Donald Trump has sweeping plans for a second administration. Here’s what he’s proposed

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James Carville Shares Theory on Why Trump ‘Hates’ America

The Democratic strategic railed against the president’s latest pick.

Veteran Democratic strategist James Carville has cited Donald Trump’s latest inexperienced hire in a crucial role as evidence that the president “hates” America.

Carville, 81, is a regular critic of Trump, who turns 80 this month. On Wednesday’s episode of his podcast Politicon, the former Bill Clinton aide expanded on his theory that the president is attempting to destroy the U.S.

It follows Trump’s appointment of federal housing regulator Bill Pulte as acting director of national intelligence this week, despite having no traditional intelligence background. He replaces Tulsi Gabbard, who resigned in May to care for her husband after his diagnosis with a rare form of bone cancer.

During her time in the job, Gabbard clashed with Trump over his war on Iran.

Trump ally Pulte is also retaining his existing jobs overseeing federal housing and mortgage policies, positions he has used to attack the president’s political foes.

Carville’s co-host, veteran Washington journalist Al Hunt, labeled Pulte’s hiring “absolutely laughable, if it weren’t so tragic.”

Hunt said Pulte served “as a hitman” for Trump in his role as a housing regulator and called him “a man of no reputation.”

“He is totally unqualified for this post,” Hunt said, claiming his “disgraceful” appointment details “the utter contempt that Trump has for the American intelligence community.”

The journalist also shared his theory that Pulte will potentially claim that “national intelligence shows that foreigners are trying to help Democrats win this election.”

Carville agreed that Pulte has been installed in his new role to do one job, which is “to do everything he can to f--- with the election on the behalf of Trump.”

“I always say, I don’t know if Trump is a traitor,” Carville said. “But he would do everything that a traitor would do. So if you were a traitor president, you’d put an idiot in [that role].”

Pointing out the major influence the director of national intelligence has over the FBI and the CIA, Carville said, “This is what you would do if you are trying to destroy the country.”

He added, “I fundamentally believe this, Trump hates the United States. And this is just more evidence.”

The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment.

Trump praised Pulte on Truth Social for his “has deep experience managing the most sensitive matters in America, the safety and soundness of the Markets”.

Pulte, the grandson of billionaire homebuilding mogul William J. Pulte, pushed for Justice Department investigations into claims that Trump foe, New York Attorney General Letitia James, committed insurance fraud, related to her properties in Illinois and Florida.

Former Obama adviser David Axelrod called out in an X post the concept of Trump appointing his “political hatchet man” in his key intelligence role with “no relevant experience” while the U.S. is at war with Iran.

Axelrod then posted that Pulte is “an unqualified errand boy” who’s only intelligence experience is “spying on [Trump’s] perceived `enemies,’ rummaging through their mortgage documents as head of FHA, looking for dirt. It was a total abuse of his authority there. Imagine what he can do as DNI!”

Mark Warner, the vice-chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Pulte appeared to have been selected “because the White House believes he will provide the narrative it wants, not the intelligence we need”.

“The president has chosen an official who has demonstrated not just willingness but eagerness to use the authorities of government to pursue political retribution,” Senator Warner said in a statement.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer also called Pulte a “partisan thug”.

“A guy who can file such baseless, political and outrageous charges against political office holders he doesn’t like can’t be entrusted to protect our national security,” Schumer said.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/james-carville-shares-theory-on-why-trump-hates-america/?

ps:You'd think this administration couldn't get anymore pathetic, and than they prove you wrong!!

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⚖️ Breaking: Bolton, Blanche

John Bolton, national security adviser in the first Trump administration, has agreed to plead guilty to a single count of retaining classified information under a deal with the Justice Department that could allow him to avoid prison time. He'll face a $2.25 million fine. Go deeper. 🏛️ President Trump said he'll nominate acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to serve permanently. That would touch off a bruising confirmation battle for his former personal lawyer in the Senate. Go deeper.

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Senate passes $70B immigration enforcement bill without limits on Trump settlement fund Just before 5 a.m. Friday, Senators voted 52-47 for legislation to fund ICE and Border Patrol for the next three years. It came after weeks of delays and fierce backlash to an unrelated $1.776 billion settlement fund that resolves President Donald Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS. Read more.

