The Democrats Who Let Trump’s Oligarchs Buy Hollywood

The more we find out about the Ellisons’ purchase of Warner Bros., the more dispiriting the tale becomes. As a report in The Wall Street Journal makes clear, a sizable chunk of California’s Democratic establishment, led by Gov. Gavin Newsom, greased the skids that enabled the father-son duo of Larry and David Ellison—charter members of President Trump’s billionaire brigade—to gain control of a commanding share of America’s culture and news industries.

As the Journal recounts, clearing the antitrust bar at Trump’s Justice Department was no heavy lift after David had reshaped CBS’s legendary news team more to Trump’s liking and put on a salute to Trump and his White House staff earlier this year. The chief obstacle was in California, where the state’s Democratic attorney general, Rob Bonta, filed a very plausible antitrust case against Ellison’s proposed purchase of Warner Bros. by Paramount, and enlisted 11 other state attorneys general (all Democrats) to join the suit.

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Rather than go to trial, which a judge had scheduled for next March, and pay millions of dollars every day in financial penalties if the deal didn’t close by September 30, Ellison devised a strategy to isolate Bonta politically. His threat to relocate the studios to Nashville was of dubious veracity, but gave Hollywood’s unions palpable pause (save only the Writers Guild, whose members generally write at home). Ellison met several times with Newsom, and, the Journal documents, also enlisted a roster of former Democratic notables—onetime Assembly Speaker Fabien Nunez, onetime Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, and onetime and longtime Sen. Barbara Boxer—to work behind the scenes to build support for the merger. Publicly, both Newsom and current L.A. Mayor Karen Bass called on Bonta to reach a settlement. (Facing a serious challenge to her re-election next month, Bass understandably feared appearing to be indifferent to the relocation of Hollywood to Tennessee.)

I note with dismay that both Bass and Nunez were launched on their electoral careers by the late Miguel Contreras, whose leadership of the Los Angeles AFL-CIO transformed state politics in a distinctly more progressive direction, and that Villaraigosa also benefited crucially from Contreras’s backing.

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Right-wing studio moguls are nothing new in Hollywood, of course. During Herbert Hoover’s presidency, Louis B. Mayer was actually the finance chairman of the Republican National Committee, and it was his studio that scripted and filmed the phony newsreels in 1934 that featured actors playing Bolshevik tramps and thugs who vowed to swarm the state if Democratic nominee and socialist writer Upton Sinclair won that year’s gubernatorial election. (Hoover, of course, was a model small-d democrat compared to Trump.)

The problem for Ellison now is running the actual business. He’s given executives enormous bonuses (taking $150 million for himself) while firing the duo that gave Warner Bros. one of the most successful financial and critical years in Hollywood history in 2025. Skydance, as the combined company is now known, has nearly $80 billion in debt, a situation incompatible with making 30 movies a year. Its stock has plummeted and its bonds are in junk status. Its main source of cash comes from the rapidly declining broadcast and cable TV business, and the streaming services it wants to combine—HBO Max and Paramount+—have millions of dual subscribers, leading to a net loss even without raising prices and angering customers. The future looks bleak, which is bad for a Hollywood now dependent on Skydance thriving.

Meanwhile, in his work to isolate Bonta, as well as his de facto leadership of the “moderate” opposition to the billionaire wealth tax measure on November’s California ballot, Newsom has effectively forfeited any claim to progressive support in 2028’s presidential primaries. Compared just to his fellow governors who may also run in ’28—Illinois’s JB Pritzker, Kentucky’s Andy Beshear, Maryland’s Wes Moore, Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro, and Lord knows who else—Newsom will have a lot of ’splainin’ to do.

The post appeared first on The American Prospect.