to right-wing organizations that are accused of racist, homophobic behavior. The court has not, let’s say, protected the rights of union organizers to exercise their free speech rights to actually organize people and register people for unions, even though it has protected the rights of the mega-rich to donate near unlimited amounts of money to elections. So, yes, in principle, this court does care about the First Amendment. In principle, of course, it should care about news organizations’ ability to publish material that they decide to publish. There are a host of right-wing news organizations that publish all sorts of crap that you would hope, right, they would recognize they don’t want to allow litigation for. And yet this court has time and time again found a way to be selective in whose rights it’s protecting, even when it purports to be applying some general principle.Sargent: The Supreme Court really does like big corporations.Litman: Yes, they do. And ABC is a big corporation, so it has that going for it!Sargent: I want to try to get at a key thing about Trump’s corruption here. The open and explicit nature of it really is a critical piece of it, in the sense that Trump wants it known that he will, in fact, use the FCC to bully networks whose reporting displeases him.This is both a demonstration of his power to his base—like, look, I can do this openly, because I can—but it’s also an explicit signal to many institutions in this country to bend the knee to him. He can’t let go of the open and explicit nature of this. It’s central to his whole project. But now, at least to some degree, it’s backfiring. Can you talk about that?Litman: Yeah. So I want to first talk about how it is central to his project, and how doing it openly very much seems to be a feature in their eyes. You know, it’s partially a way of normalizing the conduct. If they do it all the time, if it happens all the time, if they flood the zone with B.S., it’s harder to stop or challenge any of it. But another important part of it is the signaling. We are talking about, as we said, ABC, a big corporation. There aren’t always going to be big media entities with the resources of ABC that are making a calculus about whether they can or should publish a story that might upset the administration or the president or someone in his circle. And so they will look at the kind of retaliatory campaigns that the president is openly engaged in and openly threatening against these companies, and have to make a calculus. Are we in a position to potentially fight that, if the eye of Sauron turns its gaze on us? And some will make the calculus of no. So yes, the openness of this is a big part of the story, and also part of the problem.I do hope that it is also part of what allows us to push back against Donald Trump, because it is much easier, I think, to organize opposition when you can point to, “look at what he is doing, look at what he is saying.”Obviously, right, you can’t allow a president to do that—just imagine how that power could be used. And so hopefully, right, the openness of it will also make counter-organizing, counter-political opposition easier. And hopefully it will also make legal challenges easier, as we were talking about. Because when the president admits he has an unconstitutional motive, that should matter under the law. It really should. Sargent: It really should. And I think it is backfiring, at least to that degree. So I think there’s a big question here about whether Trump is succeeding or not in cowing the news media. And there’s a lot of fatalism out there about this. And I get that, right? You look at The Washington Post, what happened there. You look at CBS News, what’s happening there. And there’s a lot to be kind of despairing about. But I think the story is generally a decent one, though, that aside, because the American news media is just really big and sprawling.Litman: It’s diffuse. Sargent: Yeah. And it’s robust, it’s energetic. And I think I’m seeing some of the most aggressive reporting right now on Trump that I’ve seen in, I don’t know, in my lifetime. What do you think of that? What’s your sense—is he succeeding or is he not succeeding? And where do you think this particular thing is going to go?Litman: Look, he’s succeeding in some ways. I’m sure there are some stories, right—some turns of phrase—that we are just never going to see, because organizations make the calculus that it’s not worth it. On the other hand, you’re absolutely right that the American media landscape looks very different than, let’s say, the media landscape in Hungary, where there are fewer organizations and therefore easier to control and take over. Here there are some big media institutions, including some like ABC or The New York Times that have opted to fight back against Trump when he targets them. The New York Times successfully quashed some subpoenas that had been directed at it over its reporting about the president’s use of the Qatari Force One, you know, the jet gifted to him. And there are also a bunch of independent media organizations that have been more faithful, in a lot of ways, to the aggressive reporting even earlier in the administration.So I think that the media landscape is, you know, concerning in some respects. Obviously the consolidation of several big media entities into the hands of some Trump supporters is not a good development for democracy. But it’s not maybe quite as dire as people might think, at least if you are conscientious enough to ensure you are getting a media diet that includes a lot of independent media and media that hasn’t been taken over by Trump allies.Sargent: And where do you think this is going to go with ABC? What’s your gut tell you?Litman: I think ABC will be able to push back the threats against its licenses. I just do.Sargent: And what will that look like, basically?Litman: I think either the administration will fold—you know, if ABC, for example, gets a favorable court hearing, or some initially favorable judicial decision—or they will get a favorable judicial decision and the Trump administration will opt not to appeal it, because they just don’t think it’s one of their better cases. And there have been lots of examples where they have elected not to appeal unfavorable lower court rulings. So even though they’ve had a bunch of success in the Supreme Court, they haven’t taken all of the cases they have lost in the lower courts to the Supreme Court. So my guess is that will be how this episode resolves.Sargent: And if that happens—which I think it will as well—it will be a huge deal, not least because Trump himself keeps drawing attention to his own corrupt motives. Leah Litman, always great to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on. That was great stuff.Litman: Thanks for having me.