Jimmy Kimmel is back on ABC, and President Trump is not happy about it

President Trump threatening to sue ABC again after Jimmy Kimmel Live returned from a brief suspension. Trump writing on Truth Social, quote, Last time I went after them, they gave me $16 million. This one sounds even more lucrative. Jimmy Kimmel took aim at Trump and FCC Chair Brendan Carr in Tuesday night's show. As seeming pressure from the administration to cancel the show sparked free speech debates around the country. Joining me now on this, Terry Haynes, Pangea Policy founder. Terry, it's great to see you. This has obviously been dominating a lot of the discourse. I'm curious about the implications for the companies that operate, right, in the broadcast and journalistic and media realm. What these kinds of threats mean and are they a business threat to these companies? Well, good morning, Julie. Yeah, they are to some extent, sure. But I think there's two things happening here. I had written for markets Sunday and Tuesday both that there's kind of cross currents going on here. On the one hand, on a pure business level, what you see from not only from Disney, the broadcaster and the speaker, but from the affiliates as well, is a desire to want to mitigate risk. And so markets will take that positively, even though it doesn't affect the bottom lines very much. The bigger threat to me is to telecom companies because the FCC is an independent agency, very much like the Fed. It exercises congressional power. And if you get a situation where the White House bigfoots FCC on broadcasting standards, then the next concern is that it might bigfoot telecom companies on all kinds of things, including tech matters. And if they start doing that, you've got an agency that's dealing very arbitrarily instead of calling balls and strikes. So that's kind of a negative for me to the telecom sector. So it's essential that both Congress and the FCC itself kind of right the ship here before it's too late. Well, Terry, it doesn't seem like the administration needs to bigfoot the FCC. The call's coming from inside the House, so to speak. I mean, Brendan Carr said what he said. Maybe behind the scenes he was being bigfooted, but it didn't seem like there was a lot of pressure being brought to bear. So then, you know, what does that mean for how the telecom companies need to sort of finesse this relationship? Well, you know, whether or not Carr got some marching orders from the White House or not, I'm sure that one aspect of Carr's behavior was he knew that saying what he said would please the White House. So the effect, I think, is probably the same. But either way, you've got a situation here where an independent agency that's supposed to be calling balls and strikes has now shown itself to be susceptible to political pressure or to please certain masters. And frankly, the masters it's not supposed to be trying to please. Right. Let's switch gears but talk about a similar theme. Talk about another entity that the White House has been trying to influence. That, of course, is the Federal Reserve. Of course, despite pressure from President Trump, the Fed has sought to remain apolitical. And Fed Chair Powell even called out critics who attempted to politicize his actions in his speech Tuesday. Let's listen again to what Powell said. The truth is, mostly people who are calling us political, it's just a cheap shot. And also, we don't engage, we don't, you know, our argument is doing our jobs. We don't get into back and forth with external people. We just do our jobs. We keep our head down and do our jobs. That's what we do. And, Terry, I mean, this is entirely in keeping, of course, with Powell's line, where he has basically shut down any line of questioning that seemed to go there. He didn't really talk, give us a lot of hints about policy yesterday. But what did you take away from the speech? A couple of things, Julie. First, you know, you can compare and contrast what's going on with the Fed and the FCC. As I say, they're broadly similar sorts of agencies, although they do different jobs. The FCC is showing itself kind of too compliant to the White House. The Fed is, I think, very aggressively and properly defending its independence. In fact, I've been selling markets even before the Fed rate decision last week that one reason why they should expect 25 basis points instead of 50 was, frankly, the Fed would be anxious to show that it was not under the White House thumb and wasn't overly responding to White House pressure. What I took away from that speech yesterday is very simply that this is still Powell's Fed. What you got out of the rates decision last week was unity, except for the new governor, which was expected. I think that Trump's going to continue to be frustrated with the Fed and acting out partially as a result of the kinds of things Powell said yesterday. Trump probably also gets more frustrated with his new governor because there's a lack of influence that's already been shown, and the governors, whatever else they might be interested in, are not going to kind of follow Myron's siren song on this stuff without evidence. Finally, I know that Fed world is always very interested in looking for the cracks between governors, and that's to be expected, not least because there's money in those cracks. But what you saw from Powell last week and yesterday, I think, was a guy who's still very much in charge of the Fed and still able to marshal consensus. And in terms of the expected rhetoric that's going to continue from the White House, do you think at this point that the market can just not ignore it, but do you think that the sort of fundamental threats to the Powell Fed are largely behind us, considering he only has a few months left? Yeah, I think that's probably so. And the reason why I would say that is not just kind of my own read of the body language, but also somebody like Besant, who has been counseling calm here. What you've got is kind of a good cop, bad cop routine out of the White House and the administration where Trump blusters about this stuff and really focuses on pushing a policy argument, which the markets, frankly, are swallowing to some extent. Jerome, too late Powell. The too late part gets taken up by lots of people in the markets. But where Besant is is kind of marshalling the transition and trying to put together a new Fed that is, you know, it's not a matter of being compliant with the White House, compliant with Trump, but a different sort of Fed that's looking at itself as more of a treasury partner is Besant. Interesting. And then, Terry, finally, I want to get your latest take on the shutdown, which you've been saying for a while is going to happen. And I thought it was interesting you recently talked about how it is in both parties' interests right now to have the shutdown happen. They both are trying to sort of angle to get something out of it. Yeah, the politics are, you know, people, I think, overcomplicate this. You know, the politics are that Democrats need to show that they're willing to stand up to bad orange man. And Schumer got a lot of grief about this a few months ago, making a deal over an earlier shutdown threat. So they're going to have to have some sort of performance. At the same time, the signals Democrats are sending is we're willing to back off, provided we get some agreement on a compromise on premium Obamacare plans and premiums for Obamacare plans. And Republicans, in turn, have signaled that they're willing to talk about making a compromise there, just not in a temporary spending bill. So what you got is a situation, I think, where there's a signal from the Democrats. And at the same time, what Republicans want to signal is that, look, we're not the people that are making it difficult to deal with debt and deficit. These other folks are. The Democrats are. So it serves both of them to have a little performance this week and next. But traditionally, this hasn't mattered very much. It matters more now because of debt and deficit signals. But strangely enough, tariffs have proved to be the friends of the markets here because they're making up on a lot of the revenue that was earlier a concern.