Trump Plays Reverse Card to Announce His Blessing On $6.2B Nexstar/Tegna Deal

Live look at Dems right now… 

(Source: Giphy) 

After torching the Nexstar–Tegna merger a few months ago, Donnie Deals has gone to Truth Social yelling “GET THAT DEAL DONE!” (no exaggeration) like he just discovered where the volume knob is. 

The deal in question, obvi,  is none other than Nexstar Media buying Tegna for $6.2B, scooping up 64 more stations and pushing Nexstar’s reach to roughly 80% of the country. It was announced last August, penciled in to close sometime in the back half of 2026, and has been floating in regulatory limbo ever since. However, Trump’s new logic is simple and very on-brand: more consolidation equals more competition. Or at least, more competition against “THE ENEMY,” which in this case is national cable news. His argument is that a scaled-up local broadcast giant can punch back at the ABC/NBC axis and dilute the cultural chokehold of the legacy networks. Sounds legit. 

(Source: Giphy) 

Again, this is a hormonal reversal from where he was at in November, when Trump was very much in the “absolutely not” camp, warning that consolidation might help “Radical Left Networks” expand. Back then, the vibe was scorched earth: make them smaller, not bigger. Now the vibe is more “fight fire with a bigger flamethrower.” And now that Broadcast TV is getting slowly strangled by cord-cutting, ad dollars are leaking to Big Tech, and local stations are one of the last semi-functional pieces of legacy media that still throw off real cash… it makes hella sense. 

That said, Nexstar CEO Perry Sook has been saying this part out loud for months. His pitch is that local broadcast is the last defensible moat against Silicon Valley eating everything, and that the ownership rules were written for a world with rabbit ears and VCRs. To make the deal work, the Federal Communications Commission would have to lift its 39% national reach cap… a rule Nexstar has called “antiquated” while asking regulators to Ctrl + Alt + Delete it. 

On the other hand though, Trump’s thumbs up doesn’t magically fix that problem, but it absolutely changes the political clusterf*ck going on with it.  A green light from him reframes the merger from “evil media consolidation” into “strategic counterweight to Fake News,” which is a much safer lane in a deregulatory environment. 

But, but, but… if you’ve been paying attention, this honestly shouldn’t come as a surprise. Nexstar became the first major broadcaster to preempt Jimmy Kimmel Live! after Kimmel’s comments about the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. That move didn’t go unnoticed in conservative media circles… or, presumably, by Donnie Deals himself. 

Meaning, this reversal is definitely not random… and it’s 100% transactional. Trump sees a scaled local-broadcast empire as a weapon against national networks and Big Tech. Nexstar sees deregulation as the only way to survive the next decade. Tegna shareholders see a $6.2B exit in an industry that isn’t getting any friendlier. If the FCC blinks, this thing closes. If it doesn’t, it dies loudly… with ALL CAPS on Truth Social. Either way, Trump has picked a side now. That alone makes this deal a lot harder to quietly kill. And that’s the trade. Until next time, friends… 

At the time of publishing, Stocks.News does not hold positions in companies mentioned in the article.