Back in November, responding to a question about whether Roy Moore should drop out of Alabama’s special election, Donald Trump launched into a seemingly unprompted tirade about his television habits. “Believe it or not, even when I’m in Washington or New York, I do not watch much television,” he told reporters aboard Air Force One in the midst of his grand Asian tour. “People that don’t know me, they like to say I watch television—people with fake sources. . . . But I don’t get to watch much television. Primarily because of documents. I’m reading documents. A lot.”

Though the rant seemed off the cuff, on Monday The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple revealed that Trump had been inspired by a list of questions The New York Times sent to the White House to fact-check an article about, among other things, just how much time the president spends in front of the TV. That article was published over the weekend, and it did not want for detail: Trump apparently spends “at least four hours a day, and sometimes twice as much as that” watching TV, tuning into CNN for news, MSBNC for rage, and Fox & Friends for “comfort and messaging ideas.” The president, of course, furiously denied the charge on Twitter, telling his followers that the estimate was “wrong!” and insisting “I seldom, if ever, watch CNN or MSNBC,” a claim that might’ve held a little more weight if he didn’t routinely respond to both networks’ reporting in real time. But he didn’t bother denying his Fox & Friends habit, perhaps realizing it was a lost cause:

So you can imagine Trump’s panic, nay, terror about the Thursday morning news that Walt Disney Co. had agreed to buy “key” assets of 21st Century Fox in a deal valued at $66.1 billion. What would that mean for his beloved show? Would Disney chief Bob Iger, a Democrat who resigned from the White House’s advisory council, take his Friends away from him? Where would he be able to turn for atta-boys and Obama bashing? Who could he count on to convince Americans that this Russia fracas is much ado about nothing? The prospect was apparently so terrifying that, according to my colleague Gabriel Sherman, Trump took nothing to chance:

As has been reported several times, Fox News itself is not among the assets that Disney would acquire—a fact Rupert Murdoch presumably conveyed to the president. With that enormous, Steve Doocy-shaped weight off his shoulders, Trump was free to get down to the business of further demonstrating that he is knows nothing about business. During Thursday’s press briefing, Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters, “The president spoke with Rupert Murdoch earlier today, congratulated him on the deal and thinks that, to use one of the president’s favorite words, that this could be a great thing for jobs. And he certainly looks forward to and is hoping to see a lot more of those created.” That’s right: the C.E.O. president, who wrote a book called The Art of the Deal, is not aware of the fact that corporate mergers typically result in job losses rather than gains. In fact, according to Axios, Disney said in an investor call on Thursday that it “expects to achieve $2 billion in ‘cost synergies’ by 2021,” which is usually corporate jargon for “clean out your desk.”

Trump’s favorite show aside, his call to Murdoch also has the potential to create the appearance of favoritism, especially as the Justice Department moves to thwart the merger of AT&T and Time Warner, the latter of which owns CNN. As my colleague Joe Pompeo reported, the D.O.J.’s anti-trust chief told AT&T C.E.O. Randall Stephenson that if he wanted the department to green-light the deal, he would have to sell off Turner Broadcasting, the parent entity of CNN, which AT&T would acquire, or ditch DirecTV, the satellite provider it bought in 2015. And then, of course, there’s the fact that the AT&T-Time Warner deal is a “vertical merger,” which regulators are usually cool with, whereas the Disney-Fox deal is a ”horizontal merger,” a traditional red flag. Luckily, the president has zero personal bias when it comes to CNN.

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Marco Rubio may block tax cuts so some poor kids can eat

What a truly selfish bastard!

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) has informed Senate leaders he intends to vote against the Republicans’ $1.5 trillion tax plan unless it includes a larger expansion of a child tax credit, according to a Senate G.O.P. source. Rubio and Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) proposed a change to expand the tax credit as part of the tax bill that passed the Senate, but the plan was opposed by G.O.P. leadership and voted down . . . If Rubio votes against the bill, Republicans can afford to only lose one more vote on their tax plan and pass it through the Senate. They control 52 seats in the Senate and need 50 to pass their bill, as Vice President Pence could break a tie. But Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) already opposes the plan because of its effect on the federal deficit.

The change they’re now pushing would expand the credit by $80 billion over 10 years, a smaller change than they proposed for the Senate bill.

