President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

Factually:

1) Trump spent every one of those dopey campaign rallies attacking CNN. He tweeted about CNN endlessly and threatened them more than once.
2) Before Trump took office, the man who became head of the antitrust division at the DOJ said (on the record, quoted accurately): "This is more of what we call a vertical merger -- a content with distribution -- rather than two competitors merging."I think it'll get a lot of attention, but I don't see this as a major antitrust problem."
3) Trump took over. He has sold himself as an anti-regulation guy (and the actions of his administration have borne it out) and pro business. ... yet, when it came to this deal (because of CNN), he was Bernie Sanders.
4) That head of the antitrust division (who I quoted above), did a 180, once he was working for Trump, and brought an antitrust suit, but not just an antitrust suit, but one that was so weak (it was a vertical integration!) by the standards of antitrust suits, that the DOJ lawyers got destroyed in the courtroom arguments.

Given all of that, If you conclude that there is no evidence that this didn't stem from Trump and his beef with CNN and the DOJ doing his bidding, so be it.

BTW, in those original posts months ago, you were trying to shoehorn this into what happened with Comcast / NBC, and at one point told me how you found this deal even more problematic (you had an opinion, don't walk it back) because of this narrative that AT&T owns DirectTV and would use it put everyone out of business. Which I pointed out was ridiculous (and you were regurgitating a claim by the DOJ). DirectTV has been losing subscribers in droves, and if anything, they have an eye on the future, which is streaming content. Which is kind of the point of why we shouldn't have a bunch of corrupt politicians trying to manage markets to make things "competitive." They have no clue what the market dynamics actually are, nor do they know what the future holds in terms of consumer demand. At best, they stifle actual competition in the name of do gooding, and limit consumer choices (which is hard to measure, because you can't know the damage they did by not allowing things to play out on their own). At worst, it's plain corruption, in which someone like Trump can use that kind of power to try to hurt his perceived enemies.