The Munk Debates Podcast - Friday Focus: ABC capitulates to Trump and what to expect in Canada's upcoming federal budget

Episode Date: September 19, 2025

Friday Focus provides listeners with a focused, half-hour masterclass on the big issues, events and trends driving the news and current events. The show features Janice Gross Stein, the founding director of the Munk School of Global Affairs and bestselling author, in conversation with Rudyard Griffiths, Chair and moderator of the Munk Debates. Rudyard and Janice start today's show with the big news story of the week: the capitulation of ABC to the Trump administration, suspending the Jimmy Kimmel Show indefinitely in response to his somewhat innocuous remarks about Charlie Kirk's assasination. Trump is continuing to attack institutions that are integral to the functioning of democracies, and forcing other, smaller organizations to adopt an attitude of anticipatory compliance. This is no longer a question of the US backsliding into authoritarianism; it is already there. In the second half of the show Janice and Rudyard turn to Canada's upcoming federal budget and rumours of a very large projected deficit, coupled with confused messaging about a commitment to austerity and investment. Is the Carney government up to the task of restructuring our economy - and making bold policy changes - to prepare us for the future? To support the Friday Focus podcast consider becoming a donor to the Munk Debates for as little as $25 annually, or $.50 per episode. Canadian donors receive a charitable tax receipt. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue. More information at www.munkdebates.com.Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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full-length edition of this program. Thanks in advance for your generous contribution. Welcome to Friday Focus for the 19th of September 2025. I'm Roger Griffiths, Chair of the Monk Debates, joined by Janice Gris. Stein, the founding director of the Mug School of Global Affairs. Well, Janice, we are officially underway, the busy month of September, steamrolling along. How are you faring? Did you dig yourself out of that first week where everyone feels like it's a deluge and come up for air for week number two of the month? I don't know. The steamroller is going strong. I think it's a

it's going strong for you too. It's like going from 20 kilometers an hour to 250, not much time in between. Yeah, we will see. It was a, I would say maybe thankfully, a little bit of a quieter month, sorry, a quieter week on the international front, which is odd, considering how each week over the summer seemed to bring us one crisis, to the next, but in some ways it's seen, Janice, the big story, at least of the last 72 hours or so, has been the flex, big flex by the Trump administration regarding American media, and particularly the cancellation by a major American network of a very popular late night show, the Jimmy Kimmel show, as a result of some.

pretty innocuous remarks on the part of the host. How do we understand this, Janice? It seems as if, I don't know, we've had some new turn, some new kind of twist in the drama that is the presidency of Donald Trump. Roger, I can only understand this. It's a sequential attack on the instance. institutions, it's intimidation on the core institutions, outside government, that are critical to a democracy. You know, the universities were in their crosshairs for nine months.

Universities, frankly, have to negotiate. They couldn't withstand the pressure. Columbia made a deal. There are other universities that have made deals. Harvard has been in a month's long intensive. negotiation. Of course that creates a chill. There's no question. It's the same story. So where do you go next? If you're looking to silence critics, where do you go next? Of course you go to the media. They're powerful. And the Kimmel story just, I think, brought to the surface what's going on. You know, there were lawsuits against two of the big networks who paid out, Richard. You know, I was so, I was shocked, you can hear in my voice.

They paid out. They negotiated. And they said, oh, now you're going to laugh at my night. And I don't blame you. But the legal, they were told by their lawyers, they would prevail. But they did not want to withstand years and years. in the courts and everything that would go with it. And so they paid.

Jimmy Kimmel is the last in a sequence. I can imagine a world record where podcasts of the kind that you and I are doing right now. And substack posts are the only sites for people to honestly debate the issues. look at the Washington both, right? This is an attack. It's planned. It's systematic. It's not Jimmy Kimmel saying something,

although for the record, Jimmy Kimmel was wrong in what he said in the wake of the assassination. His facts were wrong. And we all try very hard not to let that happen, but you don't cancel a show for that. Yeah, and it's also, it's not a news broadcast. It's a late-night comedian. So, yeah, he inaccurately inferred that Charlie Kirk's killer was somehow ideologically aligned or, you know, part of the MAGA movement, quote, one of them.

You know, that was wrong. He made those statements, though, before, you know, more information had come out on the assassin, which has linked him to, seemingly, to be very very. verified a variety of kind of left causes but to cancel a show over that indefinitely so this this isn't simply a suspension he wasn't you know I don't know denied his his late night spot for a week or even a month the show was canceled and I guess that what I want to ask you Janice is you know ABC is not newsmax you know the the MAGA network or it's not some fringe podcast. I mean, this is a storied, I don't know, how many decades, ABC has been on air doing news, journalism, entertainment, you name it.

