The Price of Power: Donald Trump and the Tech Broligarchs | Pivot

... ABC News has agreed to pay $15 million to settle a defamation lawsuit brought by Donald Trump. The suit's centered around comments that ABC's George Stephanopoulos made against a c- uh, in a civil suit against Trump, brought by E. Jean Carroll. He said he was found liable for rape when he actually had been found liable for sexually assaulting and defaming Carroll. Uh, the judge had- had- had mentioned that it was in most terms that would be considered that, and that's, I think, why he said it. Um, but in fact, the- the- the jury had found him liable for, uh, sexual ass- assault, uh, and d- defamation. Under the terms of the settlement, ABC News will donate, uh, uh, the money, $15 million, uh, to a future presidential foundation and museum. And Stephanopoulos and ABC also- also issued a statement of regret for the mistake. Um, uh, many experts thought... I- I've talked to a dozen lawyers. They thought ABC would have won, uh, and Trump is... typically does this a lot, as a, as a... and so does... speaking of Elon Musk, we just talked about him. They use legal, uh, threats as a means of- of- of, uh, having people, uh, acquiesce. So, t- talk a little bit about this. I mean, from a business point of view, again, it's using censorship. It's using l- legal means. It's using anything but actual competition, or just like things work out.

And it's more than that. What we're seeing is that... I mean, some of us had warned that, um, that, uh, a Trump admi- second Trump administration would be one in which the, uh, coercive power of the government, uh, against business would become huge. That it... I mean, we're in a- a mixed economy where the government plays a big role, uh, private sector plays a big role. Uh, lots of things in the private sector depend upon government decisions that are reasonably favorable. Um, as long as you have rules, norms, rule of law, um, then that kind of works okay. But if you start to have arbitrary exercise, and then... One of the things we worry about on, on tariffs, um, it happens to be the case that the way that our trade laws are written, the president has enormous discretion in tariff setting. And in some ways, one of the worst things about Trump tariffs will be not the tariffs he applies, but the ones he doesn't, because he can play favorites with who gets to get exempted from a tariff. There is some evidence he did that even on the relatively small tariffs he imposed in the first term. So, if you're ABC and you're looking at, uh, at all the ways that Trump can hurt you if he wants to, uh, then you, you know, pay protection money. That's what just happened. And this is a much bigger thing than just competition. This is basically, um, big business already acknowledging that we've become a, uh, uh, a- a protection racket country.