Trump Just Undercut His Defenders
Minutes after news broke that ABC had bowed to the Trump administration’s threats and indefinitely suspended Jimmy Kimmel, Ari Fleischer, the former Bush-administration press secretary, tried to explain why the thing that just happened was not actually what happened. “Liberals want to make this firing about ‘free speech,’” he wrote on X, “Did it ever occur to them the issue might be accuracy? Kimmel told his viewers that Charlie Kirk was murdered by MAGA.”
Nothing to see here, just a network imposing a zero-tolerance standard for factual accuracy upon its comedians and implementing it without warning. (Despite his fanatical belief in the importance of factual accuracy, Fleischer’s own tweet substantially misconstrues the facts: Kimmel’s joke implied that it was possible Kirk’s murderer was a MAGA supporter, but did not say so outright. Fleischer’s self-punishment for this error will no doubt be merciless.)
These are glorious, heady days for the Republican Party’s unselfconsciously authoritarian wing. Every day President Donald Trump tramples on the rights of their enemies, and the natcons rejoice, This is what I voted for.
[David Sims: An escalation in every way]
But we should spare a thought for the party’s more conflicted wing, the anti-anti-Trump conservatives such as Fleischer. They profess support for free speech, democracy, and the rule of law while attempting to remain Republicans in good standing. They resolve this tension by focusing on the hypocrisy and foibles of their old liberal foes and ignoring the actions of the world’s most powerful person.
It is a survival strategy, and not a pleasant way to spend four years. That which causes the natcons unremitted joy forces the anti-anti-Trumpers into painful mental contortions. No event to date has given them more anguish than Trump’s gleeful defenestration of Kimmel.
As the story developed, a slightly more complicated explanation than Fleischer’s hasty effort took shape. The anti-anti-Trumpers conceded that the sequence of events looked bad. Yes, the Federal Communications Commission chair, Brendan Carr, threatened to revoke broadcast licenses from ABC stations, warning, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.” Rolling Stone reported that “multiple execs” at ABC and Disney considered Kimmel’s comments to be minor, but “the threat of Trump administration retaliation” forced their hand.
But perhaps the relationship between these events was purely coincidental. “Neither Carr nor the FCC ever asked ABC or any of the broadcast stations to do anything specifically. There was no formal complaint or a specific action requested,” Conn Carrol wrote in the Washington Examiner. The conservative commentator Mike Solana insisted that, despite the perception that Trump ordered Kimmel off the air, “this didn’t happen.” Rather, Solana elaborated on X, “jimmy’s ratings were abysmal. he spread a conspiracy theory about kirk. two major affiliates refused to carry his show. ABC fired him.”
Ilya Shapiro, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, argued on X that Kimmel was fired because his show “was losing money”—“there was thus no govt coercion here.” But, he allowed, “FCC statements were unhelpful because makes it look like threat of govt action for bad viewpoints.”
Trump’s FCC chair threatened to destroy ABC’s business, and the network just so happened to then do something Trump very much wanted it to do, but only paranoid leftists would presume these two things were somehow related. Sure, the threat was “unhelpful” for the way it might seem like coercion to the uninitiated. But if anybody was the victim here, it was Trump, who was unfairly blamed for the blunders of a subordinate.
[David A. Graham: Is Colbert’s ouster really just a ‘financial decision’?]
Alas, as often happens when his friends attempt to devise a tortured alibi, Trump promptly blurted out his intentions the following afternoon.
“I have read someplace that the networks were 97 percent against me again, 97 percent negative, and yet I won, and easily,” Trump said about the 2024 election to reporters on Air Force One on Thursday. He added: “I would think maybe their license should be taken away. It will be up to Brendan Carr.”
Indeed, the idea that Trump would threaten the networks because he wants them to stop criticizing him was floated by Trump himself last month: “Despite a very high popularity and, according to many, among the greatest 8 months in Presidential History, ABC & NBC FAKE NEWS, two of the worst and most biased networks in history, give me 97% BAD STORIES. IF THAT IS THE CASE, THEY ARE SIMPLY AN ARM OF THE DEMOCRAT PARTY AND SHOULD, ACCORDING TO MANY, HAVE THEIR LICENSES REVOKED BY THE FCC.”
Awkwardly, these comments do make it seem like Trump may very well be extorting the networks by threatening their broadcast licenses so they’ll remove his critics from the airwaves. But surely there’s another innocent if convoluted explanation for these facts brewing in the minds of the not-yet-openly authoritarian Republican elite. Their future in the party may depend on it.
