Trump asks CNN to donate to veterans charities extra profits from next week's debate

Ed Morrisey reports at Hot Air,

Troll-fu level: Master. Ever since the first Fox News debate turned into a ratings smash, other networks have been rethinking their revenue strategies. On Friday, the Hollywood Reporter’s Marisa Guthrie revealed that CNN had hiked their ad rate for the September 16th prime-time debate from $5,000 per 30-second spot to a range of $150,000-200,000 — forty times what they’d normally expect, at the high end.

So what does Trump do? He demands that CNN donate their profits to veterans charities. Ed writes,

In one moment, Trump has cast himself as a populist crusader against excess profits, as a champion of veterans (after his fumble about military prep school), and a leader in holding national media’s feet to the fire. If CNN goes along with this idea, Trump can take credit for the largesse. If they don’t, Trump has a new media target at which to aim for the next few weeks, one that doesn’t attempt to undermine conservative-media allies the eventual nominee will need to combat media bias in a general election.

Now on the flip side, this does have a rather strong whiff of the kind of authoritarianism that runs counter to American conservatism. Since when do conservative politicians make normal business profit a vice? Of course, Republicans tried to defend big-business profits in 2012, and that … didn’t work out very well for them, either. Would a President Trump make similar demands of corporations enjoying short-term profits off of cultural moments? It’s also worth noting that Trump’s had plenty of windfall profits in his life (as he reminds people constantly); how much of that went to veterans groups before his presidential runs in 2011 and 2015?

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