Trump may have pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández, former president of Honduras, but that doesn’t mean the convicted fraudster and money launderer who helped move tons of cocaine into the United States is home free. The government of Honduras issued its own international arrest warrant for Hernández yesterday, apparently determined to administer the justice the American government suddenly has so little concern for. If that’s not a good metaphor for all this nonsense, we don’t know what is. Happy Tuesday.

Donald Owes Larry. Can Larry Collect?

by Andrew Egger

I have no strong or well-formed opinions on what it will mean for the movie industry if Netflix buys Warner Bros.—for such things you’re better off consulting Sonny Bunch. But I have watched in fascination over the last few days as the negotiations have been ensnared in the court politics of obtaining the personal blessing or disapproval of one Donald J. Trump.

Netflix’s top competitor in the bid to acquire the Warner Bros. studio and HBO Max has been Paramount, the media company owned by one of Trump’s inner-ring tech billionaire pals, David Ellison. Ellison had thought the Warner Bros. deal was as good as his, but somehow Netflix managed to outmaneuver him, announcing their deal last week.

Over the weekend, though, Trump cracked the door open. The Netflix–Warner Bros. deal “could be a problem,” he said Sunday from the red carpet at his Trumpified Kennedy Center Honors ceremony—standing in front of a backdrop conspicuously featuring the logo of the event’s main sponsor, Ellison’s CBS. Netflix already has “a very big market share” in streaming, Trump said (correctly). “When they have Warner Bros., that share goes up a lot. . . . I’ll be involved in that decision, too.”

It was the last bit—Trump’s promise to get personally involved rather than leaving matters up to his underlings at the Justice Department and/or the Federal Trade Commission—that likely caused Ellison’s heart to sing. On Monday, he seemed to take the president at his word, launching a $108 billion hostile takeover bid for Warner Bros. designed to go around the company’s board by appealing directly to its shareholders. Ellison was offering more money than Netflix, but he also offered a remarkable argument: Shareholders should go with him, he wrote, because he believed Netflix’s bid would face “a challenging regulatory approval process.”

Both Netflix and Paramount have plainly known for a while that getting Trump’s personal buy-in was key to the deal. But while both companies did what they could to curry favor—both courted former Trump adviser Jason Miller to come aboard as an adviser to the deal, for instance—there’s little question Ellison came out better in that department. Part of the financing he lined up for his bid was ponied up by Affinity, the investment group of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. And Ellison has spent the first year of Trump’s term coming through for the president in all sorts of remarkable ways—settling Trump’s ridiculous lawsuit against CBS News’s 60 Minutes, then handing over editorial control of the entire news outlet to contrarian conservative Bari Weiss.

And here, after all that, was Ellison coming to reap his reward, in plain English: Netflix, not Paramount, was the party likely to face regulatory blowback from the White House. Trump wants ME to get it, Ellison might as well have said, not THEM.

But the court politics can cut both ways. Trump loves being sucked up to, and he loves distributing head-pat rewards to the suck-ups. What Trump does not love is powerful people starting to treat those rewards as something they’ve earned. The largesse of the emperor is never earned—it is freely bestowed by his gracious will and graciously received by the unworthy! The baldness of Ellison’s pitch seems to have rankled at least some in Trump’s orbit, who offered some real howlers of complaint to Semafor: The Paramount team seems to “believe the worst tropes” about corruption in the administration, they groused. They’re “leaning into all the stereotypes.”

Where did those tropes and stereotypes come from, one wonders?

Ellison’s brazenness may have complicated Trump’s decision tree, but there’s little question the president is still the guy whose say-so will be final.

“In a normal administration, maybe the president would actually have [control of the deal], but he’d never say anything. He’d probably just, like, wink and nod—‘Well, we’ll let the enforcers do what the enforcers do’—and then not claim responsibility,” an administration official familiar with antitrust issues told The Bulwark. “In this administration, the president wants responsibility and wants everyone to know that he blocked the deal or whatever. . . . If the president is dictating, he’s gonna get what he wants. So we’ll see what he wants.”