The Dictatorship
The TikTok deal would turn Trump allies’ dreams of control into reality
Jimmy Kimmel returned to ABC on Tuesdayjust under a week after the network suspended his show over comments he made about the far-right response to Charlie Kirk’s assassination. While it was a welcome change of pace in our current reality to see Kimmel back, at least for nowtwo days later, the president approved a deal that would hand his allies the video platform TikTok and a level of control over U.S. news and information that not long ago they could only dream of. These two stories are signs of how weak institutional U.S. media platforms, both traditional and social, are at this critical moment. And things are likely to get far worse.
The group of investors in the new TikTok reportedly would include not only media moguls Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan, but also major Silicon Valley businesses like venture capital firm Silver Like and software company Oracle, whose founder Larry Ellison is a major Trump ally and the second wealthiest person in the world.
Feeling underserved and unfairly attacked, tech billionaires decided the problem wasn’t their own practices, but the media itself.
TikTok’s sale still has to be finalized, including approval by China. Should the deal go through, though, Ellison would be adding a significant platform to his family’s media empire. His son, David, now owns CBS through his company Paramount Skydance. The younger Ellison is reportedly about to purchase The Free Press in a deal that would hand the conservative outlet’s founder Bari Weiss a senior leadership role at CBS News. And CNBC reports that he is mulling a bid for Warner Brothers Discovery, which owns BLN and HBO Max.
This is the latest example of the outcome of a yearslong project on the part of right-wing billionaires to disrupt the media and ultimately take it over to redirect reporting and online scrutiny of them and their allies like the president. As I detail in my recent book “Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left,” for many years, Silicon Valley received mostly complimentary coverage from the press. But over the last decade or so, it has faced more critical newsrooms and the investigative spotlight that comes with being at the top of one of the world’s largest industries. Social media companies have come under fire for their policies, like Facebook (by its own admission) letting its platform be used to “foment division and incite offline violence” in Myanmar and Twitter’s role in shaping public opinion before U.S. elections. Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, outed in a post by Gawker affiliate Valleywag in 2007, compared members of the media to “terrorists” in 2009.
Feeling underserved and unfairly attacked, tech billionaires decided the problem wasn’t their own practices, but the media itself. The solution was to break down the industry and reshape it into something more amenable to their interests. “Move fast and break things” — how Mark Zuckerberg termed the philosophy behind the tech industry’s rise to power — was the path forward here as well. Another way to look at it was creating a parallel media establishment that would serve Silicon Valley interests, as tech investor Balaji Srinivasan put it in 2023.
Tech billionaires poured millions into an alternative media ecosystem, investing in companies like newsletter platform Substack and YouTube clone Rumble. They offered prolific writers and big-name stars the ability to generate revenue through subscriptions — and in some cases, the outlets simply paid the authors upfront to move platforms. And the biggest billionaire, Elon Muskoutright bought Twitter.
The effect of this project has been to depower and delegitimize the media. Now, these wealthy allies of the far right, who have no pretense of objectivity in reporting and no commitment to fair and accurate coverage, are finding themselves with a new opportunity. Weakened media institutions, hemorrhaging money but still with huge reach, are up for sale and open to control. And with a pliant White House ready and willing to push on companies like TikTok to allow for more politically aligned ownership, ideological consolidation feels inevitable.
Weakened media institutions, hemorrhaging money but still with huge reach, are up for sale and open to control.
This isn’t to say that newsrooms and networks don’t shoulder their own share of the blame. There’s much to criticize about for-profit media, and many books and articles have been written about the corporate consolidation of news. But while imperfect, the old paradigm at least feinted at objectivity and held reporting and holding the powerful to account in nominal high regard. The future we are heading into now, with thin-skinned men who have more money than the GDP of some countries controlling our news media, is far different.
Which brings us back to Kimmel. Disney brought the late-night host back, seemingly deciding that an angry customer base was more a threat to the bottom line than the White House. But with the media landscape shifting quickly and a new regime in place, it may only be a matter of time until a MAGA monoculture takes over the mainstream airwaves.
