One Trump Promise He Can Deliver: Killing AT&T's Time Warner Deal

Obamacare is staying, but the president doesn’t need Paul Ryan to dismantle an $85 billion media merger he hates and stifle CNN’s Jeff Zucker in the process

- Michael Wolff

Donald Trump says he is determined to keep his campaign promises. It is a mantra in the West Wing. All campaign promises have to be turned into executive orders, legislation or regulatory action. That’s the agenda. There’s an actual checklist on which staffers tick off each promise. One of those promises — falling somewhere behind extreme vetting, repealing and replacing Obamacare (well, um, cough, blame someone else for that), tax reform, immigration bans, military expansion, budget cutting, a Mexican border wall and making NATO allies pay up — is to block the planned merger of AT&T and Time Warner.

I recently contacted Time Warner, which will receive $500 million if the $85.4 billion merger doesn’t go through, about the status of the deal and was pretty much told that the press- and politics-savvy company, led by Jeff Bewkes, was strictly in the back seat on this one. In fact, at the presidential inauguration party at Time Warner’s Washington government affairs offices (in sight of the White House) — where Carol Melton, who oversees the D.C. office, is regarded as one of the best public policy people in the media business — the talk was about closing the Capitol outpost.

So I got in touch with AT&T’s Washington office, which seemed confused about how to talk to a reporter. Claudia B. Jones, AT&T vp public affairs and communications, responded by sending me a press packet about the deal. I said thanks but that I was really looking to sit down with someone and hear a bit of the thinking — on background would be fine — about how AT&T was planning to navigate the new and strange realities of Trumpworld and its public disdain for the deal. Corporate PR then stepped in and offered an on-the-record interview with AT&T general counsel David McAtee.