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Brendan Carr Sends Warning Letter for Disney CEO; Musk's Unprecedented Power; U.S. Demand for Nuclear Energy Grows. Aired 12:30-13p ET

Aired December 24, 2024 - 12:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[12:30:00]

PHIL MATTINGLY, CNN HOST, INSIDE POLITICS: A top Trump lieutenant is putting media giants on notice. Brendan Carr, Trump's pick to lead the Federal Communications Commission, wrote a scathing letter to Disney CEO Bob Iger over the weekend, warning Iger that he would, quote, "be monitoring ABC's ongoing negotiations with its local affiliate stations."

Carr, in the letter, says, quote, "Americans no longer trust the national news media to report fully, accurately, and fairly." It goes on to cite ABC's $16 million settlement of a defamation lawsuit filed by Donald Trump. CNN's Brian Stelter scooped this letter. He joins me now. Brian, let's start with, look, people in our world saw this and I think alarm bells went off a little bit, but what's the backstory here to the letter?

BRIAN STELTER, CNN CHIEF MEDIA ANALYST: Well, the FCC is normally a relatively sleepy agency overseeing wireless broadband things like that. Brendan Carr, who has been a commissioner since 2017, appointed by Trump back then, now he's set to become the chairman. He will be the leader of the agency, and he is signaling he's going to use a much heavier hand. Even if he doesn't always have legal power, regulatory power, he's at least going to use his bully pulpit, and he wants to do so.

I think we should consider this story on two levels, Phil. First there's the policy level. Carr is expressing concern about ABC's negotiations with its affiliated stations. You know, most stations across the country that have ABC shows are not actually owned by Disney, they're owned by companies like Nexstar and Sinclair. And there's a balance of power between the national and the local that Carr thinks is out of whack. He's concerned that local programming is getting squeezed out, while Disney spends gobs of money on its global streaming service.

So, he says he's monitoring that issue. And frankly, that's an interesting policy issue. But then there's the politics here. Trump views ABC as an enemy. He didn't like how ABC moderated the debate last September. He didn't like being fact checked about Springfield, Ohio and the migrants. So, he said ABC ought to lose its license as a result.

Now, national networks are not licensed, only local stations are. But that's beside the point. The point is that Trump wants his government agencies to be doing battle with media companies. And it seems Carr's letter comes amid that Trumpian backdrop of threats and pressure against big networks.

MATTINGLY: Yes, you make a great point. The policy context is fascinating on some level. He wrote at length about it as a contributor to the conservative blueprint known as Project 2025. But on the politics side, he's also a frequent guest on Fox. Take a listen.

STELTER: Yes.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BRENDAN CARR, FCC COMMISSIONER/INCOMING CHAIRMAN: The administrative state has been controlled by Democrats and it wields an awful lot of power. People know President Trump is about to lead another great American comeback because this wet blanket of government control is going away.

[12:35:00]

Social media companies that have weaponized Section 230 and are using it as a sword to carry out their own partisan political agenda.

President Biden, I'm sorry, stood at the White House podium a couple years ago and said Elon Musk is worth being looked into. And ever since then, the regulatory agencies have launched unprecedented lawfare.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MATTINGLY: You know, your point about kind of how we traditionally view the FCC, the people who are on the commission, the chairs, you take what you just heard from some of the clips of his Fox News interviews into this new job as chair. How do those two things connect, or do they?

STELTER: And this is a story we're seeing, I think, across government. We're going to see this in the coming weeks as Trump's appointees take charge, and they're trying to do it differently than they did the first time around. My impression from my reporting is that Carr is more than happy to take the criticism. People might say, you know, why is a government official getting involved, maybe bullying these companies? He's going to welcome that and he's going to use his pulpit of X, thanks to his friend Elon Musk, he's going to use the power of X to get these messages across

Now, ABC doesn't have any comment on the letter to Iger, but it is notable that ABC paid $15 million to Trump's future library, tried to make that ugly case go away, and yet, you still do see Trump's FCC chairman going after Disney anyway. I think that's notable.

Going forward, you know, I think we're going to see Carr push these culture war issues, censorship, the claims against censorship by big tech. We're going to see those keep coming up in the months and years to come.

MATTINGLY: Yes. It's a great point. A great example. A lot of people talk about the second term will be different than the first, the primary reason why personnel. And I think Brendan Carr is one of those examples without any question at all. Brian Stelter, really appreciate your time, my friend. Thanks so much.

STELTER: Thanks.

MATTINGLY: Well, up next, we just heard Brian talk about him. Elon Musk, already the richest man on Earth, and now he's got the ear of the soon to be leader of the free world. How will he use such unprecedented power?

