Kara Swisher Says the Ellisons Are the Problem, Not Trump

The Streisand effect claimed another victim this week, and Kara Swisher is not even a little surprised. CBS, under its prospective new owners the Ellison family, quietly spiked a Stephen Colbert interview with Texas state representative James Talarico rather than air it on the linear broadcast. It ended up on YouTube. Colbert’s audience found it. Of course they did. Swisher’s diagnosis of what actually happened here is brisk and unsparing: this was not the Trump administration winning. This was a media company embarrassing itself to court a president whose approval it does not need and whose favor it cannot trust.

The Ellisons Made This Bed

Host Brian Tyler Cohen frames the segment suppression as an administration power play. Swisher corrects him almost immediately. Yes, FCC chair Brendan Carr is threatening broadcasters, invoking equal-time rules against entertainment shows in ways that stretch the concept past recognition. But Swisher has been covering the FCC for three decades and she isn’t interested in making Carr the mastermind. She calls him, twice, a tool. The Ellisons, who are trying to complete their acquisition of Paramount and need regulatory goodwill from this administration, made the call to blink. That’s the story.

The Ellisons look like the world’s most enormous suck-ups.

She isn’t particularly moved by the strategic idiocy of it either. CBS’s audience was never going to be the MAGA voters the Ellisons are presumably trying to keep happy. Colbert is already leaving in May. All they’ve accomplished is a PR bruise and a YouTube clip that more people watched than would have seen it on broadcast. The Kimmel precedent, where Carr’s pressure on Colbert’s ABC counterpart produced that show’s most-watched episode ever, apparently taught the Ellisons nothing. Swisher’s suggestion for what CBS should have done instead is characteristically blunt: invite Carr onto the show and run right over him. She thinks he’d fold. She’s probably right.

I texted one of those and I said just invite on that idiot Brandon Carr and run right over him because he’s not very smart.

Coins and Cultists

When Cohen pivots to the larger question of how to respond as a consumer, Swisher endorses her Pivot co-host Scott Galloway’s unsubscribe campaign with some practical caveats. You don’t have to be purist about it. Cancel Paramount Plus. Keep your iPhone if you want. The math still works: she cites the figure that a drop of 30,000 AT&T subscribers knocked six billion dollars off the company’s market cap. Small sustained pressure on a president who, as she puts it, operates on a very simple transactional logic.

With Trump, you give him money, he does what you want. That’s pretty much how it goes.

The Epstein digression that closes the episode is actually the most revealing stretch of Swisher’s thinking. She says she told Galloway months ago that the Epstein files were a load-bearing wall for the MAGA coalition, not a side issue that would blow over. She was right. She also knew Epstein personally, encountered him repeatedly at TED, got invited to his house before his 2019 arrest, and watched him work a room of tech people. Her read on what Trump is doing with the file releases, flooding the zone with names to diffuse attention, is exactly the kind of observation that requires actually having been inside those circles. On Howard Lutnick: didn’t do anything wrong, but lied about the relationship, which makes him a mendacious liar and that’s the thing that counts. The accountability stack, in Swisher’s model, goes criminal indictments first, then everything else in descending order of culpability. Pam Bondi, for the record, she classifies not as evil but simply bad at the job. Which, depending on your perspective, might be worse.

They’re incompetent cultists and it’s not going to… it’s like watching a group of people trip down stairs, except you’re in the way and you get pulled down with them.