Protesters outside Jimmy Kimmel Live! following ABC's indefinite suspension of the programme at Hollywood Blvd in Los Angeles, California. Photo / Getty Images
The Trump Administration’s pincer move against talk show host Jimmy Kimmel shows the breadth of its panoramic campaign to discourage dissent and entrench its hold on national power.
Yesterday’s announcement by ABC and its parent, the Walt Disney Company, that he will return to the air today displayed the potential power that the Administration’s opponents can wield against those efforts.
The Kimmel confrontation spotlighted the two distinct tactics United States President Donald Trump and his allies are using to weaken any institution that they view as an impediment to their agenda.
These dual approaches – one creating pressure from the top down, the other from the bottom up – converged quickly to topple Kimmel last week.
And just as early capitulations by major law firms and universities emboldened Trump to make further demands on those sectors, the TV host’s fall emboldened the Administration to push harder against media companies.
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr threatened last week that there will be more actions to come, and industry insiders were worried that other network programmes conservatives consider too liberal, such as The View or the Sunday talk shows, could be next.
But the story took a turn when consumers quickly organised boycotts against Disney, hundreds of prominent artists signed an open letter organised by the ACLU condemning the decision, and even some Republican senators dissented from what they correctly saw as the FCC violating free-speech rights.
Yesterday’s announcement by ABC and Disney – like the earlier decisions by prominent law firms and universities such as Harvard to sue rather than concede to Trump’s demands – shows that the President’s drive to centralise power and debilitate those he considers opponents is not assured of success.
For those willing to defend constitutional rights and democratic norms, pushback is still possible, though this confrontation likely has further twists to come.
The Administration’s moves against Kimmel last week demonstrated both prongs of Trump’s strategy to undermine opposition.
One is a determination to transform every component of federal authority into a lever to punish Trump’s perceived political adversaries and reward his friends.
The second is a systematic attempt to enlist people and institutions operating in conservative regions of the country into Trump’s crusade to diminish the political and cultural influence of the Democratic-leaning parts of the country.
Kimmel’s swift fall, after incorrectly suggesting that Charlie Kirk’s alleged assassin belonged to the Maga movement, underscored how much pressure these twin tactics can apply against basic democratic safeguards that many Americans have long considered inviolate.
From one angle, Carr, in his moves against Kimmel, simply extended the playbook the Trump Administration has developed to deploy federal pressure against other institutions it considers obstacles.
Carr warned ABC’s affiliated stations that they could face FCC punishment, or even the loss of their licence, for failing to uphold the public interest and/or engaging in “news distortion” if they allowed Kimmel to remain on the air.
The unspoken blade looming over Carr’s threats was the fact that the Nexstar Media Group and Sinclair Broadcast Group, which together own about one-fourth of all ABC affiliates, need FCC approval for an assortment of planned mergers and acquisitions.
Soon after Carr’s first Kimmel criticisms, Nexstar announced it would pre-empt the show, which helped force Disney’s hand; Sinclair soon followed.
With those warnings, Carr was following the familiar strongarm strategy of Trump’s second term.
But the Kimmel controversy also illuminated a second strategy the Trump Administration is using to consolidate power.
Carr not only bullied the local ABC affiliates; he also cajoled them to identify as part of a movement to break the political and cultural influence of blue America.
Carr explicitly urged local stations to reject “the programming that is coming from Comcast and from Disney that’s being generated in New York and Hollywood and has been fed like foie gras to the entire country”.
Carr’s appeal echoed the argument Trump has made to Republican-controlled states to redraw their Congressional district lines, and that Trump’s aides have raised to suggest that red states supply the Administration National Guard forces to deploy into blue states.
In each case, the Administration is signalling that institutions in red states should view themselves less as a component of a unified nation – or even as individual states with their own priorities – than as a member of a red team.
The Trump Administration can then call on those “red team” states to use their leverage to entrench the Maga movement’s national power, which provides it the means to subjugate blue America.
This part of the strategy acts as a force multiplier for Trump’s overt transformation of the federal government into a vast machine to reward friends and punish opponents.
On this score, Trump has already far surpassed President Richard Nixon, who privately raged against many of the same targets (the media, universities, the “eastern establishment”) and ultimately prompted his aides to compile a White House “enemies list” of individuals he wanted to harass through IRS audits or other federal enforcement.
Trump has gone further, repeatedly seeking to coerce other perceived adversaries by subjecting them to direct federal pressure - cutting off research grants for universities, barring law firms from federal contracts, withholding federal dollars from blue states and cities, and conditioning business deals (like the Paramount sale to Skydance Media) on adoption of policies the Administration demands.
Federal investigations disappear for allies and descend on adversaries.
“In a sense, Trump is Nixon’s id unleashed in a way that Nixon didn’t dare back in the 1970s,” said Mark Feldstein, a University of Maryland professor of broadcast journalism who has written a book about Nixon’s relationship with the press.
Nixon was constrained by a Democratic-controlled Congress, a more independent Supreme Court, and aides in his administration that resisted many of his darkest impulses. (The IRS, for instance, ignored his pressure to audit “enemies.”)
With all those restraints gone, Trump’s opponents have struggled to slow his efforts, apart from some victories in lower federal courts.
The ABC reversal suggests that consumer backlash against companies that bend to improper demands may represent one of the best remaining options for the opposition.
Even so, the Disney-Trump face-off may continue.
One former high-ranking network executive told me Trump will likely find a receptive audience for his arguments against ostensibly liberal programming among affiliate chains such as Nexstar and Sinclair that operate mostly in red markets.
The affiliates are already feuding with the networks over distribution of the crucial fees that local stations receive for allowing cable and satellite distributors to air their channels; the heavy nudge from Carr to reject other network programming, the executive told me, is likely to result in them pre-empting more shows conservatives dislike.
It remains to be seen if Nexstar and Sinclair will restore Kimmel on their affiliates (both have said no, for now) – or even if they do, keep him there the next time he makes a joke Trump complains about.
Disney’s initial surrender over Kimmel marked another ominous advance in Trump’s campaign to suppress dissent.
Kimmel’s restoration shows that those willing to resist that campaign can tap into a deep well of public concern.
This fight is hardly over, for Kimmel, or any of Trump’s other targets.
– Ronald Brownstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics and policy. He is also a CNN analyst and previously worked for the Atlantic, the National Journal and the Los Angeles Times. He has won multiple professional awards and is the author or editor of seven books.
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