Let’s be clear about what happened to Jimmy Kimmel

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Let’s be clear about what just happened: Jimmy Kimmel, a prominent late-night comedian, was just taken off the airwaves because the Trump administration didn’t like what he had to say — and threatened his employer until they shut him up.

The Trump administration, it appears, has learned to effectively weaponize the regulatory powers of the federal government to punish speech it doesn’t like from people it doesn’t like. This is a favored weapon of modern autocrats; its deployment against Kimmel is a qualitative escalation even above the administration’s previous acts of censorship (like targeting the author of a pro-Palestine op-ed for deportation).

What just happened, in short, shows how far down the authoritarian road the United States has traveled in just eight months.

Kimmel’s downfall began with some admittedly ill-advised speculation in Monday’s monologue: “We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them, and doing everything they can to score political points from it.”

At the time, the evidence suggested the shooter very likely was not a MAGA believer (and evidence released the next day showed that he almost certainly was on the political left).

But Kimmel’s aside — in a monologue mostly focused on mocking President Donald Trump — did not justify what came next. During a Wednesday podcast appearance, FCC head Brendan Carr threatened to revoke the broadcasting licenses of any stations that continued to air Kimmel’s content.

“It’s time for them to step and say this garbage…isn’t something that we think serves the needs of our local communities,” he said.

Carr’s threat should have been toothless. The FCC is prohibited by law from employing “the power of censorship” or interfering “with the right of free speech.” There is a very narrow and rarely used exception for “news distortion,” in which a broadcast news outlet knowingly airs false reports. What Kimmel did — an offhand comment based on weak evidence — is extremely different from creating a news report with the intent to deceive.

But months before the shooting, Carr had begun investigating complaints under this exception against ABC and CBS stations, specifically allegations of anti-conservative bias. Stations had to take Carr’s threat seriously — even though Carr himself had declared (in a 2024 tweet) that “the First Amendment prohibits government officials from coercing private parties into suppressing protected speech.”

Hours after Carr’s Wednesday threat, Nexstar — the largest owner of local stations in America — suddenly decided that Kimmel’s comments from two nights ago were unacceptable. Nexstar, it should be noted, is currently attempting to purchase one of its major rivals for $6.2 billion — a merger that would require express FCC approval.

“Mr. Kimmel’s comments about the death of Mr. Kirk are offensive and insensitive at a critical time in our national political discourse,” Andrew Alford, the president of Nexstar’s broadcasting division, said in a statement. “Continuing to give Mr. Kimmel a broadcast platform in the communities we serve is simply not in the public interest at the current time.”

Without access to Nexstar’s roughly 200 stations — covering about 39 percent of the national market, the maximally allowed cap — Kimmel would suffer an enormous ratings blow. And so, shortly after Nexstar’s announcement, ABC/Disney announced that he’d be suspended indefinitely.

Trump has had it in for Jimmy Kimmel, a prominent critic, for a very long time. After CBS axed fellow late-night Trump critic Stephen Colbert earlier this year, the president repeatedly said that Kimmel was “next.” Kimmel’s Kirk comments, which both an FCC commissioner and (reportedly) ABC executives considered well within bounds, seem like a pretext — taking advantage of the pervasive climate of fear and censorship in the wake of Kirk’s death to punish a prominent name on the president’s enemies list.

The weaponization of seemingly neutral “good government” rules, like broadcast regulation, to punish the enemies of the current president is a familiar turn in the story of democratic backsliding. It was one of the principal tools used by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán to batter his country’s press into submission, ultimately forcing independent outlets to sell to government-aligned conglomerates who transformed their editorial stance.

It would take quite a bit more work for Trump to consolidate Orbán-levels of control over the media. But what’s so striking about the Kimmel case is how swiftly Nexstar (and ABC) rolled over. They didn’t even try to put up a fight to defend their own ability to control what goes on their airwaves. They instead apparently decided that fighting the government is costly and risky, putting licenses or even a valuable merger at risk, and that risking that isn’t worth it for Jimmy Kimmel.

This is what it looks like when a society’s elite rolls over in the face of authoritarianism. It never ends well.