Brendan Carr, President Donald Trump’s top TV regulator, has landed in the center of another media fight — this time between two powerful groups of Trump-friendly news executives, each pushing him to tilt the law in their favor.

The nation’s largest TV station owners want Carr’s Federal Communications Commission to loosen the rules that limit how many stations a single company can operate, a goal that many conservatives have been pressing for years.

But they have a formidable opponent in Trump confidant Chris Ruddy, the majority owner of Newsmax Media, who wants to keep the rules in place and now appears to be making headway with the president.

“NO EXPANSION OF THE FAKE NEWS NETWORKS,” Trump wrote Sunday on Truth Social, echoing Ruddy’s argument that removing the ownership cap would hurt conservatives. “If anything, make them SMALLER!”

Since Trump named him to lead the agency in January, Carr has shown a knack for disruptive, MAGA-pleasing culture-war moves, like his public upbraiding of comedian Jimmy Kimmel and accusing ”60 Minutes” of being unfriendly to conservatives.

This time, however, he’s confronted with a conflict within the right that highlights the unpredictability of navigating policy issues in Trump’s Washington — even for committed Republican regulators and GOP-allied business interests.

Carr has signaled he may want to change the 21-year-old limit on TV station ownership, which was intended to prevent any one broadcaster from too much power over what Americans see on television.

Loosening the ownership rule would allow right-leaning companies like Sinclair Broadcast Group to expand. These large TV station owners, with Sinclair at 185 stations and broadcaster Nexstar at 201, are hitting a growth limit. A larger cap would give more power to station owners — seen by many conservatives as an ideological counterweight to the mainstream national networks that control TV programming.

In regulatory filings and on Capitol Hill, however, Newsmax’s Ruddy is trying to block any change, arguing that the cap — which limits a broadcaster’s reach to 39 percent of U.S. households — preserves the right market balance between TV broadcasters and cable outlets, and allows a greater mix of voices. That’s crucial for the future of his own right-leaning Newsmax cable network.

“It’s not going to work,” Ruddy told POLITICO. “The president doesn’t want this, and so I have no doubt that he will not support the FCC going to extraordinary but potentially illegal lengths.”

A tug of war between connected Republicans

In a traditional Republican administration, this sort of deregulation might have been a clear point of agreement. Under Trump, it has turned into a political tug-of-war and an influence battle between big names on the right.

Sean Spicer, Trump’s former press secretary, authored an op-ed in the Daily Caller on Oct. 31 arguing that Carr should lift the cap. The push, championed by the century-old National Association of Broadcasters, has earned support from a host of conservative groups, including organizations like Heritage Action and Americans for Tax Reform, as well as upstart groups targeting liberal media bias like the Center for American Rights.

“Conservatives who believe in free enterprise should not be vocally encouraging Big Brother to continue barring broadcast TV companies like Sinclair and Nexstar from competing in the free market,” argued Spicer, a contributor to Nexstar’s cable network NewsNation.

Spicer didn’t respond to requests for comment about how he came to this view. (In response, Ruddy said: “Well, Sean Spicer, I wouldn’t call a conservative thought leader. Let’s leave it at that.”)

Coalitions of Republican lawmakers have also signaled sympathy for the broadcasters’ financial concerns. This fall, an assortment of former Trump administration officials and ex-GOP lawmakers lent their support, too.

Ruddy, however, insists media consolidation not only hurts independent cable executives like himself but consumers broadly, cutting down on the number of local voices and raising cable prices (His opponents say this is misleading, arguing he’s just out to kneecap his conservative media competition).

As a longtime confidant and adviser to Trump, his word appears to carry extra weight, and he told POLITICO he’s spoken to Trump about the ownership cap multiple times this year: “He’s aware of the issue.”

Also on his side is Charles Herring, president of the pro-Trump One America News Network cable channel, who shares a marketplace wariness of TV station owners gobbling up too much power, and the Conservative Political Action Conference. They’re fighting alongside many Democrats, other cable industry leaders, organized labor and organizations devoted to civil rights and consumer advocacy.

“Independent & diverse voices will disappear,” cautioned Herring in an X post.

Although some conservatives have framed rolling back FCC restrictions as a consensus political view, Ruddy accused his critics of bandying about “TV industry talking points and issues that the FCC is working to do against the interests of the president and his supporters — and really against most consumers.”

“We have a history of big companies going in and giving conservative think tanks money to do reports and stand on issues,” Ruddy added. “And it’s not working.”

