Nervous Billionaires Party While Albanians Fight Back
Paramount wins a round and Trump desecrates the White House. Here’s what you can do about it.
Hey, Raw America family. Welcome to the Sunday Wrapup. I’m here with my cup of coffee, watching videos of dirt bikes flipping on the White House lawn and trying to decide whether to laugh or scream.
To everyone who became a paying subscriber this week, thank you. You’re the reason we can tell you the truth about what’s happening in Washington. We have you, and this week you showed up.
If you haven’t yet become a subscriber, I hope this newsletter convinces you. You and I are the last defense against billionaire capture of our press. The billionaires just swallowed CNN. If you’ve been reading on a free subscription and you’ve been meaning to upgrade, this is the week it matters most.
Paramount Is Popping Champagne with Trump Team Right Now
On Friday, Trump’s DOJ approved Paramount’s $111 billion merger with Warner Bros. Discovery. No divestitures. No concessions. No conditions. The deal places CNN and CBS News under the same roof, controlled by pro-Trump billionaire David Ellison.
This morning, while the cage fights play out on the South Lawn, Paramount is hosting a private brunch at Ned’s Club, the MAGA hotspot members club steps from the White House. Ellison’s executives will raise glasses with administration officials.
Let’s be clear about how this happened. Because it wasn’t an accident. For months, Ellison and his father Larry — one of Trump’s closest billionaire allies — worked the president personally. David made repeated trips to Washington, privately assuring officials that CNN would change direction. Paramount hosted a gathering this spring “honoring the Trump White House” while the merger was under review. And Bari Weiss’s overhaul of CBS News sent the loudest signal of all: this would be a friendly empire.
This is the story of this era in one weekend. A president who treats antitrust law as a favor to be traded, and a billionaire who understood that the only regulator who mattered was an audience of one. Thousands of actors, journalists, and academics signed letters begging the government to stop it. The government waved it through.
It’s not over. The merger still faces European regulators, and a coalition of Democratic attorneys general led by California’s Rob Bonta is preparing a lawsuit to block it. Every day Ellison can’t close past September 30 costs Paramount a “ticking fee” of roughly $6.9 million. So there’s pressure. But make no mistake about what Friday represented: the people who own the news now answer to Trump.
We’ve been warning of this. It’s why we built Raw America: so there’s at least one place left where the story doesn’t get softened to please a king. If you believe we need to take the fight to billionaires, consider upgrading to a paying subscription. It’s the best way to stay in the fight.
A Cage Match for a King
Today, Donald Trump turns 80. To try to mask his age, the oldest president in American history marked it by building a childish 92-foot octagon on the South Lawn for “UFC Freedom 250.”
The price tag so far, according to The Daily Beast? $60 million.
Trump’s gladiators held their press conference Friday at the Lincoln Memorial, where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. The ceremonial weigh-in happened at the Ellipse, where Trump held his “Stop the Steal” rally. The fighters will reportedly walk to the cage from the Oval Office.
Trump revealed Friday that he intends to use the event as a recruitment tool: a “conscription” pitch to send Americans to a war in Iran. He’s also reportedly bought up to $50,000 in stock in the UFC’s parent company, meaning he stands to profit from the spectacle he’s staging on public land.
People can’t afford health insurance. Inflation is at a three-year high. Immigrant children sit in detention camps. And the answer from this White House is motorcycle flips and ring girls in the shadow of the Washington Monument.
People-Power Can — And Will — Stop Billionaires
Five thousand miles away, I see reasons for hope. It comes from a wetland full of flamingos on the Albanian coast.
You’ll remember the story: Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump set their sights on a protected stretch of Albania’s shoreline and the uninhabited island of Sazan, planning to bulldoze one of Europe’s last wild river deltas into a luxury playground for the rich.
Ivanka described “discovering” the island from a friend’s boat, as if a place where flamingos nest was waiting around for a billionaire fever dream. The deal was grotesque. It’s exactly the kind of deal that usually goes through while ordinary people are told there’s nothing they can do.
Except this time, ordinary people decided otherwise.
What began as an environmental protest has now run for twelve straight days and grown into the largest demonstrations Albania has seen since the fall of communism. Tens of thousands have filled the streets of Tirana, holding inflatable flamingos and signs reading “Albania is not for sale.” They faced down water cannons, and didn’t go home.
And it’s working. Albania’s anti-corruption prosecutors have opened an investigation into the land deals and frozen the bank accounts of the company holding the property. Kushner’s own investment firm has gone conspicuously quiet, with reports it may be backing away. The deal isn’t dead yet: Prime Minister Edi Rama dismissed the outrage this week as “ideological bullshit.” But a project that looked like a done deal a month ago is now tangled in criminal probes, frozen assets, and a national uprising that’s threatening to take the whole government down with it.
What This All Means
All of these events are connected. Trump’s hosting a cage match because he’s weak: the New York Times reported yesterday that Trump’s spell over working class voters has collapsed. David Ellison’s CBS takeover has gone poorly: the CBS Evening News has shed a million viewers in a matter of months. And the firing of Stephen Colbert has devastated the company’s ratings.
Just because billionaires own big media outlets, it doesn’t mean people will keep watching them.
Power throws itself a party because it’s nervous. You don’t spend $60 million on a spectacle when you’re confident. You do it when the polls are cratering and the people who put you in office are walking away.
How You Can Stay Ahead of the Billionaires
If you’ve been reading carefully, there’s a common thread. Unchecked power believes it can do whatever it wants, and hopes no one will tell you the truth about it.
Raw America exists to refute that narrative. We don’t have a billionaire owner who can quietly make a fact-checker disappear. We don’t soften a story before a regulator weighs in. The only people we answer to are our subscribers. But that independence has a cost. And the truth is we’re behind on our fundraising goals, heading into the most consequential midterm year of our lifetimes.
Here’s what your subscription builds: reporters on Capitol Hill breaking stories the corporate outlets won’t touch. Live interviews with officials Trump would rather keep off your screen. And a newsroom that covers the Trump family’s failures five thousand miles away.
None of this happens without you.
So if today’s issue made you angry, or hopeful, or both: turn that into something.
Albanians proved this week that ordinary folks can stop billionaires when they refuse to look away. So can you.
I want you to be part of our community. Join us today, and let’s go win this thing together.
—John Byrne / Founder, Raw America and Raw Story
P.S. Want to see what standing up to billionaires looks like? Here’s Albanian protesters fighting back against Jared Kushner’s resort. We covered it Thursday on our Raw America Notes page, which we update daily. Check our website for all the latest viral news videos from around the world.