Donald Trump’s media enforcer doesn’t seem to have high hopes about what his legacy will be after he launched a crusade against broadcasters that have angered the president.
In an interview with The Financial Times, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr suggested there wasn’t much he could do at this point to change the way he’ll be remembered.
“I’m sure The New York Times has already written my obituary,” he said. “And there’s not a lot that I can do to improve upon it or make it worse at this point in time.”
He later became more serious with the outlet, saying, “We tried to do a large number of things. We tried to be bold in the decisions that we made, and then other people make their decision about what was right and wrong.”
“I got my time, I got my shot, I took my shot,” he added.
Carr, appointed by Trump in January 2025, has been accused of weaponizing the FCC to muzzle the president’s critics.
The FT reporter suggested that Fox News would hire him after his stint running the FCC, to which Carr said: “Something tells me Disney won’t.”
His comments came after he ordered an early review of eight Disney-owned TV stations over diversity practices, a move widely seen as retaliation on behalf of the president.
The order came just a day after the president and First Lady Melania Trump called for Jimmy Kimmel to be fired “immediately” for a joke he told at Melania’s expense on ABC, which is owned by Disney.
The sole Democratic commissioner at the FCC, Anna Gomez, has called the inquiry an attack on free speech.
“This is an outrageous assault on the freedom of speech by this FCC in order to retaliate against Disney and against the critics of this administration,” Commissioner Anna Gomez said this week.
At the same time, Carr is also looking into whether ABC’s The View violated the “equal time” rule for airing an interview with Democratic Texas Senate nominee James Talarico.
ABC, which is owned by Disney, has fired back, calling the probe “unprecedented” and “counterproductive.”
“The Commission’s actions threaten to upend decades of settled law and practice and chill critical protected speech, both with respect to The View and more broadly,” ABC wrote in the filing on behalf of their Houston affiliate, KTRK.
“Some may dislike certain—or even most—of the viewpoints expressed on The View or similar shows,” the filing continued, “Such dislike, however, cannot justify using regulatory processes to restrict those views.”