Eoin Higgins is a writer based in New England. His book, “Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left,” is available now.
NEW YORK (AP) — About 3 million fewer people in the United States had Affordable Care Acthealth insurance plans in February compared with the same time last year, according to new federal data.
In the reportreleased Friday, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services suggested the 13% drop in enrollment from 22.1 million people in 2025 to 19.2 million this year could be attributed to a federal crackdown on fraudulent or “phantom” enrollment. But health analysts said it was more likely related to the Jan. 1 expiration of federal subsidieswhich caused a surge in plan costs that resulted in many people being unable to pay their premiums.
“We know that real people lost their health insurance coverage,” said Cynthia Cox, a vice president and director of the ACA program at the healthcare research nonprofit KFF, citing survey findings on people who had left their plans. “This coverage loss happened at the same time millions of people faced double or even triple digit increases in their premium payments.”
The new data, compiled in April but showing coverage in February, represents the government’s first official look at how people’s inability to pay their first bills this year affected total enrollment. That is because the figures capture the marketplace after a nonpayment grace period expired.
A federal estimate in Januaryshowed that about 800,000 fewer people had signed up for ACA plans compared with the same time last year, marking the first time in the past four years that enrollment had been down from the previous year at that point in the shopping window.
Cox said KFF expects the total number of people in the government healthcare program to continue to declinethroughout the year, potentially to a low of about 17.5 million. That would be a significant drop for the government’s flagship subsidized health insurance program for working-age people who do not qualify for Medicaid. In recent years, ACA plans have become a popular choice for gig workers, farmers, ranchers, hairstylists and others without health coverage through an employer.
The ACA subsidies that expired this year were at the center of a bitter fight in Congress last fall, with Democrats and some Republicans calling for their renewal. Sharp increases in health costs across ACA and other health insurance programs come as voters in the approaching November elections say affordability is among their top concerns.
Rep. Julia Letlow won Louisiana’s Republican Senate primary runoff Saturday, defeating former Rep. John Fleming.
Her win comes as a victory for President Donald Trump, who has endorsed her repeatedly throughout the race — including before she was even officially running.
Letlow made history in 2021 when she became the first Republican woman to represent Louisiana in Congress. In that special election, she won the seat that her late husband, Luke Letlow, had won prior to dying of complications related to Covid-19 in December 2020.
Letlow had no political experience prior to running for her late husband’s seat. She holds a doctorate in communication from the University of South Florida and worked as an administrator for Tulane University and the University of Louisiana, according to her LinkedIn page. Nonetheless, she won the special election House race with nearly 65% of the vote.
In Congress, she has served on the appropriations and education committees, and has been a reliably MAGA Republican.
Letlow’s win also comes as a rebuke to Fleming, who loaned himself more than $11 million, according to the Federal Election Commission, and tried running for the same seat in 2016 only to finish in fifth place in the nonpartisan primary. (Letlow did not loan her campaign any money, and took in more than $5.35 million compared to Fleming’s more than $12.1 million, FEC filings show.)
Trump has played a key role in the race. In addition to backing Letlow early on, the president also helped tank Republican incumbent Sen. Bill Cassidy’s re-election campaign in last month’s primary, based on the senator’s record of bucking his party and voting in favor of Trump’s second impeachment. In the primaryLetlow earned nearly 45% of the vote, giving her a healthy lead over both Fleming, who received about 28% of the vote, and Cassidy, who earned nearly 25%.
Ahead of Saturday’s runoff, polling showed Letlow and Fleming in a close race, with Letlow retaining a small lead in several polls.
Letlow will now proceed to the November general election to face off against the Democratic nominee, farmer Jamie Davis, who came out on top in tonight’s Democratic primary runoff.
The state has not sent a Democrat to the Senate since 2008, when Mary Landrieu won her last term in office.
Julianne McShane is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW who also covers the politics of abortion and reproductive rights. You can send her tips from a non-work device on Signal at jmcshane.19 or follow her on X or Bluesky.
