"Great News for America: The ratings challenged Jimmy Kimmel Show is CANCELLED. Congratulations to ABC for finally having the courage to do what had to be done. Kimmel has ZERO talent, and worse ratings than even Colbert, if that’s possible. That leaves Jimmy and Seth, two total losers, on Fake News NBC. Their ratings are also horrible. Do it NBC!!! President DJT".
That’s what Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social Wednesday night, not long after the announcement that Kimmel’s show had been cancelled-or-not-cancelled-or-suspended ... but definitely was not going to air for the foreseeable future.
It wasn’t an entirely surprising development. In the immediate aftermath of the Charlie Kirk shooting last week, Kimmel threw gasoline on a fire when he said “the MAGA gang” was trying to “score political points from it”.
It was a relatively tame criticism as far as modern political commentary goes. Compare it, for example, with Fox News host Brian Kilmeade’s call to “just kill” mentally ill homeless people, also made on-air in the past few days, for which he did not lose his job (but did apologize.)
Yet we should have known what was coming. A spate of firings across the country had already happened after Kirk was killed, ranging from people who were seen to be celebrating the shooting to people who were simply not mourning enough. Vice President JD Vance himself had already appeared to publicly call for a mass ‘doxing’ campaign against those who were seen to have disrespected the podcaster.
But this pattern began long before Kirk. When Stephen Colbert’s show was abruptly cancelled not long after he mocked Trump on-air, it felt like a canary in the coal mine. CBS denied that it was done to curry favor with the Trump administration, but the president celebrated it as a victory nonetheless. Indeed, at the time, Trump wrote on Truth Social that “Jimmy Kimmel is NEXT to go in the untalented Late Night Sweepstakes and, shortly thereafter, Fallon will be gone… It’s really good to see them go, and I hope I played a major part in it!”
Well, would you believe it? He was right on the money about Kimmel. ABC suspended Jimmy Kimmel Live! on Wednesday, almost immediately after a threat from the Trump-appointed chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr. Carr’s comments implied that the FFC might take legal action against ABC if it didn’t happen — “we can do this the easy way or the hard way,” were his exact words — even though there’s no real way in which the American courts can be used to silence opinions made on air.
But this does underscore the way in which the White House and its allies do not need to win lawsuits against comedians or journalists in order to effectively ban criticism of themselves and their agenda. They just need to file the paperwork, or even simply publicly threaten to file suit.
That is especially true after ABC News in December agreed to pay $15 million toward Trump’s presidential library to settle a defamation lawsuit over anchor George Stephanopoulos’ inaccurate on-air assertion that the president-elect had been found civilly liable for raping writer E. Jean Carroll, as well as Paramount’s July settlement with him for $16 million over a lawsuit claiming that 60 Minutes edited a campaign-stretch interview with rival Kamala Harris to make her look better.
Trump has a long history of weaponizing litigation, either real or threatened — from the New York Times to the Wall Street Journal to the Lincoln Project to any author who uses anonymous sources in their work — knowing that the threat of endless legal fees and MAGA outrage is often enough to make corporations cave. Entertainment executives don’t want to spend years in discovery battles with Trump’s lawyers. They want advertisers and investors to feel safe. So the calculus is brutal: cut the comic loose, avoid the headache, move on.
The We Love Free Speech crew is now showing its true colors.
And none of this is confined to late-night television. We’re watching a broader institutional surrender. Universities have quietly killed talks and fellowships and “investigated” protesters rather than weather a Trumpist backlash. After the president declared that “improper ideology” would be targeted at museums and research institutions such as the Smithsonian, funding has been pulled for certain scientific research and artistic exhibitions have been quietly changed: most recently, the National Parks Service is said to have been considering the removal of a photograph of an enslaved man’s scars that was once used widely by abolitionists.
Though that particular decision did make headlines, the smaller decisions rarely do; they happen in private emails and company meetings. But the effect is the same: cultural gatekeepers preemptively silence themselves, not because the government told them to directly, but because they’re afraid.
That fear is exactly what Trump thrives on. He has always understood spectacle as power (see: that absurd state visit to the UK, still ongoing.) His lawsuits are less about legal precedent than about sending a message: mock me and I’ll make your life hell. Networks, publishers, and arts institutions are listening.
If a comedian with Kimmel’s stature, audience and clout can be shoved offstage, one can only imagine the reception awaiting a young playwright lampooning Trump at a nonprofit theater. Or a junior curator proposing an exhibition on authoritarianism. Or a historian applying for a university fellowship, or even a biochemist proposing further research into an illness that primarily affects women or other underserved communities. The answer is obvious: better to steer clear. Safer to say nothing. Divert the money back into something that seems acceptable to those in power.
The First Amendment still exists. No court has banned jokes about Trump, or Charlie Kirk, or Israel, or white male podcasters, or whoever is now apparently beyond the reach of mockery. But who needs the First Amendment when you’ve got a sweet arrangement like this? America’s most prominent cultural institutions are doing the censoring themselves!
Needless to say, when self-censorship becomes the default, the legal protections on paper are meaningless.
Colbert’s exit should have rung louder alarms, and Kimmel’s is a five-alarm fire — because we are now witnessing the consolidation of cultural power around one man’s ego. The question everyone should be asking is: why are so many willing to comply in advance?
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