People can ignore this New York Times article about AT&T. It's for myself because I own several shares of AT&T. This article is also about our Idiot President, aka Trump, so somebody might be interested in it.

New York Times: Mr. Trump Casts a Shadow Over the AT&T-Time Warner Deal. President Trump’s hostility toward CNN may affect the proposed merger between the cable news channel’s parent company, Time Warner, and AT&T.

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD NOV. 15, 2017

President Trump’s hostility toward the news media, and CNN in particular, has been so extreme that it is calling into doubt whether his appointees at the Department of Justice can fairly evaluate a merger involving the cable news channel’s parent company, Time Warner, and AT&T.

The Justice Department’s Antitrust Division has reportedly asked AT&T to sell the Turner Broadcasting division of Time Warner, a unit that includes CNN, or sell its DirecTV unit to gain approval for the deal. On its face, this is not an unreasonable request. Combining AT&T and Time Warner in their present form would create a vertically integrated telecom-media goliath. It would have the market power to hurt competitors and consumers by raising prices of popular shows like “Game of Thrones” and channels like HBO, CNN and TNT. Smaller rivals like Dish Network and regional cable-TV companies might have no choice but to pay or risk losing their customers to AT&T.

For these and other reasons, experts and lawmakers have been saying for months that a merger raises serious problems, and some sort of divestment seems necessary before it can be approved. But asking Time Warner to sell Turner Broadcasting and its CNN unit raises its own questions. Given Mr. Trump’s repeated attacks on CNN, there’s ample cause to suspect that the Justice Department scheme is a ploy to force a sale of the news organization to owners that will strip away its editorial independence and turn it into a house organ of the Trump administration.

Officials at the White House and the Justice Department insist they haven’t discussed the case with one another. They also say that political considerations have played no role in the department’s review. But it’s interesting, and to some people suspicious, that the chief of the Antitrust Division, Makan Delrahim, has changed his mind about the deal. In October 2016, he said he did not see a “major antitrust problem” with an AT&T-Time Warner marriage. Now he does, and he supports the divestiture of Turner and CNN. Reasonable people are bound to ask if he changed his mind because economists and lawyers at the Antitrust Division persuaded him, or because he was influenced by Mr. Trump’s tweets and public statements.

Justly or not, Mr. Delrahim suffers from the same suspicions that attach to just about all of Mr. Trump’s appointees. By firing a director of the F.B.I., by demanding that the Justice Department investigate his political opponents and by attacking judges, Mr. Trump, unlike other presidents of the modern era, has shown little but contempt for the independent, honest judgment of government departments and agencies. In a more insidious fashion, he has undermined the integrity of public service by appointing people to important jobs who have glaring conflicts of interest. He has stacked the Environmental Protection Agency with officials who have long ties to the fossil fuel and chemical industries; a similar bias infects the Interior Department.

This week, the president nominated a former pharmaceutical industry executive, Alex Azar, who led a company that repeatedly raised the price of important drugs like insulin, to head the Department of Health and Human Services.

Mr. Delrahim could well be an exception. But he has a lot to prove. For starters, his division needs to build a strong legal case against the AT&T-Time Warner deal. He will also need to explain why the Justice Department, instead of requiring a divestiture, could not use the same approach it did in 2011 when it allowed Comcast, a cable company, buy NBCUniversal, a media business, as long as the company agreed to treat other cable companies and internet streaming firms like Netflix fairly.

Further, to show that his views on this deal are more than politically expedient, Mr. Delrahim needs to be just as tough on other mega-mergers that come before him. He will have no credibility if he takes an aggressive stand against AT&T-Time Warner but then goes easy on deals involving companies owned or controlled by conservative tycoons, like the pending Sinclair Broadcast Group acquisition of Tribune Media and any deals made by 21st Century Fox, which has reportedly had talks to sell assets to Disney. Mr. Trump’s appointee to head the Federal Communications Commission, Ajit Pai, has, in fact, changed rules to help Sinclair get bigger, and also seeks to make it easier for media companies to own multiple news outlets in the same market.

Through his relentless politicization of everything he touches, Mr. Trump has complicated matters greatly for his appointees. Unless they act with utmost integrity they will be tainted as henchmen for an unruly and vindictive president.