Friday, July 25, 2025. Annette’s Roundup for Democracy.
First posting about Trump’s polls in a long time.
Independents Drive Trump's Approval to 37% Second-Term Low
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Six months into his second term, President Donald Trump’s job approval rating has dipped to 37%, the lowest of this term and just slightly higher than his all-time worst rating of 34% at the end of his first term. Trump’s rating has fallen 10 percentage points among U.S. adults since he began his second term in January, including a 17-point decline among independents, to 29%, matching his lowest rating with that group in either of his terms.
For their part, Republicans’ ratings have remained generally steady near 90% and Democrats have been consistently in the low single digits. (Gallup)
https://x.com/amyklobuchar/status/194857542449517807Remember this.👇
Rep. Robert Garcia: "[Ghislaine Maxwell] is a bad person who has hurt young girls and young women. She should not be trusted. She's already lied multiple times under oath...I am sick that folks in the MAGA world are somehow giving her some kind of grace. She's a monster!" pic.twitter.com/G7Yj5cPm5f
— The Bulwark (@BulwarkOnline) July 25, 2025
South Park and Trump - the Order of Things.
First, in July, Paramount Global—CBS News’s parent company—reached a $16 million settlement with Donald Trump.
• The lawsuit stemmed from a “60 Minutes” interview with then–Vice President Kamala Harris, which Trump claimed was deceptively edited to harm his electoral chances .
• The payment is not to Trump personally, but to his future presidential library, and covers legal fees—Trump will not receive direct cash compensation .
• Reports indicate Trump claims he may receive another $20 million in ad value or airtime from Skydance (Paramount’s pending merger partner), though Paramount has denied any additional compensation beyond the original settlement
- The case emerged just before Paramount’s planned merger with Skydance Media, which required approval from the Federal Communications Commission.
- A bi-product of this seems to have been CBS’s firing of Stephen Colbert, its long time and highly rated late night host.
- Then, this 👇 happened yesterday.
F.C.C. Approves Skydance’s $8 Billion Merger With Paramount
The deal, which came under intense scrutiny by the Trump administration, was hailed by the F.C.C. chief, who welcomed “significant changes” at CBS, a unit of Paramount.
The Federal Communications Commission said Thursday that it would allow Paramount to merge with the Hollywood studio Skydance, clearing the way for one of the most highly scrutinized media deals in the last decade.
Brendan Carr, the chairman of the F.C.C., said in a statement that the agency had approved the deal after receiving assurances from Skydance that the new company would be committed to unbiased journalism and would not establish programs related to diversity, equity and inclusion.
“Americans no longer trust the legacy national news media to report fully, accurately and fairly,” Mr. Carr said in the statement. “It is time for a change. That is why I welcome Skydance’s commitment to make significant changes at the once storied CBS broadcast network.”
Mr. Carr’s approval was the biggest remaining hurdle for the $8 billion deal, which has generated near-weekly headlines since it was announced last July. And it effectively ushers in the beginning of a new family dynasty for Paramount, which has been controlled by the Redstone family for decades. David Ellison, son of the tech billionaire Larry Ellison, plans to take control of the company when the deal closes.
In recent weeks, Paramount has been engulfed in turmoil stemming from the company’s strained relationship with the Trump administration. The company paid $16 million this month to settle a lawsuit brought by President Trump. Critics — including CBS’s “Late Night” host, Stephen Colbert — said the settlement was effectively a payoff to secure approval from the Trump administration, claims the company flatly rejected.
Mr. Colbert said last week that the company was ending his show next year, leading some prominent Democrats to claim that the move was politically motivated. The company has denied that, saying the program was canceled for financial reasons.
In recent days, Skydance took steps to assuage Mr. Carr, telling the agency that it would install an official at the news division to ensure fairness in its journalism and committing to avoiding diversity, equity and inclusion programs at the company. In his statement, Mr. Carr lauded these steps, saying they would “begin the process of earning back Americans’ trust.”
Anna M. Gomez, a Democratic commissioner on the F.C.C., said in a statement that the agency had used “its vast power to pressure Paramount to broker a private legal settlement and further erode press freedom.”
“Even more alarming, it is now imposing never-before-seen controls over newsroom decisions and editorial judgment, in direct violation of the First Amendment and the law,” Ms. Gomez said.
Spokespeople for Paramount and Skydance had no comment.
With the deal expected to close shortly, the future of Paramount’s management team, including its three co-chief executives, is hanging in the balance. Though George Cheeks is expected to stay on under Skydance, the two other chief executives, Brian Robbins and Chris McCarthy, have not disclosed their next steps. Skydance has also said that the company would look to cut costs after the merger closes, raising questions about the future of the company’s work force.
The F.C.C.’s approval is a coda for one of the most tortured deals the media sector has seen in years. Though Paramount initially said the deal would close in the first half of 2025, the companies ultimately had to extend that deadline.