What does it mean when big institutions like this don't seem to simply, you know, I don't know, to be overly, maybe sensitive to the administration or a genuine, reflect to the administration, but kind of jump to attention and proactively take this kind of maximal step of basically sending a message to every other employee at ABC, including, I would think, in their news division, that if you say something that this administration finds is overly critical of them, you're going to lose your job. Yeah. Look, I really find this a disturbing story record. Because of ABC's reaction, what the Trump administration is trying to do here is a classic authoritarian playbook, right? Yeah. But why did ABC cave? That's really the point. You know, look, I'm not going to defend the universities in the United States. But you can at least argue that when you're threatened with a billion dollars in loss of research funds and thousands of your best researchers are going to lose their jobs and your labs are going to have to shut down, that's the argument that the university is made for getting into these protracted negotiations

with the Trump administration. And they've gone on for months and months. What does ABC lose here? It's not funded by the Trump, by government in any way. It really does. There's a reason we call it the fifth estate, right? Media is fundamental to democracy. It really is. There is no democracy without a flourishing, noisy,

obstreperous, foolish, responsible media, which speaks out. It is absolutely critical. I know you believe that. And to have, frankly, a powerful network like that cave, and so did the others, Roger. They paid him out in these frivolous libel suits. And just this last week, he sued the New York Times for billions of dollars. I don't think the New York Times will negotiate.

But we're left every, because they're, they're, they're, paywall guarantees them enough of a, you know, they're resilient enough to withstand the fight. But what does this tell you? Then unless you're really, you've got a reserve fund that is big enough to see you through five years of expensive legal fees, you know, this, there's a name for this. You know, you sue relentlessly because you're going to break the back of those you sues, They can't afford the legal fees. I mean, it's not a motivation from EBC.

I think it's a shameless, shameful behavior. I think it's shameful behavior on the part of ABC who have done this. Yeah, a lot of these media companies obviously are either in merger talks, exploring merger talks. I don't believe in this case, though, ABC was,

but we saw some of the other lawsuits being settled on the basis that, you know, it then green lighted a merger because a lawsuit was settled where money was paid to the president, ostensibly to his presidential library, but I don't know, to what extent are those funds not intermingled or fungible with the president's and personal interests and proclivities and those of his family. So I go back to what you said earlier, though, Janice, the kind of early signs and symptoms of of autocracy. I mean, we kind of, you know, we kind of, I don't, Gallo's humor joked about this at the beginning of the Trump presidency and the, you know, the famous injunction now of monk school scholar Timothy Snyder, you know, do not obey, you know, resist being compelled to submit. to you know what are by any any normal kind of measure you know extreme or radical actions on the part of an administration in this case again the threatening of i guess abc's broadcast license maybe ultimately by the fcc and the trump appointee who runs uh you know who runs uh that organization so what happens

Janice to Snyder's injunction, you know, do not obey. Do not obey in advance. These organizations seem to be tripping over themselves from the law, from, you know, prestigious, powerful law firms to some universities, maybe the majority of universities, with the exception of Harvard. Now the networks, like, and now we're hearing that as early as next week, there will be an executive order, uh, likely, targeting not-for-profit groups like the Soros Foundation and others which you know have potentially made controversial or other other grants but basically the implied threat then is to the entire not-for-profit world saying that your

charitable status will be revoked based on a kind of political assessment of the administration you know vis-a-vis your views. So what's left? I mean, if you've removed the media, the law firms, the universities, and the NGOs, who's left to say no? Well, that's exactly the point. You know, Tim's argument is what he calls, and not only don't comply, but he says, what happens in the environment that you're describing, is there's anticipatory compliance. They don't even have to do anything. You watch this, you're a media organization, you're one of the smaller ones, and you say, oh, I'm not, well, I'm going to protect myself against that, and you comply, you anticipate

that the administration will go after you, and you comply. I'm going to say, I think the United States is already, it is already authoritarian. This is systematic silencing of all the normal sources of opposition. What's left? A Congress that has completely abandoned its constitutional responsibility as the Republican majority caves entirely and doesn't resist the executive with grab powers that are constitutionally assigned to the Congress. So what are we left with courts? Well, yes, at the lower level of some of the federal. justices have ruled against the Trump administration. All these cases are on the way to the Supreme Court.