Why this matters: The final vote came after Republicans narrowly defeated multiple attempts by Democrats and Republicans to add language to the bill that would permanently ban Trump’s settlement fund for political allies who believe they have been politically persecuted. Republicans defeated an amendment proposed by one of their own members, Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy, that would have redirected payments from Trump’s settlement to members of law enforcement who were injured in the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol.   The amendments were a test of party unity that complicated what should have been an easy vote for Republicans who wanted to keep the focus on immigration enforcement in an election year. Instead, they spent almost a full day haggling among themselves over whether to block the settlement fund, even after acting Attorney General Todd Blanche had said earlier this week that it would not go forward.

RELATED COVERAGE ➤ Trump says Pulte won’t be his nominee for director of national intelligence   Ex-national security adviser John Bolton will plead guilty in classified information case: AP source   Senate blocks extending key surveillance program following backlash over Trump pick to lead intel   US employers likely added 105,000 jobs in May with labor market stable despite costly Iran war   Trump announces $700 million in new support for struggling coal industry   House passes bill to aid Ukraine and impose new sanctions on Russia   US sanctions Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel in latest move to pressure island’s leadership   Prosecutors lose appeal in Arizona’s fake elector case but vow to present it again to a grand jury   With Oval Office replica and skyline views of Chicago, Obama’s new museum is political and personal   Kennedy Center moves to erase Trump references after judge said they were illegally added   Water begins refilling Reflecting Pool after Trump’s renovation to repaint it ‘American flag blue’   Planning commission seeks more details on Trump’s planned 250-foot arch near the Lincoln Memorial

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The Jolly Donald

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The U.S. Navy was born to fight piracy. After the Revolutionary War, the United States maintained no standing fleet, but attacks by the Barbary pirates—corsairs based in North Africa who preyed on American merchant ships and took sailors ransom—drove Congress to reestablish a navy in the 1790s. In 1801, Thomas Jefferson dispatched ships to the Mediterranean to fight the pirates, and the successful war that followed proved a template for American interventions for centuries: The U.S. showed it was willing to use military force to defend American commercial interests and to punish bad international actors.

Trump has already rejected much of this vision of American foreign policy, a point he demonstrated vividly last month by approvingly likening the U.S. Navy to pirates while describing an interdiction in the Persian Gulf. “We took over the cargo, took over the oil. It’s a very profitable business. Who would have thought we were doing that?” the president said in West Palm Beach, Florida. “We’re like pirates.”

Perhaps a man as enthralled by gold as Trump was bound to find a natural affinity with pirates. In fact, the Trump administration is taking a buccaneering attitude around the globe—not just in the actions in the Middle East that Trump described. The U.S. continues to blow up boats, including one yesterday, in the Pacific Ocean and Caribbean without any due process or basis in law. And in Washington, a prominent senator has proposed that the U.S. government commission privateers—basically, government-licensed pirates—to battle narco-traffickers.

Since the start, the strikes have been a lawless operation. Few legal experts believe there is any justification for them. The Trump administration claims that those targeted are drug smugglers but has presented no evidence for this. Surely, some of them are, though reliable reporting suggests that others are not. Even if the administration had evidence of drug smuggling, that is not the same thing as a conviction; and even if these people had a conviction, federal law does not establish capital punishment for drug trafficking.

The attacks received lots of attention when they began, much of it negative, and a few outlets (especially those based overseas) have stayed focused on covering them. But the attention of the public and, especially, Congress has moved on: There are flailing wars and cartoonish corruption going on. Meanwhile, the strikes have actually accelerated. Like the pirates of the golden age, the U.S. military is functioning as an unseen menace, dealing death with no warning or recourse. More than 200 people have been killed in the strikes, but as The New York Times reported a few days ago, the campaign has made no dent in the cocaine trade to the United States.

Senator Mike Lee would rather this work be done by private individuals. The Utahn introduced a bill in December that would authorize the president to issue letters of marque, a tool by which the government licenses private individuals to attack foreign interests by seizing ships, as a way of taking on drug traffickers. The Constitution does specifically grant Congress the power to issue letters of marque, though they were effectively abolished by an international treaty in 1856. The wisdom of encouraging private Americans to get into armed battles with cartels is certainly debatable, and the Senate has not advanced the bill.

