It was clear Donald Trump and his allies would ramp up their crackdown against any and all opposition in the wake of the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk — and this week, the president’s second administration unleashed its most authoritarian blitz yet.
The Trump administration got late-night host Jimmy Kimmel’s show taken off the air by threatening companies’ broadcast licenses if they continued to run his show. Trump and his team threatened to strip the tax-exempt status of liberal nonprofit groups, while the president called for left-wing activists to be jailed for protesting him at dinner. Trump announced he’ll once again try to designate “antifa” — America’s disparate anti-fascist movement — as a terrorist group, with no legitimate basis, clarifying once again where he stands on the whole fascism question.
Meanwhile, the administration worked toward its goal to deport a legal U.S. resident for speaking out against Israel’s relentless assault on Palestine. Reports trickled out that Trump would fire a U.S. attorney for failing to bring charges against one of his enemies, before Trump publicly called for his departure and he quit.
This ugly, authoritarian week didn’t happen in a vacuum. Trump just last month mused about how Americans want a “dictator,” and the administration now appears to be using Kirk’s shocking murder as an excuse to escalate Trump’s ongoing campaign for total power.
The ramp-up began on Monday, as Vice President J.D. Vance hosted Kirk’s podcast from the White House and huddled with Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy White House fiechief of staff and the man responsible for leading his mass vengeance campaign.
“You have the crazies on the far left who are saying, ‘Stephen Miller and J.D. Vance, they’re going to go after constitutionally protected speech. No, no, no,” Vance said, before immediately pledging to go after a network of liberal nonprofits that supposedly “foments, facilitates, and engages in violence.”
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During the discussion, Miller repeatedly invoked Kirk’s death to justify the effort to shut down liberal groups.
“The last message that Charlie sent me was — I think it was just the day before we lost him — was that we needed to have an organized strategy to go after the left-wing organizations that are promoting violence in this country,” Miller said. He added, “With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle, and destroy these networks.”
As the MAGA movement worked to get people fired for sharing negative thoughts about Kirk, conservative media outlets honed in on comments Kimmel made in the wake of his killing — twisting Kimmel’s words to make them seem like a fireable offense. And on Wednesday, Trump’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairman, Brendan Carr, began issuing explicit threats, demanding that broadcasters take Jimmy Kimmel Live! off the air.
Speaking with right-wing influencer Benny Johnson, Carr demanded that broadcasters tell ABC: “‘Listen, we are going to preempt, we are not going to run Kimmel anymore, until you straighten this out because we, we licensed broadcaster, are running the possibility of fines or license revocation from the FCC.”
Carr added, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to take action on Kimmel, or there is going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”
Within hours, ABC had indefinitely suspended Kimmel’s show and two large broadcast companies, Nexstar and Sinclair, announced they wouldn’t run it. (Note: The companies all have regulatory matters before the FCC.) Sources told Rolling Stone that while multiple executives at ABC and its parent company, Disney, did not feel that Kimmel’s comments merited a suspension, they caved to pressure from Carr.
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“They were terrified about what the government would do, and did not even think Jimmy had the right to just explain what he said,” a person familiar with the internal situation said on Thursday, calling the decision “cowardly.”
Throughout Trumpland and the federal government, there was a heightened sense of glee over their silencing of Kimmel. Administration officials are emboldened by the multiple scalps they’ve now collected — first Stephen Colbert, now Kimmel — to the point that they’re confident they have momentum to pressure corporate bosses to get rid of Trump’s late-night nemeses over at other networks.
Two Trump advisers told Rolling Stone that potential FCC investigations of Comcast are being viewed as a plausible route to pressure the NBC brass into sidelining, or dumping, late-night host Seth Meyers, whom Trump similarly despises.
Aides at the White House and Republican National Committee often monitor the latest from liberal late-night shows, including Meyers’ program, to see if there’s any sound bite that Trump and company can quickly exploit — and that focus has only intensified in the aftermath of the Kirk slaying, two of those aides note.
The Trump administration’s threats against broadcasters have come under criticism from some conservatives. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) described Carr’s “easy way or the hard way” line as being something “right out of Goodfellas,” calling it “dangerous as hell.” The editorial board at Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal called out “the Carr FCC’s abuse of its power.”
Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.), on the other hand, has apparently decided the First Amendment is no longer sacrosanct, because someone murdered Kirk.
“Under normal times, in normal circumstances, I tend to think that the First Amendment should always be sort of the ultimate right. And that there should be almost no checks and balances on it,” Lummis said, according to Semafor. “I don’t feel that way anymore.”
Trump, himself, seemed eager on Thursday to threaten more media companies over their coverage as he spoke with reporters on Air Force One, saying that the networks “give me only bad press” and “maybe their license should be taken away.”
The same day as Kimmel’s ouster, Trump declared that he would attempt to designate “antifa” — short for anti-fascist — a terrorist organization. Given that the anti-fascist movement lacks any sort of centralized system of organization or leadership, it’s unclear how the administration would enforce such a designation or the scope of those it would target.
When an NPR reporter asked Trump on Air Force One how he would target antifa, he said, “We’re going to see. Did they have anything to do with your network? We’re going to find out.”
Trump also this week called on a group of protesters who bothered him to be jailed. Activists from the anti-war group CodePink, recently located the president at Joe’s Seafood near the White House as he ventured out to see the city streets during his military deployment to the nation’s capital. The protesters made it into the restaurant near Trump and shouted at him: “Free D.C.! Free Palestine! Trump is the Hitler of our time!”
Trump is mad about it. “They should be put in jail, what they’re doing to this country is really subversive,” he said on Monday, adding that he asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to look into bringing “criminal RICO” racketeering cases against them. On Thursday, Trump said of the protesters, “I think they were a threat.”
Amid Trump’s attacks on free expression, one of the president’s longest attacks on speech received less attention as it turned more ugly.
On Wednesday, it was reported that the Trump administration could soon deport Mahmoud Khalil to Algeria or Syria. The administration already jailed Khalil for months after revoking his green card over his pro-Palestine activism. Khalil, whose wife and baby are American citizens, was released in June per a judge’s order.
There was news about Trump’s apparent attempt to wield the Department of Justice against one of his most trumpersonal enemies.
On Thursday, ABC News reported that Trump planned to fire the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia for refusing to bring charges against ​​New York Attorney General Letitia James, after prosecutors in the office apparently failed to find evidence she committed mortgage fraud.
James led the civil fraud case against the Trump family’s business empire. Trump was ordered to pay $355 million in damages in the case last year, before it was tossed last month.
In any other administration, news that the president intended to fire a prosecutor for failing to charge a political enemy would be treated as a massive scandal — indeed, it’s similar to the scandal that led to the resignation of George W. Bush’s attorney general, Alberto Gonzales.
Trump is different. When a reporter asked him Friday if he wanted to fire Erik Siebert, Virginia’s acting U.S. Attorney, Trump said, “Yeah, I want him out.” He complained about the prosecutor receiving blue slips — customary endorsements — from Virginia’s two Democratic senators, whom he called “bad guys.” Siebert resigned afterward.
With everything going on, it might have been easy to miss the news Trump ordered more strikes on boats in the Caribbean supposedly carrying drugs — attacks so lawless that John Yoo, Bush’s torture memo author, felt the need to register his concern. “We can’t just consider anything that harms the country to be a matter for the military,” Yoo said.
Trump deployed the National Guard to Memphis, Tennessee, continuing his militarized crackdown on Democratic-led cities, while his masked goons roughed up a Democratic congressional candidate protesting outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Illinois.
Late in the day Friday, The Washington Post reported that the Pentagon — under the leadership of former Fox News host Pete Hegseth, who’s calling himself the “Secretary of War” — will now require journalists who want press badges to agree not to gather any information that hasn’t been officially approved for release. That is, of course, a reporter’s job.
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Speaking in the Oval Office on Friday, Trump claimed he’s “a very strong person for free speech,” before asserting, as he keeps saying, that 97 percent of reports about him are negative. “That’s no longer free speech,” he said. “That’s just cheating.”
It was a fitting cap to Trump’s very authoritarian week. There’s still Saturday. There is next week and many more.