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Credit: Gage Skidmore, Flickr (Donald Trump) / Inside the MagicOn Sunday night, President Donald Trump took to his Truth Social account to slam Disney-owned ABC for what he called “97 percent negative” coverage of his presidency so far. Trump also suggested that ABC was an “arm of the Democratic Party,” and was “biased and untruthful, an actual threat to democracy.”
In the multi-post rant, Trump also suggested that ABC should “pay up big” for its broadcasting license and threatened to revoke ABC’s right to broadcast on the public airways. Trump’s latest rant against the Disney-owned company seemed to come after former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie took to ABC’s airwaves to criticize the president.
On Sunday morning, Christie was on ABC News and was critical of the Trump Administration’s raid on the home of former National Security Advisor John Bolton, looking for classified information. Christie said that it was “funny” that when Trump had classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, the “same rules didn’t apply.”
Trump also seemed angered that ABC and NBC were reporting on his low polling numbers. Trump said that he had “some of the highest” polling numbers ever, despite a recent Reuters poll that put his favorability at 40 percent and unfavorability at 54 percent.
This latest spat between Trump and Disney comes after a relatively calm few months between the two former combatants.
In December, before Trump took office, Disney reached a $16 million settlement with the president over his defamation lawsuit against ABC News. Then, in March, Trump’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chair, Brendan Carr, announced that he was investigating Disney and ABC over their diversity practices, which he claimed violated equal opportunity regulations.
This comes at a particularly bad time for Disney, which is attempting to get its ESPN deal with the NFL through government regulators. The FCC and the Department of Justice are already investigating that multi-billion-dollar deal.
It is unclear what will happen next with ABC’s broadcasting rights, but this could cause Disney another headache at just the wrong time.
What do you think of the president threatening news outlets that give him unflattering coverage? Let us know in the comments.