Trump’s FCC Chief Brendan Carr Is Acting More Like a Mob Enforcer Than a Federal Regulator

For nearly a century, the FCC operated mostly outside the realm of politics, regulating the nation’s airwaves, licensing TV and radio stations, and promoting competition and diversity across the media landscape. Although FCC commissioners are nominated by the president, Congress designed the agency to act independently from White House influence, and for the most part, FCC chiefs treated that independence as essential to ensuring free speech and diversity over the nation’s airwaves.

Trump and Carr’s complete disregard for that principle is evident in their campaign of coercion against 60 Minutes, which has infuriated the president with its critical coverage of his hostility to Ukraine and imperial ambitions for Greenland. In an apparent attempt to bolster Trump’s bogus $20 billion lawsuit over last summer’s disputed Kamala Harris segment, Carr launched a “news distortion” investigation into CBS and has slow-walked approval of its parent company Paramount’s merger with Skydance Media. Paramount, in turn, has reportedly begun influencing 60 Minutes news coverage, leading to the resignation of two senior executives.

Carr, who has recently taken to wearing a gold Trump-head lapel pin, is also doing his part as a loyal MAGA minion by pressuring media giants like Comcast and Disney to join Trump’s anti-diversity crusade and abandon their DEI hiring policies. He’s threatened to block merger proposals from companies that fail to do so. In an abject display of corporate capitulation, Verizon dutifully obliged in order to win approval of its $20 billion buyout of Frontier Communications.

The Trump FCC’s assault on the First Amendment has been so shocking that it has diverted attention from Carr’s extreme pro-business, anti-consumer agenda. In April, Carr launched what he called a “massive deregulatory initiative” that public interest group Free Press described as “a brazen attempt to roll back consumer safeguards on a widespread scale for industry’s convenience.” The pro-consumer FCC policies on the chopping block amount to a big-business wish list that includes eliminating broadband label and truth-in-billing requirements, rolling back restrictions on scam robocalls and texts, and watering down digital discrimination rules that encourage equitable broadband deployment.

Earlier this month, Carr launched a proceeding aimed at eliminating FCC broadcast ownership caps that limit how many TV stations a single corporate entity can own. These rules, which are designed to foster diversity, competition, and local service across the national media landscape, have long been in the crosshairs of conglomerates like Nexstar, Sinclair and Gray Television, which together control 40 percent of all local news stations in the United States. Public interest groups warn that scrapping these rules would allow a handful of already-powerful corporate giants to further consolidate at a time when independent local news outlets are vanishing across the country.

Last week’s confirmation of Trusty violated a long-standing FCC practice in which the president simultaneously nominates candidates from both parties to fill vacancies at the agency. Given Trump’s illegal firing of two Democratic commissioners at the FTC, public interest advocates warn that Trump could fire Gomez, the remaining Democratic FCC commissioner, while elevating recently departed GOP commissioner Nathan Simington’s former chief of staff, 31-year-old MAGA ideologue Gavin Wax, who once declared that Trump’s reelection would be a “time for retribution.”

Wax would fit right in. If President Trump behaves like a Mafia boss, then Carr is acting like a MAGA enforcer, threatening Trump’s media enemies while doling out favors for corporate interests with little regard for the collateral damage done to the rule of law or the public interest. It’s a familiar Trump formula: weaponize the federal government to punish criticism, reward obedience—and screw the American public.