Incidentally, the cost of repealing the estate tax clocks in at around $269 billion over a decade but that is obviously the sort of talk that could get you charged with treason in certain corners of the Capitol.

Someone gave Trump giant scissors

If there’s one thing Donald Trump loves almost as much as himself, it‘s props. Just before taking office, he convened a conference about passing control of the Trump Organization to his sons during which he stood alongside a stack of files that supposedly contained his business plans that may or may not have been completely blank. On two separate days in April, he used a comically large flowchart to demonstrate all the “horrible” regulations preventing bridges from being built. In July, he had the time of his life at the administration‘s “Made in America Week,” where he got to pretend to be a fireman, a baseball player, and a cowboy. And on Thursday, perhaps sensing the need to perk the president up, staff at the White House not only assembled multiple stacks of (blank) paper for Trump to gesture to during a press conference about his deregulation progress, but rustled up a ribbon for him to cut as though he was fêting the opening of a new hotel.

“We’re here today for one single reason: to cut the red tape of regulation,” Trump told the crowd. “For many decades, an ever-growing maze of regulations, rules, restrictions has cost our country trillions and trillions of dollars, millions of jobs, countless American factories, and devastated many industries. But all that has changed the day I took the oath of office, and it’s changed rapidly. You’ve seen what’s happened.” The president then told reporters that his administration had far exceeded its goal of eliminating two regulations for every new one, claiming that the ratio was in fact 22-1, bringing “the never-ending growth of red tape in America . . . to a sudden screeching and beautiful halt.” And while it’s certainly true that Trump has said the word “regulations” about as often as “wall” or “fake news,” it may surprise you to hear that there was some hyperbole at play, according to Bloomberg:

. . . a Bloomberg News analysis of the earlier version of the regulation report [the administration released Thursday] found that Trump and other administration officials had exaggerated claims of cutting almost 1,000 regulations...Of the 469 regulatory actions the Trump administration said in its earlier report that it had “withdrawn” this year, 42 percent were as good as dead already. Some 180 of them weren’t listed on President Barack Obama’s final agenda of upcoming rules, meaning there were no immediate plans to impose them. In many cases, there had been no activity on them in years, records show. Another 15 had been halted under Obama before Trump took office. At least three more were listed in error or were moot because the rule-making was continuing.

Speaking of regulation . . .

On Thursday the Federal Communications Commission voted to scrap net-neutrality guidelines, in a move that may open the door to those businesses “blocking websites or charging for higher-quality service or certain content.” Ajit Pai, who Trump nominated to lead the commission, naturally cheered the news that virtually no American is in favor of as being all about “helping consumers and promoting competition.”

Wall Street bros are trading models and bottles for healing crystals

This is a real thing that’s happening:

They’ve long been popular with New Age enthusiasts and wellness fanatics, from Kim Kardashian, who turned to them to recover from her Paris robbery, to Gwyneth Paltrow and her Goop followers. But, increasingly, crystals are attracting an unexpected demographic: alpha men. Finance titans and start-up bros are dropping big cash on shining rocks that supposedly have healing properties, as the popularity of crystals spreads beyond hippie-dippy circles.

“These are people who run hedge funds, who work on Wall Street. These are guys who are running businesses and handling all these people’s money,” Colleen McCann, an “energy practitioner” whose “crystal reading” sessions run $250 an hour, told the Post.

Elsewhere!

Initial Coin Offerings Surge Past $4 Billion—And Regulators Are Worried (W.S.J.)

Wells Fargo Trims Staff in Its Giant Mortgage Unit (W.S.J.)

G.O.P. considers shortening duration of tax cuts for families as a way to fund changes to tax plan (Washington Post)

What’s Eating Bill Ackman? (Institutional Investor)

Blankfein Photo Gets Traders Talking Again About Twitter Takeout (Bloomberg)

Uber investor departs venture firm amid harassment claims (Reuters)

Wilbur Ross Ditches Security Detail in Sandwich-Fueled Hamptons Rumspringa (The Hive)

Lin-Manuel Miranda Calls for Puerto Rico’s Debt Forgiveness (Bloomberg)

Elliott Preps for Potential Fight with Hess, Seeking C.E.O. Ouster (W.S.J.)

George Clooney Gave All His Best Friends $1 Million Each (New York)