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[12:40:00]

MATTINGLY: Commander in Musk. Donald Trump may be Time's Person of the Year, but Elon Musk is the man of the moment. The billionaire has a mounting and unprecedented myriad of wealth, influence, power, and proximity to the president-elect. So, is he untouchable?

Let's discuss with bestselling author and founding partner of Puck, Bill Cohan. Bill, I really appreciate you being here. I was chuckling this morning. I was looking at my bookshelf, three of my most dog- eared books are books you wrote that I read religiously as a young financial reporter. "Last Tycoons," "House of Cards," "Money and Power," all of those were firms where powerful people often went in and out of government on some level. And yet, I haven't been able to figure out an analog to Elon Musk in this moment. Is there one that occurs to you?

WILLIAM COHAN, BEST-SELLING AUTHOR AND FOUNDING PARTNER OF PUCK: Well, thank you, Phil, for having me, and happy holidays to everyone. I appreciate those kind words. Look, I mean, it's a complicated situation because, you know, a president is allowed to have his advisers anybody, you know, the people he wants around him. We hope that he will choose wisely. We hope that he will surround himself with the best and the brightest.

I mean, John F. Kennedy invited into his defense secretary, Robert McNamara, who was president of Ford Motor Company. So, of course, there's plenty of examples. And, you know, CEOs of Goldman Sachs have gone to become treasury secretaries. So, you know, Elon isn't in the cabinet. He hasn't been really appointed to anything except for this DOGE Committee, which is, you know, sort of a new-fangled thing that doesn't really have all that much authority.

And he's got a lot of conflicts. And of course, you know, between SpaceX and Starlink and Tesla and other things that he does, he's got a lot of conflicts. He's got an incredible amount of wealth. I don't think we've ever seen someone with this kind of wealth or nearly his kind of wealth be in and around the president of the United States.

So, there's a lot to unpack here. And, you know, he tried his hand at the legislative process last week, sort of got his head handed to him a little bit, but, you know, it's still early days in all of this.

MATTINGLY: You know, you mentioned the wealth, like one year ago, $231 billion his net worth, according to Bloomberg Billionaires Index Election Day, $264 billion. Today, $451 billion. It seems on track potentially to be a trillionaire at some point. Embedded in that is government contracts, national security issues. What's the end -- do you have any sense of what the endgame may be here?

COHAN: I suspect, Phil, that the end game will be that Donald Trump won't want somebody usurping his attention and his power. And it's been sort of nice in this interregnum period and sort of fun and everybody's having a good time down there in Mar-a-Lago. But I think once he's inaugurated and once he's president of the United States, I don't think he's going to want Elon Musk and his, you know, $450 billion, pushing him around and usurping his limelight.

Now, we'll see if Elon can contain himself. Trump sort of already put down a marker the other day and, you know, said, well, you know, Trump will never be president of the United States. He wasn't born here. And don't you worry, I'm going to be the one making decisions.

So, already he's kind of like laying the groundwork for a departure, a break with Musk. But, you know, Elon Musk is sort of one of those untouchable people that we kind of end up revering in this country for unknown reasons. $450 billion is a ton of money, and he gets his way pretty much all the time. He's got lots of government contracts. He's -- you know, SpaceX is going up to the International Space Station to save those Boeing astronauts. So, I mean, it's very much a codependent relationship. But I think Donald Trump is not going to want Elon Musk stealing too much more of his limelight.

[12:45:00]

MATTINGLY: What's fascinating about the relationship is, Trump has -- you know, there are long lists of people that he's brought in and then dispatched with when he's kind of run out of interest in what they bring to the table or isn't -- doesn't feel like he's getting anything from what they're bringing to the table. But Musk is different. To your point, there don't seem to be any guardrails with him. He's rich enough. He's connected enough. He has enough big businesses. He has an entire social media platform. The risk reward for Trump in this case seems to be pretty dramatic on the risk side if they split.

COHAN: Yes, I agree with you, Phil. I mean, don't forget he's got like an army of 190 million people who follow him on X in addition to owning X. And, you know, he could say, and as I've speculated from time to time, if he arranged for a merger between X and Truth Social, Trump's publicly traded social media company. He could vastly increase Trump's wealth on that merger alone, given that it's basically a meme stock at this point.

So, if he wanted to, he could gift Trump billions of more net income net worth, and that gives him even more power over Trump. To say nothing of the army he controls, you know, look what he was able to do when he started tweeting about the continuing resolution bill. He got Republican congressmen to back away from it. It didn't work out in the end, really, but, you know, he's got that army and he's obviously not afraid to use it. He's kind of an untouchable guy. And so, that's what makes this so dramatic and interesting to follow.

MATTINGLY: Real quick before I let you go, because you've written about this, you had a great pod with our pal Peter Hamby, your colleague, over -- talk about this as well. The merger or tie up between Truth and Twitter, you think -- or X, sorry, do you think that's possible -- like really possible that something could happen?