In the absence of privateers, Trump seems to enjoy the idea of the U.S. military acting as outlaws on the seas. During his protracted attempt to figure out what he wants and what he can get out of the war in Iran, Trump announced a full blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. As Lawfare’s Todd Huntley writes, a full blockade would be a violation of international law, though that’s not actually what the U.S. is doing. (One sometimes gets the sense that Trump uses maximalist language without knowing or caring what it means, simply because it sounds cool to him; he also futilely called for Iran’s “unconditional surrender.”)

No one disputes that the Iranian government is acting illegally in the strait. Under international law, the Strait of Hormuz is open to navigation, but Iran has mined the strait and allowed only certain vessels to pass through it, attacking others. The question is what the United States can do in response. (Complicating the matter is the fact that Iran closed the strait after Trump launched a war that is dubious under international law and unauthorized by Congress.) The traditional—and responsible—role for the United States, in the lineage of fighting the Barbary pirates, would be to defend the international norm of free navigation and push to reopen the strait.

Trump has been willing to mouth these words. Visiting China last month, he said he raised the issue with Xi Jinping, but Trump did not make it a major focus and received no commitments from Xi. What seems to really excite Trump is not freedom of navigation but financial gain. As his remarks in West Palm Beach indicated, Trump is taken with the idea of seizing ships and selling their cargoes. He had the same impulse with oil tankers carrying Venezuelan oil, which the U.S. seized this winter. The problem is that, as with many of Trump’s past schemes to make money, this one is a mess in practice. As The New York Times reported in March, maintaining just one seized oil tanker had cost $47 million.

Perversely, Trump’s war in Iran has driven up the price of oil, so the cargo on board is more valuable. Still, seizing ships doesn’t seem like a very effective way to fill the Treasury’s coffers, and embracing freebooting carries risks besides financial ones. Free and peaceful navigation have enabled the prosperity of the United States and much of the world. No child, or reader of Robert Louis Stevenson, can deny the allure of pirates, but the marauders are rarely the good guys in the story.

Related:

• 20 U.S. boat strikes in three months
• Trump’s logic for blockading the blockaders

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Crime Spree of Pardoned Jan. 6 Rioters Revealed as Worse Than Known

One in 16 of the rioters whom the president freed has since been arrested, charged, or convicted of other crimes.

At least 97 of the more than 1,500 Capitol rioters pardoned by President Donald Trump have since been arrested for, charged with, or convicted of crimes unrelated to Jan. 6.

The figure, published Thursday by the independent legal outlet Lawfare, is nearly triple the largest prior tally and amounts to nearly one in 16 of the insurrectionists swept up in the clemency order Trump, 79, signed on his first day back in office.

The crimes “run the gamut,” Lawfare reports, from low-grade offenses such as trespassing and drug paraphernalia to grand larceny, stalking, plots to kill politicians and police, and fraud against the government. At least 14 pardonees have been charged with sex crimes or offenses tied to child sexual abuse material. At least six have faced domestic violence charges. At least 20 have been hit with DUI or public intoxication charges.

Most damning, five of those Trump freed were arrested over conduct that happened at least partly after their release. That means the clemency order may have actively enabled their alleged crimes.

One of the five, Lawfare reported, is Andrew Paul Johnson, 45, a Florida handyman freed by the pardon in 2025. A Hernando County jury convicted him in February of five charges, including the molestation of two children, and he was sentenced to life in prison in March. Police said he tried to silence one victim by promising to share restitution money he expected from the Trump administration over his Jan. 6 case.

Another, as PunchUp exclusively revealed last month, is Christopher Quaglin, 40. The violent Proud Boys member was sentenced to 12 years after he committed some of the most heinous crimes on Jan. 6, but served only four before Trump pardoned him. As our sister Substack reported on May 29, the electrician from North Brunswick, New Jersey, who currently lives in Florida, has been arrested twice in the past three months alone—including in May, when he allegedly fought with officers who arrested him for disorderly conduct.

The new count dwarfs earlier figures. The New York Times editorial board counted 39 reoffenders in March. The watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington identified 33 in December 2025, a figure echoed by a report from the Democratic staff of the House Judiciary Committee.

Tracking the pardonees is difficult because, unlike parolees, they face no monitoring or reporting requirements, Lawfare noted. The job has been made harder by the Justice Department’s deletion of Jan. 6 defendant records, which Lawfare has worked to restore.

Trump signed the sweeping proclamation hours after his second inauguration, with no pardon attorney review and no victim notification, undoing what had been the largest federal investigation in U.S. history.

