• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, February 12, 2025

Trump won -- so why is he so hellbent on punishing his so-called enemies?

It reminds me of the famous exchange between Tom Hagen and Michael Corleone near the end of “The Godfather Part 2.”

“Alright, just consider this, Mike. That’s all. Just consider it,” says Hagen, seated across from Michael in the Lake Tahoe house. “Roth and the Rosatos are on the run. Are they worth it? … I mean, you’ve won. Do you have to wipe everybody out?”

Replies Michael: “I don’t feel I have to wipe everybody out, Tom. Just my enemies.” The scene is intended to convey the extent to which Michael is prioritizing vengeance over practical business considerations. 

Channeling his inner Michael Corleone, Donald Trump is cleaning house in government departments such as Justice, where he is taking his revenge on personnel who he says had a hand in investigating him.

He is also threatening his perceived enemies in the news media, most notably CBS for the way editors at “60 Minutes” cut an interview with Kamala Harris.

Trump thinks the editing amounted to a distortion that somehow reflected negatively on him. He is so bent out of shape over it that he is threatening to pull the broadcast licenses held by CBS parent Paramount Global, which would be quite an accomplishment. 

Last October, after the interview aired October 7 (four weeks before the election), Trump became so incensed that he filed suit against CBS asking for a mind-boggling $10 billion in damages for an editing job that he felt amounted to nothing less than election interference.

Not to waste too much time on the details, but as I understand it, Trump took issue with clips from the interview that were seen on a “60 Minutes” promo and also “Face the Nation” on the morning of the “60 Minutes” broadcast.

As I understand it, the clips were both taken from Harris’ reply to a question from CBS’s Bill Whitaker about Benjamin Netanyahu and the Middle East.

The clips differed somehow and Trump saw this as a distortion that affected him personally and undermined his campaign, which was victorious a month later anyway.

Quick -- raise your hand if you even remember the Kamala Harris interview. That’s just it. No one ever remembers these things except Trump. 

For the rest of us, the TV interviews, talk-show ravings and op-ed columns we consume everyday are soon forgotten.

I should know. I can’t even remember what I reviewed last week.

Under pressure from Trump in the form of a request from the FCC, CBS was more or less forced to release a full transcript of the entire, unedited interview. 

They did so last week, after which Trump interpreted the unedited material as proof of his election-interference claim. 

He declared the situation to be "the biggest Broadcasting SCANDAL in History!!" Gee, I always thought the biggest one was the 1950s quiz-show scandal of the 1950s. My bad.

To my knowledge, the broadcast licenses of stations that aired the scandalized quiz shows were never threatened.

Many of the stories found online on Tuesday about Trump’s broadcast-license threat wrongly said he sought to revoke the license of the CBS network. Or maybe he actually believes that networks are licensed in this way.

But TV networks in and of themselves are not licensed. Local broadcast TV stations are the ones that have licenses.

Paramount Global owns 28 of them in 18 markets -- including the top five DMAs (New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas/Fort Worth and Philadelphia) and 10 other DMAs in the top 20.

These stations were once among the most valuable media properties a company could own, partly thanks to the broadcast licenses they held in the era of little or no competition from other electronic media. 

Some of the old broadcasters referred to them as “licenses to print money” and to a certain extent that was true.

Today, local TV stations are facing the same headwinds as other legacy media such as local radio and newspapers (or what’s left of them).

As I understand such things, if a TV station loses its license, it goes dark. I cannot imagine a situation where 28 TV stations in big cities where they have operated and provided news and entertainment for decades would suddenly be shut down by the United States government over the editing of a news show.

But this is Donald Trump’s America, where anything is possible.