Trump will only succeed if more institutions cower at his feet

As treacherous as he is, you cannot entirely blame Donald Trump for this one.

Last Oct. 7, CBS's 60 Minutes aired a relatively uneventful interview with Vice President Kamala Harris, who of course was Trump’s presidential opponent. Nothing special — or so it seemed.

Trump’s team noticed that a Harris answer aired on 60 Minutes — about the Israel–Hamas conflict — was shorter than the version that aired the day before on CBS’s Face the Nation. And Trump seized on the discovery for one of his hourly tantrums.

The technical journalistic term for the significance of the different clips is “nothing.”

But on a scale of one to “Obama was born in Kenya,” Trump rated it a nine and promptly demanded that CBS lose its broadcast license. As one does.

Everyone had a good laugh. As conspiracy theories go, this felt less like “we faked the moon landing,” and more like “we landed on the moon but covered up the secret that our astronauts died of cheese allergies.”

But Trump wasn’t done. On Oct. 31, five days before the election, Trump filed a $10 billion lawsuit — yes, billion with a B — against Paramount, owner of CBS. But not for libel, slander, or defamation, none of which could remotely be alleged.

No, in a wicked stroke of judicial chicanery, Trump’s legal team set off for the friendly confines of Texas to sue Paramount under something called the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act — for “deceptive advertising.” God help us.

Essentially, Trump claimed that the allegedly unfair editing of his political opponent’s interview in her favor amounted to consumer fraud against him. Can you imagine if that standard were held to every other race in the nation?

And that one state’s funky deceptive advertising law would take precedence over the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of the press?

One might call this a novel legal theory. But it’s far more bizarre than that.

Suffice it to say that Trump’s lawyers didn’t get tossed out the courthouse front doors as if it were a Texas saloon, but that only did not happen for three reasons:

• First, venue matters. Trump owns a huge home-field advantage in Texas and effectively venue-shopped to get it.
• Second, Trump was elected president five days after filing the lawsuit. Had he lost the election, his only court appearances would have involved playing defense. This case would have been long gone.
• Third, as president, Trump suddenly got his grip on something Paramount desperately wanted: regulatory approval of an $8 billion–plus merger with Skydance Media — one expected to result in the emergence of a $28 billion behemoth.

Trump’s approval was now the key to tens of billions of dollars. If he said yes, gold rained down. If he said no, well, Paramount didn’t want to think about that.

So it was nothing for Paramount to pay $16 million to Trump’s future presidential library — what a ghastly concept — and to his lawyers. Further trivializing it all, Paramount removed the Harris interview from its archives. And why again?

Were ours a functioning democracy, the next order of business for Paramount after closing the deal would be a chat with federal investigators to determine whether that $16 million payout constituted high-stakes bribery of Trump.

Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Ron Wyden are all demanding as much, as they should. But they’re not Republicans, so it’s hard to see that going anywhere.

Paramount should be held to account for this travesty. Trump is Trump, and as much as he deserves all the condemnation in the world for his assault on our democracy, he can only succeed if once-proud institutions like CBS cower at his feet.

This is painful for those of us who grew up with Walter Cronkite and all the other giants of CBS. And decades of unparalleled excellence at 60 Minutes, which through no fault of its own has been slandered by Trump and abandoned by its own bosses.

It’s an American tragedy that this great institution has gotten sold out in service of a merger. And how ironic it is that it’s also in service of Trump, the man who has channeled some of history’s worst dictators in routinely tarring the media as “the enemy of the people.”

Now, through no fault of its journalists, CBS finds itself thrust into that role. When the owners of the network sell out all principles of press freedom — when they put their merger above their country — it is the American people who pay the greatest price.

In the settlement, Paramount made one of those wooden statements that there would be “no apology or admission of wrongdoing.” Wrong — both of these should be forthcoming right now — directed not to Trump, but to those millions of betrayed Americans. This is a twisted tale.

It really should be a 60 Minutes story.