Bill Pulte, the acting director of national intelligencehas stirred fear by choosing as his chief of staff a GOP election lawyer who oversaw a poll watching program that included Jack Posobiec and other conservative conspiracy theorists. The lawyer, Christina Norton, also appears to have no experience working in the intelligence community.
“It is horrifying,” a former senior U.S. intelligence official told MS NOW Saturday. “Not only does Norton have absolutely no background, experience or expertise in national security or intelligence, but her principal qualifications appear to be loyalty to Pulte and an embrace of absurd election-interference conspiracies.”
Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., who has been a vocal critic of Pulte, also raised concerns about election integrity on Sunday while taking shots at the director of national intelligence and the office itself.
“We should eliminate the DNI, and we should eliminate Pulte from the DNI until that happens,” he said on BLN, adding, “I am concerned that we’re gonna continue to cast doubt on elections in November and erode what has been a 250-year tradition of a peaceful transition of power.”
Pulte’s choice of Norton is also likely to increase concerns among Democrats that President Donald Trump intends to use the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to interfere in the midterm elections. Pulte, a loyalist with no intelligence experience, has used his current position as head of federal mortgage agencies to refer political rivals of the president for federal criminal prosecution.
Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., told MS NOW on Sunday that the choice “just confirms” that the “only job qualification is absolute political loyalty and devotion to Donald Trump.” But he expressed faith in the judicial system during an appearance on “The Weekend,” noting that “right now we have federal courts across the land that are rejecting their various attempts to take over the election process. Nine different federal courts have rejected the claim that the president, by executive order, can compel the states in the union to turn over all of their voter lists to Donald Trump and to the White House.”
The New York Times first reported Norton’s appointment.
The former senior intelligence official, who requested anonymity due to concerns of retaliation, told MS NOW the choice also “signals as clearly as could be that Pulte has been put at ODNI to misuse the awesome power of the U.S. intelligence community to interfere in the upcoming midterm elections.”
Norton, reached by MS NOW by telephone, declined to comment and referred questions to an ODNI spokesperson. The spokesperson declined to comment on Norton but defended Pulte’s tenure.
“Acting Director Pulte and his team are focused on carrying out President Trump’s national security priorities while faithfully executing ODNI’s statutory mission,” the spokesperson told MS NOW. “We are leading the Intelligence Community to provide President Trump with elite, apolitical intelligence that keeps America safe.”
Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., appearing on CBS News’ “Face the Nation” Sunday, said his objection to Pulte is “that he used personal information to target a political enemy of the president,” a reference to New York Attorney General Letitia James.
“You should not be using the force of government to crash upon somebody just because the person in charge does not like them or finds them inconvenient. The fact that Bill did that is disqualifying for someone to be the director of national intelligence,” Cassidy said.
Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said on Friday that Congress would ensure that the ODNI under Pulte will “report on legitimate foreign threats to elections, not Donald Trump’s imaginary ones.”
Himes warned that, “Trump was explicit when he appointed Bill Pulte to a job he had no qualifications for that he had elections in mind.”
Trump has said in interviews with the news media that he would like to see Pulte shrink the size of the ODNI and investigate election fraud. Pulte’s predecessor, Tulsi Gabbard, participated in investigations in Georgia and Puerto Rico to find proof of Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.
Democrats and some former intelligence officials say they worry that Pulte may try to falsely claim that his office has found evidence that foreign governments are secretly funding Democratic candidates in the midterms.
Pulte could falsely claim foreign actors have hacked U.S. voting machines, they say, and altered vote totals in favor of Democrats during the midterms. Or Trump could instruct Pulte to be present if FBI agents seize ballots and election records in November as they did earlier this year in Fulton County, Georgia.
Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, warned in a statement on Friday that Pulte should not use his position to spread Trump’s false election conspiracy theories.
“The mission of ODNI is to identify and counter foreign threats, not to import election denialism into the Intelligence Community,” Warner said. “Americans have every reason to fear that this administration is once again eroding the wall between our intelligence agencies and domestic elections.”
David Rohde is the senior national security reporter for MS NOW and a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. Previously he was the senior executive editor for national security and law for NBC News.
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