Trump Team Freaks Out Over CBS’s Newest Hire

The White House is weighing in on the internal affairs of private business—again.

Trump administration officials are reportedly seething that CBS News hired Jeremy Adler, a communications executive who previously worked for former Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney, according to insiders that spoke with Axios Thursday.

Cheney, a lifelong Republican and the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, stood out among her caucus for her unrelenting critiques of Donald Trump’s performance during his first term. She was one of 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump, repeatedly rejected Trump’s 2020 election conspiracy, and served as the vice chair of the House committee that investigated the January 6 Capitol riot.

Exactly how Adler’s affiliation with Cheney would prevent him from functioning as a communications executive for the news network is not clear, but nonetheless, the decision did not sit well with the people surrounding the president.

Further, the administration’s public derision at Adler’s appointment once again flouts the free-market philosophy that Republicans have championed for decades, highlighting the growing differences between Trump’s MAGA agenda and the larger conservative party.

“The idea CBS would hire Liz Cheney’s flack who has worked to jail President Trump and make it impossible for anybody who supported the president to get hired is insanity. What the hell is Bari Weiss thinking?” a White House official told Axios.

Weiss, the founder of the pro-Israel blog The Free Press and a former New York Times opinion columnist, was tapped as the newsroom’s newest chief late last year, despite the fact that she had never worked in broadcasting, lacked traditional reporting experience, and had never run a major news operation.

In a few short months, her business decisions atop the network have unequivocally and single-handedly divorced CBS News from its decades-long place within America’s prestige news media circuit.

What was once crowned the “gold standard” of broadcasting, and the home of some of journalism’s most venerable names, such as Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow, has since devolved into a graveyard for journalism ethics.

Under Weiss’s stewardship, CBS News has killed critical stories in order to save face for the Trump administration. In December, Weiss pulled the plug on a 60 Minutes segment investigating the result of Trump’s mass deportation program, focusing on Venezuelan immigrants who had been deported to El Salvador’s notoriously brutal CECOT megaprison.

The network has also lost a cadre of veteran journalists, whom Weiss replaced with the likes of Peter Attia (who was ousted from his role as an on-air contributor shortly after his hiring was announced due to his various ties to Jeffrey Epstein).

Yet Weiss’s appointment was merely the cherry on top of a large portion of recent chaos at CBS. In the last year, parent company Paramount undermined itself by settling multimillion-dollar lawsuits with Trump over CBS’s fair and accurate coverage (in an apparent bid to butter up the administration ahead of a multibillion-dollar merger with SkyDance). That resulted in the loss of two storied showrunners, including 60 Minutes producer Bill Owens and CBS News chief Wendy McMahon, who rejected Paramount’s approach to handling the groundless lawsuit.