After the deal was announced in July, Paramount began a period to see whether other suitors would top Skydance’s offer. Though some would-be acquirers, including the businessman Edgar Bronfman Jr., explored bids, no offers that were superior to Mr. Ellison’s materialized.
Meanwhile, Paramount was dealing with Mr. Trump’s lawsuit. Filed just before the election in November, the complaint said CBS’s “60 Minutes” had misleadingly edited an interview with Kamala Harris, the vice president and Democratic presidential nominee at the time, giving the Democratic Party an unfair advantage in the election. Although most legal experts said the case was baseless, Paramount settled the case rather than risk being dragged into a long legal battle with Mr. Trump.
The lawsuit caused no shortage of agita at CBS News, particularly at “60 Minutes,” a hallowed bastion of investigative journalism. Bill Owens, the longtime executive producer of “60 Minutes,” resigned this spring, citing corporate pressure that infringed on the company’s journalism. Wendy McMahon, the president of CBS News, was forced out a month later.
While Paramount never killed any critical stories about the Trump administration, some journalists at CBS News said they felt that the company’s close scrutiny of segments involving Mr. Trump amounted to corporate interference.
As the merger neared its conclusion, some of Paramount’s most popular programs came under the microscope. News reports surfaced about discontent among the creators of “South Park,” Comedy Central’s popular scatological cartoon, stemming from negotiations over the future of the show. And the cancellation of Mr. Colbert’s show led to a rebuke from Jon Stewart, the host of Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show.”
Some of those disputes appear to have been quelled, for now. But the aftereffects on the network’s programs still linger. This week, “South Park” ran an episode featuring Mr. Trump in bed with Satan, with Jesus urging the denizens of South Park to strike a bargain with the president to avoid corporate interference.
“The guy can do whatever he wants now that somebody backed down, OK?” the cartoon Jesus said. “You guys saw what happened to CBS?” he added.(New York Times)
This followed the merger, right on the heels of its approval.
'South Park' vs. Trump in Season Premiere: 'South Park' Wins
In a moment when Hollywood and the media are gripped by fear, Trey Parker and Matt Stone stepped to the mic and dropped a balls-out critique of President Trump and Paramount.
>This post contains spoilers for the Season 27 premiere of South Park, which is streaming on Paramount+.
‘South Park’ presents the 47th president of the United States of America.
Nearly three decades after South Park debuted, its creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone are still capable of displaying impeccable timing.
The animated comedy’s 27th season premiere, “Sermon on the ‘Mount,” arrived a week after CBS canceled The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, apparently to appease the Trump administration and grease the wheels for a merger between CBS’ parent company Paramount and Skydance Media. It came only a few days after Parker and Stone closed a new five-year, $1.5 billion deal with Paramount for South Park streaming rights, which meant that this would be the first new episode to be made available the next day on Paramount+, rather than on HBO Max. And it debuted the night before Parker and Stone would be appearing on a panel at San Diego Comic-Con. The stars have rarely aligned as perfectly for the duo to take a shot at the biggest possible target, at a moment when they have the biggest possible spotlight on themselves. And boy, did they take advantage of it.
“Sermon on the ‘Mount” starts out focused primarily on parochial matters within its small Colorado hamlet. Cartman is dismayed to learn that the presidential administration has canceled NPR, which he listened to solely to laugh at all the complaining liberal voices on public radio. As other symbols of wokeness fall away — including PC Principal now bringing the literal Jesus Christ into their school, and re-dubbing himself Power Christian Principal — Cartman goes through an existential crisis. Because if no one is espousing liberal values anymore, then his own persona stops being transgressive. Meanwhile, Stan’s father Randy argues that Jesus appearing at a public school is illegal, and convinces his redneck buddies that perhaps the president has pushed his agenda too far. They assume POTUS is Mr. Garrison — who functioned as the show’s stand-in for Donald Trump in the late 2010s — but he’s retired from politics to spend time with his boyfriend Rick.
From there, the action shifts to the White House, where an animated version of Trump — with a photorealistic head and a floppy mouth (usually a South Park signifier for Canadians) — is portrayed, in short order, as: an unapologetic con man pushing a fundamentalist Christian agenda as a cover to steal money from the government and the American people; a whiny narcissist who threatens to sue anyone who doesn’t suck up to him and is in denial that he has a micropenis; and an all-around dictator who — like Saddam Hussein in the movie South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut — is literally in bed with Satan. And the devil is no happier in this relationship than he was back then with Saddam. He’s arguably even more miserable.
It’s a blistering, no-holds-barred attack on Trump — including animated full-frontal nudity of the aforementioned micropenis. And it comes at a moment when so many in the media — Parker and Stone’s corporate bosses in particular — are terrified of pointing out that the president is acting like a fascist, or that the only cause or person he seemingly has ever cared about is himself. The episode is unsparing on Paramount, portraying various CBS News reporters as scared to say anything that might antagonize POTUS and invite a lawsuit. It turns out even Christ has only come back to South Park because he was sued, and he’s as unhappy about all the crimes being perpetrated in his name by Trump as everyone else in town. (The episode’s title is a play on the name Paramount.)
