Tim Miller ventures outside the Bulwark bubble for a candid conversation with Mario Nawfal, a Trump-friendly influencer who’s having serious buyer’s remorse. They discuss Trump’s disastrous Iran war, the voters abandoning his coalition, his increasingly dangerous obsession with his legacy, and his willingness to throw Ukraine under the bus to appease Putin.
AT A CAMPAIGN RALLY in Alaska earlier this week, Donald Trump, chuckling, introduced Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr to the MAGA faithful in this way: “And we have the FCC head, the most-feared man in government here, Brendan. Thank you, Brendan, what the hell are you doing here?”
Nominally, Carr was there because the FCC was announcing a nine-figure investment in broadband infrastructure in the Alaskan wilderness. And while this move connecting upwards of hundreds of Alaskans to 4K-quality Netflix is undoubtedly of great import, the real reason Brendan Carr was in attendance is far simpler: He has become one of President Trump’s favored tools of government interference in day-to-day life, a living avatar of the president’s own distaste for freedom of speech and the right to criticize the government.
Carr has accepted the role with zeal, oozing into his newfound fame as the president’s poison sludge with oily dexterity. Anytime there’s something media-related that Trump wants squelched, Carr folds his arms, pushes his frameless glasses up his nose, and gets to jawboning. Anytime there’s a media deal the president wants slow-walked to extract concessions from an enemy of the people (that is, the free press), Carr slams on the brakes. And anytime an administration-backed deal comes before the FCC, well, no problem at all—even if the concessions being made by the FCC to permit those deals are patently illegal.
“The FCC has become a political arm of the administration,” FCC commissioner Anna Gomez told me in a phone interview. “Prior to this administration, our decisions were based on technical expertise and policy concerns, not the political whims of the White House.”
I’ve yet to speak to a longtime observer of the FCC who thinks Carr is acting within the normal bounds of the office. What was once a government regulatory body more concerned with broad questions about what counts as profanity or with technical questions about broadband access has devolved into something much uglier, more partisan.
That he’s also a hypocrite isn’t the worst part of all this—the worst part is
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