The findings come weeks after the administration floated a $1.8 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” to compensate those it says were politically targeted. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche would not rule out letting pardoned rioters who assaulted police claim payouts, per CNBC, though the DOJ is now backing off the plan amid Republican pushback.

One case shows the pardons cutting the other way, too. Andrew Taake, 37, a Houston man, had pleaded guilty to soliciting what he believed was a 15-year-old girl for sex—a charge that predated the riot. He escaped a sentence by drawing on prison-time “credit” banked while detained for bear-spraying a police officer at the Capitol, a conviction Trump then erased, the Daily Beast revealed last November. He didn’t reoffend after walking free—but the clemency still spared him punishment for a separate child sex crime.

“President Trump has exercised his constitutional authority to issue pardons and commutations for a variety of individuals, including those who have been victims of Biden’s weaponized justice system,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson told the Daily Beast, before pivoting to an attack on former President Joe Biden’s clemency decisions.

“The White House has a rigorous pardon review process which includes the White House Counsel, the Department of Justice, and ultimately the President as the final decider. And the only pardons anyone should be critical of are from President Autopen, who pardoned and commuted sentences of violent criminals including child killers and mass murderers—and that’s not to mention the proactive pardons he ‘signed’ for his family members like Hunter on his way out the door.”

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-jan-6-pardon-crime-spree-revealed-as-even-worse-than-known/?

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Trump Wins Fight to Blow $125 Million on ‘Dumbest Thing Ever’

Republicans have given Trump a symbolic trophy.

Republicans have handed President Trump a win in one of his more eyebrow-raising vanity projects, a push to rename the Pentagon that Democrats say will cost up to $125 million and accomplish absolutely nothing.

The House Armed Services Committee voted along party lines to permanently rename the Department of Defense the Department of War, tucking the measure into the annual defense policy bill during a marathon late-night session. The move codifies an executive order Trump signed last fall, resurrecting a name the U.S. military bureaucracy last used in the 1940s.

Representative Adam Smith, of Washington and the committee’s top Democrat, was forthright in his assessment of the effort. “One of the dumbest things that has been done by this administration,” he said. “It’s semantic nonsense at a time when we have a lot of substantive arguments.”

The amendment was introduced by Republican Representative Ronny Jackson of Texas, a hard-line Trump ally, who framed the rebrand in soaring terms. “Restoring the name Department of War sends an unmistakable signal to the world,” Jackson said. “Deterrence only works when adversaries believe America is willing to fight and win to secure its interests.”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has already taken to calling himself secretary of war, celebrated the vote on social media. “The Department of War will officially be restored soon,” he posted.

The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that a full renaming could run as high as $125 million—a number that landed badly with Democrats already furious over the bill’s $1 trillion overall price tag and what they described as a lack of meaningful guardrails around the nearly 100-day war with Iran.

Democrat Representative Pat Ryan of New York, one of a dozen Democrats who voted against the broader bill, did not mince words. “It’s performative bulls--t,” he said. “I think ending on that performative note summed up the whole situation.”

The broader National Defense Authorization Act—now carrying the renaming provision—cleared the committee in a bipartisan 44-12 vote, though the dozen Democratic no votes made it the panel’s most partisan such vote in years.

The name change still faces a steep climb. The Pentagon’s legal name remains the Department of Defense until both chambers of Congress sign off, and the Senate—where Democratic votes are needed to advance most legislation—is expected to resist.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-wins-fight-to-blow-125-million-on-dumbest-thing-ever/?

ps:So pathetic!!!!!

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Whistleblower Exposes Trump Goons’ Jaw-Dropping Social Security Plot

The plan involved exploiting a database known as the “Death Master File.”

A Trump administration whistleblower says officials plotted to declare 2.7 million living individuals dead to push immigrants out of the country.

The scheme would have used the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) “Death Master File,” a database that flags the deceased, to wipe people off the financial grid, cutting off their pay, bank accounts, credit and benefits, the Washington Post reports.

Tech broligarch Elon Musk, who spearheaded the Trump administration’s controversial cost-cutting DOGE initiative last year, had pushed to bend the agency’s records to President Donald Trump’s deportation agenda, the newspaper notes. The SSA had separately marked 6,100 immigrants as dead last year in an earlier, smaller push.

Jeremiah Schofield, a career official at the SSA who helped run the agency’s IT modernization before leaving in October, said the plans crystallized on a single conference call last year.