COHAN: Well, I do think it's possible, Phil, because, you know, X, at the moment, you know, the equity value, I think, is gone, he's got $13 billion of debt, I mean, what better way to, you know, have a good outcome for Musk and his investors, it's not just his money, he's also brought other investors in, like Larry Ellison. And for Trump, I mean, he can just gift this platform of X to Trump, take them both public, at the same -- you know, take X public at the same time, it become this crazy meme stock for a while anyway, and it would bail out Elon's investors and make Trump a hell of a lot of money. I think it could be a kind of a match made in crazy town heaven, but it could happen.

MATTINGLY: Your analysis in the wake of something like that would definitely be the first one I would read. Bill Cohan, really appreciate your time. Thanks so much for coming on.

COHAN: Thank you, Phil.

MATTINGLY: Well, coming up, the push for more nuclear energy, which could be a key part of weaning the U.S. off fossil fuels. The public has real concerns about safety. We'll tell you why experts say it's actually, quote, "boringly safe."

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[12:50:00]

MATTINGLY: The United States is on the cusp of a nuclear renaissance. There's just one big problem, Americans are terrified of the waste. Nuclear waste that is not buried in a mountain but sitting in steel reinforced concrete casks at more than 50 sites around the country. And with a growing appetite for more power, America needs to figure out what to do with this costly waste. CNN Chief Climate Correspondent Bill Weir has more on what's proposed and the misconceptions about nuclear energy.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BILL WEIR, CNN CHIEF CLIMATE CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): With humanity thirsty for clean energy, nuclear is having a green renaissance.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Get the Palisades nuclear plant back up and running.

WEIR (voice-over): Even among Democrats. In Michigan, Governor Gretchen Whitmer is using a billion and a half in IRA funds to reopen the Palisades nuclear plant, saying, it's the only way to meet state climate goals.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Chaos and confusion reigned as monitors tried to determine exactly how much radiation was released.

WEIR (voice-over): And 50 years after America's most notorious nuclear accident, Microsoft is planning to reopen Three Mile Island to power the demand for A.I. computing.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Radiation containment.

WEIR (voice-over): There is no conclusive proof that accident made anyone sick. But films like "The China Syndrome" and "Silkwood" helped make a Cold War culture even more wary of meltdowns that never came. But spent nuclear fuel has been piling up at dozens of sites around the country radioactive waste with no clear destination.

WEIR: What do you think are the biggest misconceptions about nuclear energy in the general public, in the United States especially?

BRIAN VANGOR, DRY CAST SUPERVISOR AT INDIAN POINT, HOLTEC INTERNATIONAL: Well, that it can blow up. It can't blow up. When the plant was running, it couldn't blow up.

WEIR (voice-over): Brian Vangor spent his career at Indian Point before New York Democrats like Andrew Cuomo and RFK Jr. helped shut it down. Safety, he insists, was never an issue.

VANGOR: So, 25 milliohm is a typical, maybe one or two chest x-rays. And you'd have to stand at the plant fence to 24/7 for an entire year to receive that radiation. Each one of these canisters weighs 360,000. They're designed for floods, earthquakes, fires, explosion, aircraft impact, you name it, they can withstand it.

WEIR (voice-over): Data shows that when measuring deaths from accidents and pollution, Coal, oil, and gas are the most dangerous power sources by far, while nuclear ranks with wind and solar among the safest. But uranium mining can still have a steep environmental cost, and the waste remains radioactive for centuries.

[12:55:00]

WEIR: One pellet of enriched uranium holds as much power as one ton of coal. So, these 127 canisters hold all the pellets that produced 50 years' worth of electricity for a big chunk of New York City. Hell of a legacy. But now, they got to figure out what to do with this.

WEIR (voice-over): In 2010, Harry Reid and Nevada Democrats killed a plan to bury the nation's nuclear waste under Yucca Mountain. And with no new plan, it has been piling up at dozens of sites around the country ever since.

PAUL MURRAY, DEPUTY ASSISTANT SECRETARY, SPENT NUCLEAR FLUE AND HIGH LEVEL WASTE DISPOSITION, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY: If we move that at 3,000 tons a year, which is a lot of fuel to be moving. It would take us approximately 50 years to move to interim storage. WEIR (voice-over): And that's just interim storage. A permanent site could take 250 years to fill and close. First, they have to build the world's safest train car to move it, and then they have to find a community to take it. Likely in exchange for a fortune in taxpayer dollars. Nominations could start next year, and could indicate whether the politics of nuclear energy is any less radioactive.

Bill Weir, CNN, Westchester County, New York.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

MATTINGLY: Our thanks to Bill. And thank you for joining Inside Politics. Have a very Merry Christmas. CNN New Central starts right after the break.

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