The Trump factor

The fight offers a window into just how difficult it is for even established lobbies to shift policy in the unpredictable, personality-driven Washington of the second Trump administration.

The wild card, as usual, is Trump himself, who is being pulled in both directions on an issue he cares a great deal about: what’s on television.

“President Trump is very directly, personally, hands on, engaged on media policy,” Daniel Suhr, a conservative lawyer who heads the Center for American Rights, told POLITICO.

Suhr, a close Carr ally, dismissed Ruddy as having “business interests that he’s trying to protect” and cast him as an outlier among conservatives devoted to the free market and light regulation: “There’s broad consensus across the conservative community, the movement, for reform or repeal of the cap.”

Broadcasters have slammed the ownership cap as antiquated in the internet era and spent the year demanding its elimination. Suhr believes allowing greater consolidation will empower broadcast affiliate station owners like Nexstar and Sinclair, based outside of liberal coastal centers like New York and Los Angeles and “more connected to red-state consumers.”

It’s also critical to those companies’ businesses. Nexstar is trying to usher through a $6.2 billion deal to buy rival station owner Tegna, a merger that would only be possible if Carr relaxes the cap. The new company would operate 265 TV stations, reaching more than half the country.

Sinclair CEO Chris Ripley told investors in early November that he anticipates Carr will raise or even eliminate the ownership cap in the first half of 2026. Sinclair is seeking to take over rival broadcaster E.W. Scripps, and in a Nov. 17 investor filing said “further scale in the broadcast television industry is essential to address secular headwinds and compete effectively with larger-scale big-tech and big-media players, as well as major broadcast groups.”

Trump framed his objections as conditional, however, which could fuel further jockeying. “If this would also allow the Radical Left Networks to ‘enlarge,’ I would not be happy,” Trump wrote. That will likely give broadcasters and their conservative allies room to try to counter Ruddy’s narrative — and some are already casting the issue accordingly.

“Americans want more access to local news and a variety of voices without the filter of the coastal elites,” Nexstar said on Monday.

One broadcast industry lobbyist, who requested anonymity given the live tensions, told POLITICO on Tuesday Trump’s post will likely accelerate the lobbying push.

“I did not view that as the shutting of the door by any means,” the lobbyist said. “I just viewed it as quiet lobbying now spilling out into the public.”

Carr’s leverage at stake

At the center of the scrum is Carr, whose power over national media rests in part in the leverage he holds over broadcast rules. When he criticized Jimmy Kimmel in September, the first companies to yank the ABC show were the station owner groups, mindful of Carr’s power over their industry.

The FCC chair has also staked his agenda around loyalty to the president, meeting with him most recently just the other week.

So far, Carr has expressed sympathy with broadcasters’ financial struggles and lamented outdated rules. He put the 39 percent cap out for comment this summer, fueling an array of sparring regulatory filings.

Ruddy emerged to defend the limit, signing pointed Newsmax regulatory filings. Ruddy worries about Fox Corp. — which runs a national broadcast network, owns TV stations and operates the right-leaning cable channel Fox News — unduly crowding out cable channels like his own. And he cranked up the volume this November, using his Newsmax platform to warn against the potential “disaster” for Trump and other conservatives.

Newsmax is also beseeching its audience to call the Capitol switchboard and GOP leadership offices and “let them know you oppose Brendan Carr’s FCC plan to end the TV ownership cap!”

The drumbeat of pressure around Carr’s agenda may rise as he testifies Dec. 17 before the Senate Commerce Committee for an oversight hearing, a setting where he’s likely to receive questions about his media ownership plans and strong-arming of media companies. Democrats have roundly condemned Carr, and even Senate Commerce Chair Ted Cruz (R-Texas) ripped into Carr’s Kimmel threats as “dangerous as hell.”

Although Cruz declined to specify his media ownership views, the Senate Commerce chair confirmed Ruddy has his ear, too.

“Chris is a good friend, and I talk with him frequently,” Cruz told POLITICO.

Carr’s path to lifting the cap is uncertain, and his own staff say they’re likely to end up in court over the issue. Detractors don’t even believe the agency has the authority to unleash this consolidation at all, saying it’s a matter for Congress.

Still, Carr generally believes he has a path to act, if he chooses.

“We haven’t made a final decision there yet,” Carr told POLITICO on Nov. 18. “I continue to be very open minded.”