Randy’s friends claim that this isn’t what they signed up for when they voted for Trump, arguing that compassion for other people isn’t bad, and that it’s OK to care at least a little about the environment. Eventually, though, they’re sued into submission, too, and ordered to pay him millions of dollars, as well as record a PSA supporting him. Unfortunately, what they come up with seems likely only to further enrage Trump, both the lightly fictionalized version on the show, and the actual version who lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Cut to an AI-generated live-action scene of Trump wandering in the desert, gradually stripping off his clothes to reveal his naked, obese body, until he collapses in the sand and his micropenis appears, with googly eyes and a squeaky voice that says, “I’m Donald J. Trump, and I endorse this message.”
On the one hand, it feels ironic that Parker and Stone are the ones to go this hard after Trump, since the governing philosophy of South Park for so long was that caring about anything is stupid, and that there’s essentially no difference between America’s two main political parties — an attitude that’s filtered down to multiple generations of people who grew up watching the show, and thus helped to create an environment where a self-involved, delusional grifter like Trump could get elected twice. That said, Parker and Stone have occasionally demonstrated regret over that attitude: In 2006, they ruthlessly mocked Al Gore’s attempts to warn people about climate change, then did a 2018 episode where the satirical target was now climate-change deniers, while Gore got a literal apology from the characters.
But Parker and Stone’s long history of making fun of earnestness in many ways makes them the ideal delivery system for an episode like this. Colbert was canceled because the president has thin skin and despises anyone who tells jokes about him, but Colbert was also preaching to the converted. That it was South Park bringing this savagery — not just making fun of Trump, but being so blunt and unsparing in its critique of him — is going to have far more impact, and get more attention, than a famously and unabashedly liberal TV host saying the same things. (Though I doubt any of the current late-night shows would have given us a talking, googly-eyed phallus.)
Desperate times mean you can’t afford to interrogate the credentials of everyone who takes your side, even if it’s only temporary. Parker and Stone can be so politically elusive that it wouldn’t be shocking if the next episode had a subplot about AOC in a bikini contest, so the duo can once again insist that their chief goal is to play devil’s advocate to whatever the conventional wisdom of the moment is.
The White House issued a statement complaining about the episode, but at the time of this writing, Trump himself has yet to respond. Certainly, anything he says or posts will only draw more attention to this unflattering portrayal, but his impulse control on this kind of thing is historically not strong. Meanwhile, Parker and Stone will be speaking to 6,000 people later today in Hall H at the San Diego Convention Center, with their words being instantly beamed out all over the internet. Given their traditional disrespect of authority — including that of the people who pay them — it wouldn’t be surprising if they dropped this episode in part because they knew it would throw a monkey wrench into the FCC’s approval of the Skydance deal, and/or because they’re actually hoping Trump will try to sue them: $1.5 billion is the definition of “fuck you” money, and litigation would only put more eyeballs on the episode, not to mention on a show that’s rarely talked about anymore with as much volume and frequency as it was in the Nineties and aughts.
At precarious moments like this, certain things need to be said out loud, even if they’re being packaged with juvenile dick jokes. When so many of their peers are too scared to offer even a mealy-mouthed version of criticism, Parker, Stone, and South Park just went for it. Motivations don’t matter. Late in the episode, Cartman calls off his suicide attempt after Butters helps convince him that there’s always hope for a return to the world where Cartman’s hateful trollery will again be a minority voice pushing back against the mainstream. May we all hope for the same. (RollingStone
)
Trump White House Rages at ‘South Park’ Over 'Desperate' Premiere
Satan (left) and Donald Trump (right) appear in 'South Park.
The president cowed Paramount execs, but the company’s talent is rebelling. Now, the administration is melting down
Donald Trump’s White House is melting down over Wednesday night’s South Park premiere, which just so happened to attack the president’s “teeny tiny” manhood and depict him as literally in bed with the devil, effectively taking over the role held on the show for years by the late genocidal dictator Saddam Hussein.
“The Left’s hypocrisy truly has no end — for years they have come after South Park for what they labeled as ‘offense’ [sic] content, but suddenly they are praising the show,” Trump White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers told Rolling Stone in a statement this morning. “Just like the creators of South Park, the Left has no authentic or original content, which is why their popularity continues to hit record lows. This show hasn’t been relevant for over 20 years and is hanging on by a thread with uninspired ideas in a desperate attempt for attention. President Trump has delivered on more promises in just six months than any other president in our country’s history — and no fourth-rate show can derail President Trump’s hot streak.”
The episode came just hours after it was reported that Paramount had agreed to buy the global streaming rights for South Park in a five-year deal worth $1.5 billion. (RollingStone).
Some pretend the birthday book to Epstein didn’t exist.
Huh?