A DOGE official, he said, laid out the goal bluntly: pile on enough hardship that immigrants either fled the country or walked into a field office for help and got arrested.

Schofield described it as “one of the most disappointing calls I’ve been in in my 25-year career,” and has now detailed the plan in a 49-page disclosure to the Senate Finance Committee and the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, reviewed by the Post.

The Department of Homeland Security allegedly handed the list of 2.7 million names over to SSA in late April 2025. Schofield pulled a sample of 25 to check it and found many were, in fact, alive. The group turned up U.S. citizens, green card holders, teens, and elderly people, including a widow receiving survivor benefits.

He said he could not confirm the alleged links to crime or terrorism that the DHS had cited in its materials.

The agency’s own attorneys had cautioned that wrongly listing the living as deceased risked breaking federal law. Schofield said he declined to take part. The SSA says the plan was never executed. A spokesperson said the agency “did not add a list of 2.7 million names to the Death Master File.”

Three DOGE members—Antonio Gracias, Jon Koval and Payton Rehling—turned up at the agency’s Maryland headquarters that February and called themselves volunteers, Schofield said. Alex Spiro, a lawyer for Gracias, told the Post that his client knew nothing of the proposal to declare 2.7 million people deceased. Koval and Rehling did not reply to the Post.

The effort traced to two April 2025 memos from then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to then-acting commissioner Leland Dudek. Dudek told the Post he had heard the legal warnings and rebranded the file by trading the label “death” for “ineligible”—“death is a state of ineligibility,” he reasoned.

The disclosure has infuriated Senate Democrats. Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts called it “an illegal attempt by DOGE to weaponize Social Security,” and Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal said the episode showed an administration intent on making people suffer, immigrants most of all. Both have now sent letters to the SSA and to the trio of ex-DOGE officials.

A DHS spokeswoman did not address the plan but defended sharing data between agencies. White House spokeswoman Liz Huston sidestepped the questions, instead promoting a Trump tax break for seniors.

“President Trump will always protect and strengthen Social Security,” Huston told the Daily Beast. “President Trump proudly delivered No Tax on Social Security for nearly every senior in America despite every single Democrat in Congress voting against it.”

The administration acknowledged in court papers last month that it had revoked DOGE’s data access at the start of the year and would not be reinstating it.

The Daily Beast contacted the DHS and the SSA for comment.

“Under President Trump’s leadership, the government is finally doing what it should have all along—sharing information across the federal government to solve problems,” a DHS spokesman said. “Biden not only allowed millions of illegal aliens to flood into our country, but he lost them through incompetence and improper processing.

“Information sharing across agencies is essential to identify who is in our country, including violent criminals, determine what public safety and terror threats may exist so we can neutralize them, and identify what public benefits these aliens are using at taxpayer expense.”

The SSA did not immediately respond.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/whistleblower-exposes-how-trump-admin-plotted-to-mark-27-million-living-social-security-recipients-as-dead/?

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What Everyone Is Getting Wrong About the Turmoil at ‘60 Minutes’

Even a broken clock is right twice a day, you might say.

This column is being republished with permission from its original home on Substack. For more from Chris Cillizza, subscribe here.

News that CBS anchor Scott Pelley had slammed new “60 Minutes” executive producer Nick Bilton—and CBS News boss Bari Weiss—in an all-hands meeting earlier this week landed like, well, a bombshell report from the long-running news show itself. The New York Times described it as an “extraordinary exchange,” with Pelley questioning Bilton’s qualifications and alleging that Weiss was intent on “murdering” ‘60 Minutes’ entirely.

Pelley was subsequently fired by the network.

The reaction among the media class was immediate—and almost entirely unified: Pelley was a hero. He was standing up to the attempts by Weiss and Bilton to turn ‘60 Minutes’ and, more broadly, CBS, into an arm of the Trump administration.

Social media was quickly filled with encomiums to Pelley and his “courage.” The narrative was set: Pelley is standing up for capital “J” journalism, which Bilton and Weiss are actively trying to destroy in the name of kissing Donald Trump’s ass. (David Ellison, who owns CBS News and its parent company Paramount, is friendly with President Donald Trump and he has, since having taken over the network, at a minimum, moved aggressively to be less openly confrontational with the president.)

But that rush to crown Pelley is not only misguided, I’d argue—and it totally misses the real point here.