That's anybody's call what happens. It is hanging by very thin reed. I never thought we would be saying this after nine months. It rests on whether people like Kavanaugh and Amy Korn Barrett privilege the fact they're judges and they know something. about the history of the United States, its constitutional systems, and whether they feel a higher obligation

to the Constitution rather than to this president, and whether midterm elections are held in the United States. Because, you know, when I'm, I go quite often to Washington, Roger, when I'm there, what am I hearing now? A lot of discussion that these elections will not be held. that there will be some national emergency that will be invoked, and these elections will be postponed. So we are way down the path now towards authoritarianism in the United States.

And, yeah, just as we wrap up this section, I guess what, does it surprise you? Because I think it surprises me. And in a sense, how easy this is been. Right? Like, why was it so? easy for a country that has espoused for, you know, the entire post-war period, a role as the world's, you know, leading democracy, the so-called, you know, city on a hill. This was, you know, a nation that saw itself, you know, steeped in its constitution, in the rule of law, in these august, you know,

institutions like the presidency. They were up until literally a year ago. There were, you know, media who would openly and vigorously assert their rights to, you know, criticize the Biden administration or, you know, assert whatever, you know, media independence they wished in the context of, you know, political debates and political coverage. And I, again, go through the list, the law firms, the universities. On and on and on. And like in nine months, Janice, were just to think, what, all that was dross?

All that was puffery, was it? Well, it's actually stunning, record. How easy it was, it has been. And, yeah, I do, no, I ask myself why. I think there's a tremendous mistake that, institutions make, sorry, that institutions make, this is a small step. Let's go along to get along right now because we have, you know, we have bigger obligations. We have to protect our mission. So we'll comply now without understanding that that itself is a message to everybody

else. And by the time you make the decision not to comply, it's too late. Because the fact the fabric of opposition is so we can, the partners that would join you in saying, no, look, don't cross this line, that is already disintegrated. And that is, that is the classic authoritarian playbook that we are seeing unfold right now in the United States. I can only think, given how feckless he's been in the past, that this was planned out by people who thought about this second term, thought about what they had to get done in the first 18 months of this presidency and are just relentless in their focus.

But boy, if you're watching that, and you're a university or your law firm or your foundation. Stop. Don't comply. Don't comply. But again, just to push you once more on this, why the rush to compliance, as Snyder, in a sense, precedently. Predicted. Yeah.

participated like why why is there this kind of keenness to to submit i don't know i mean if i was to venture an answer it's because all that stuff that people were talking about for the last decade or more about american democracy and institutions and you know global leadership was i don't know b s was no was uh you know uh kind of hagiography for for a country and a national narrative and a story that I don't know had had whimpered and died without us knowing it and and the reason that Trump has been so successful in nine months and cowing all these institutions and again it is I just go back to the seeming inability of of people to speak up and speak out of the absence of protests there's nobody on the street

Janice about this. There's a strange, I guess maybe that's what I'm trying to put my finger on. There's a strange passivity that seems to have grabbed the public. Because ultimately, in other countries that have faced these moments, you know where the power comes from. It comes from the street. It comes from what we've seen in Indonesia over the last week, or Nepal, or other countries where, you know, there is civil unrest. And in the face of that, these types of encroachments, power grabs, you know, meet reality.

They meet the moment, so to speak. But we're just not seeing that. You know, it's really interesting. Because what? What the Trump people have understood Richard is that they use the regulatory power, right? I'll take away your broadcast license. I'll cut your funding for all your medical research.

You can paralyze an institution. You can force the institution to let go of some of its very best people. And all of these institutions aren't competitive environments. So, you know, if Harvard has to let go its top 500 scientists, that paralyzes Harvard and the way it can. and attract really great students or more faculty. So, okay, well, I'll negotiate it because the consequences would be so terrible. So that's a look at what happens to the individual institution

without understanding that if everybody thinks this way, what kind of environment is that is Harvard going to be living in in another year, right? So each institution just calculates what it needs to do to survive. That's really what you're hearing. And we get, but the collective will to take to the streets and to say no, we can, every single time a Jimmy Kimmel is suspended. I just stand with the, you know, the quote of Oscar Benevite is the president of Peru in the 19, who said, for my friends, everything, for my enemies, the law.

Isn't that out? Yeah. That's a great quote, but you. Yeah. And you and I haven't talked, by the way, we have to find time when we can talk about the kleptocracy. Yes. That is this U.S. presidency.

Yeah. The revelations in the last week about, you know, crypto, crypto deals for the family, in turn for the release of America's most advanced artificial intelligence chips to the UAE. It's pretty shocking, the quid quo pro that is going on. Well, Janice, let's take a break. We'll say goodbye to our complimentary listeners and join our valued monk donors on the other side of this short break. If you're not a monk donor, you can become one for as little as $25 a year. If you're Canadian, you get a charitable tax receipt for that.

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