The Nobel prize winner Maria Ressa has said Americans are like “deer in the headlights” amid the collapse of US institutions and free speech under the Trump administration, particularly after Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension.
Speaking to Jon Stewart on the satirical news programme The Daily Show, the journalist and author of How to Stand Up to a Dictator said the speed at which Donald Trump had “collapsed” US institutions happened much faster than she anticipated.
She drew comparisons between the Trump administration and the government of the former president Rodrigo Duterte in her home country of the Philippines, saying: “If you don’t move and protect the rights you have, you lose them. And it’s so much harder to reclaim them.”
Stewart left The Daily Show in 2015 but returned part-time in 2024. He continues to host the show one night a week.
Ressa was speaking to Stewart a day after Kimmel was suspended by ABC for comments the late-night host made in relation to the Maga reaction to Charlie Kirk’s killing.
Before news of the suspension was made public, Kimmel, who has been a long-term antagonist of the president, had been chastised by the chair of the US media regulator, who appeared on a rightwing podcast and threatened ABC affiliates’ broadcast licences if action was not taken against the host.
The indefinite suspension of Kimmel’s show has prompted calls for a boycott against Disney, ABC’s parent company, amid accusations that Kimmel was taken off air to appease the Trump administration.
On Thursday, Trump suggested that TV networks that covered him “negatively” could be punished by the government.
Ressa, who won the 2021 Nobel peace prize for her fight for freedom of expression in the Philippines, told Stewart people the world over were electing “illiberal leaders democratically because of insidious manipulation … [which] starts with the manipulation and corruption of our public information ecosystem”.
She said “there is a ‘dictator’s playbook’”, comparing the Trump administration’s attacks on alleged Venezuelan drug boats to former president Rodrigo Duterte’s brutal crackdown on drug-dealing in the Philippines.
When asked by Stewart what happens next, Ressa pointed to her own work as a journalist in the Philippines, saying: “We just kept doing our jobs, we kept putting one foot in front of the other.”
