Trump Made Paramount Pay. Is This the New Normal?

Want to do business in the United States?

Pay up. More specifically: Pay Donald Trump.

That’s a reasonable lesson to draw from the Paramount-Skydance deal, which received formal government approval Thursday and should finally close in the coming weeks — about 1.5 years after it first kicked off.

We don’t know how Skydance’s David Ellison, who is buying Paramount with the backing of his father, Larry Ellison, will run the company. Maybe he’ll be able to turn the company around, and years from now we’ll note how he made a savvy purchase of a distressed asset at a fire-sale price. Maybe it continues to decline. Maybe he ends up flipping it to someone bigger in short order.

But the most important thing is the thing that was clear back in January, when Donald Trump started his second term as president: If current owner Shari Redstone wanted to sell the company to Ellison, she would need to cut Trump a check.

That happened on Tuesday, when Paramount’s current management formally settled a lawsuit Trump filed against the company last year. They paid $16 million, most of which is ostensibly earmarked for Trump’s future presidential library.

And on Thursday, the deal got formal approval from the Federal Communications Commission, run by Brendan Carr, a Trump loyalist who sometimes wears a pin in the shape of Trump’s head on his suit.

In theory, the Trump lawsuit and Carr’s approval were separate events. In reality, it would be very hard to find anyone who believes that. (I’ve asked Carr for comment.)

This is a story that has kicked up a lot of attention in the home stretch. Some of the angles are most definitely real, and concerning. Like the fact that Carr’s blessing comes with pledges from Ellison to do things like “root out bias” in CBS’s news coverage, which sounds very much like a company promising to cover news in a way that pleases Carr and his boss.

Some of the angles are much muddier: While we’ve yet to see any actual evidence that Paramount canceled Stephen Colbert’s late-night show to get the deal done, it’s reasonable for people to jump to that conclusion. (Over at The Ankler, veteran TV reporter Lesley Goldberg makes a compelling argument that the cancellation had everything to do with business, and nothing to do with Trump.)

We also don’t know whether the Ellisons have also agreed to give Trump $16 million or $20 million in other goodies as part of the deal, as Trump has claimed at various times. (Paramount has said it has no knowledge of extra payments; team Ellison hasn’t commented.)

But the main point is the main point, which we’ve known for many months: Last fall, Trump filed a suit against Paramount over the editing of a “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris. In any other world, that suit would go nowhere. But then Trump was elected, and started getting Very Big Companies like Disney and Meta to pay him to settle other suits he would normally have little chance of winning. (Like Paramount, those settlements were made directly to him, via his future library — as opposed to other settlements he is extracting from institutions like colleges and law firms, which are paying the federal government.)

So it was clear that Paramount would have to do the same thing, or it couldn’t do the Skydance deal.

Again: In theory, the “60 Minutes” suit had nothing to do with Trump’s role as president of the United States — he filed it as a private citizen, prior to his inauguration.

In reality, the only reason Paramount settled it was because he’s president of the United States — and one that’s willing to use that power to insert himself into day-to-day business deals.

Hard to believe this will be the last one where that happens.