Before I make my case, let me offer a few caveats: I do not know Pelley, Weiss or Bilton. I truly have no rooting interest here. I am also a giant fan of ‘60 Minutes.” My parents watched it every Sunday night when I was a kid. Since I got into journalism, my admiration for what they do has only grown. And yes, ‘60 Minutes’ is, by all accounts, a bright spot in the CBS News universe. Its most recent season averaged more than 9 million viewers—a 9% increase over the previous year. (Though, of course, the question of whether CBS News makes money for the broader network is more complicated.)

Oh, and I am not trying to get a job at CBS either. I love my life as an independent journalist. I just re-signed my contributor deal at NewsNation. If CBS offered me a job tomorrow, I couldn’t—and wouldn’t—take it!

But here’s the thing: I don’t think Pelley is a hero. Nor do I agree with those screaming that any attempt to change ‘60 Minutes’ is proof positive that Bilton or Weiss is trying to “murder” it.

Pelley has every right to voice his dissatisfaction with the decision by Weiss to jettison the show’s former executive producer (as well as a decent chunk of the staff) in order to bring in Bilton and a new regime.

But is an all-hands meeting really the time and place to do it? Especially considering this reporting from CNN’s Brian Stelter, which claims Weiss and Bilton had sought a private meeting with Pelley, and he turned them down.

Seen in the most pro-Pelley light, his choice to confront Bilton and Weiss in an all-hands gathering was a way to make his point as big and brightly as possible. Huddling behind closed doors with the bosses wouldn’t properly convey his upset over the restructuring.

But what if Pelley chose to do his “truth to power” thing not in hopes of actually changing anything but rather as a way to make it as performative as possible—in a content age in which performative emotion is absolute gold? I mean, you can’t blast both your immediate boss and your big boss and expect to keep your job. And I would assume Pelley knew that going in!

The immediate leak of the audio of Pelley’s remarks to seemingly every media reporter suggests to me that this latter—and admittedly more cynical—explanation has real plausibility.

Then there’s the core of Pelley’s criticism of Bilton and Weiss: That they don’t have sufficient “broadcast news” experience to do the job well/right.

There is no doubt that neither Weiss nor Bilton has the sort of resume that people who have traditionally held these roles at networks have possessed. They haven’t spent their lives in the world of TV production. And, at times, that’s shown—like when CBS News didn’t get its evening news anchor, Tony Doukopil, a visa to get into China to cover Trump’s visit there.

But there is also no doubt that broadcast news—and cable TV news—is a dying product. The average age of a CBS News viewer is 62! NBC News is 57. ABC News is a “youthful” 55.

That’s a problem. Because unless science figures out a way to get us all to live until we are 150, the reality is that the main clientele for what CBS News is offering—yes, including ‘60 Minutes’ — is, quite literally, dying off.

Which is why I found myself vigorously nodding my head to the defense Bilton offered on Monday amid the Pelley barrage: “Broadcast is an ice cube that is melting.”

No one—presumably not even Pelley—thinks that the solution to what ails big media is more of the same. Yes, ‘60 Minutes’ still works! But for how long? Doesn’t it make sense to look at your flagship products and ask, “How are we going to make this product continue to work amid massive disruption in how people want to consume content?”

To me, the answer is very obvious. Which is why Pelley’s criticism rings false.

If I was Ellison—or anyone who owns a legacy media brand—I would want people in the decision-making room who aren’t old hands. No amount of expertise in how to make great-looking broadcast TV shows or put together a whiz-bang front page of the print newspaper is going to reverse the steep decline of people who consume their content that way.

This doesn’t mean, of course, that you throw the baby out with the bathwater. CBS News still needs to make broadcast TV! You can’t get rid of everyone who is an expert in that space.

But, again, the fact that neither Weiss nor Bilton has experience in making TV seems to me more an asset than a detriment. CBS News (and every other legacy outlet) has to figure out new ways to reach people on new platforms. Why not have people—like Weiss!—who has done that?

The changes in how people consume content and the sort of content they want to consume is fundamental. It’s never going back to the way it was.

That sort of massive change requires a re-examination of how we do everything.

My personal writing hero, Stephen King, said it best in his amazing book “On Writing”: “Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.”

We’ve reached the “kill your darlings” stage of legacy media. Now the only question is what we do about it. And doing the same old things—or slight variations on the same old things—ain’t going to work.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/what-everyone-is-getting-wrong-about-the-turmoil-at-60-minutes/?