By Samuel Clench
Copyright news
Sitting down to write about the actions of the second Trump administration, day after day, feels a bit like having “the talk” with your kid over and over again, in perpetuity.
I don’t mean that in a patronising way. I mean that I’m being incredibly uncool. I’m the nerd raising his hand in class to point out that the teacher forgot to demand his peers’ homework. I am the HR manager telling workers to keep it in their pants. I’m the guy pushing his glasses up his nose and saying, “Umm sorry, actually the US President technically doesn’t have the power to do that, under the law, and it’s sort of disturbing that he would even try.”
The point is that I know full well, before even touching the keyboard, I’m about to come across as an insufferable little killjoy.
This is simply not the case when you talk about other politicians. I could write a scathing takedown of Anthony Albanese today, having a go at his climate policies or something – pick whichever annoying trait you like, he has plenty – and no one would cock an eyebrow.
But Donald Trump? Oh, that’s different. A lot of you, the moment you read that first line, rolled your eyes and thought, “Here we go. Someone in the media ranting about President Trump again. What a surprise.”
And I understand why. Really, I do. It’s all too serious, too finger-waggy, too relentless. The man seemingly can’t do or say anything without the self-appointed political correctness police throwing a tantrum.
But he’s in a serious job, with serious power, claiming to be a serious human being. And when he uses that power for serious purposes, we have to talk about it. Seriously. Sorry if you find it tiresome.
So. The Jimmy Kimmel cancellation. That’s an interesting barometer for hypocrisy, isn’t it? The same people who have spent years complaining about cancel culture now support the US government pressuring a TV network, successfully, to ditch a comedian because he said something they didn’t like.
Embedded, in that paragraph, is the factor that distinguishes Kimmel’s situation from those of other celebrities who’ve got in trouble for voicing stupid opinions.
This is not a case of Kimmel’s employer disciplining him off its own bat. It’s a case of his employer, America’s ABC, punishing him after explicit pressure from the government.
Mr Trump’s handpicked head of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which regulates a decent chunk of the American media, could not have been much clearer when he spoke to a pro-MAGA podcast yesterday, hours before Kimmel was suspended.
“Look, we can do this the easy way or the hard way,” said Brendan Carr.
“These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”
I should provide the full context, for all of this.
Here is the bit of Kimmel’s monologue, on Monday night’s edition of his show, that triggered threats of reprisal from the government, against his network, and ultimately got him suspended indefinitely.
“We hit some new lows over the weekend, with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterise this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them, and doing everything they can to score political points from it,” said Kimmel.
“In between the finger pointing, there was grieving. On Friday, the White House flew the flags at half mast, which got some criticism. But on a human level, you can see how hard the President is taking this.”
He then played a clip of Mr Trump being asked about the murder during a press gaggle.
“My condolences on the loss of your friend, Charlie Kirk. May I ask, sir, personally, how are you holding up?” a reporter asks in the footage.
“I think very good,” says Mr Trump.
“And by the way, right there, you see all the trucks? They just started construction of the new ballroom for the White House, which is something they’ve been trying to get as you know for about 150 years. And it’s going to be a beauty.”
“Yes, he’s at the fourth stage of grief: construction,” Kimmel said.
“This is not how an adult grieves the murder of someone he called a friend. This is how a four-year-old mourns a goldfish.”
The most problematic part there is Kimmel claiming MAGA-world was “desperately trying to characterise” Mr Kirk’s killer as “anything other than one of them”, which is being interpreted as him saying the shooter definitely was one of them.
That’s actually not how I read it. As I heard it, he was mocking MAGA for rushing so very, very eagerly to label the murderer a radical leftist before much was actually known about him. You could make the same point, by the way, about lefty idiots on Twitter who immediately insisted he wasn’t one of them, but Kimmel does have a political bias.
For the sake of argument, though, let’s take the least charitable interpretation of Kimmel’s monologue as true, and stipulate that he was wrong. Does that justify the government of the United States going out of its way to tell ABC it should act against Kimmel or face regulatory consequences?
Two comments here from Mr Carr, one from 2019 and the other from yesterday.
“Should the government censor speech it doesn’t like? Of course not. The FCC does not have a roving mandate to police speech in the name of the public interest.” That’s the older quote.
“We at the FCC are going to enforce the public interest obligation. If there’s broadcasters out there that don’t like it, they can turn their licence in.” That’s the newer one.
Gee, I wonder what changed between those two quotes. Could it be as simple as whose hands are now on the levers of the FCC’s power? Could it be that folks like Mr Carr do not actually give a rat’s ass about the principle of free speech, unless it’s protecting their own side?
His stance is, if anything, more moderate than the President’s.
“Maybe their licences should be taken away,” Mr Trump said today, referring to media companies that publish criticism of him.
It’s the sort of comment that could have been brushed aside, easily enough, seven years ago; that could have been dismissed as the President talking out his backside, as is his habit. But at some point, when a guy has been in power long enough, you have to reckon with the idea that he might actually believe the words that come out of his mouth.
Imagine a universe in which Joe Biden fantasised about revoking the licence of Fox News, or OAN, or Newsmax, because whichever network had managed to piss him off that day was too mean. The word “censorship” would feature heavily in that discourse. The rants about “cancel culture” would, justifiably, flow.
Where are the free speech warriors now? Where is Elon Musk, who celebrated Mr Trump’s victory in last year’s election as though it heralded a new golden age of free expression? All those tweets expended complaining about woke cancel culture, but when their own side is doing the cancelling, there’s not a word to be written.
Donald Trump himself was still employed by NBC, as host of The Apprentice, during the years he spent as America’s most prominent birther conspiracy theorist, advancing the false idea that the country’s first Black president, Barack Obama, was from Africa and therefore ineligible for the job. Mr Obama was, in fact, born in Hawaii, an American state.
You’d forgotten about the birther thing, hadn’t you? Yes, it’s true, the current commander-in-chief was previously the birther-in-chief, a title now coveted for entirely different, much more nauseating reasons by Mr Musk. But so much water has passed under the bridge since Mr Trump’s birther days that we may as well be reminiscing about the Korean War.
Did the Obama-run FCC pressure NBC to fire him? Did network executives have to worry about being punished, by the government, if Mr Trump remained on air? No. Mr Obama made some dumb jokes about Mr Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, his soon-to-be successor sat in the crowd boiling like a kettle and plotting vengeance, and then most people moved on with their lives.
How do we think the folks currently gloating about Kimmel’s suspension would have reacted, if the Obama administration had actively tried to get Mr Trump fired from NBC? Do we think they’d have been fine and dandy with an Obama appointee threatening to sic the regulator on the network in retaliation for his opinions?
I could write you 5000 words today, if I were being unusually succinct, detailing example after example after example of Trump allies, and Mr Trump himself, saying obviously false, sometimes defamatory, sometimes quite unhinged things on TV and radio.
(My favourite and also silliest example of this is probably the obsessive belief, of one right-wing personality, that the French President’s wife secretly has a penis, which has prompted the Macrons to give scientific proof to a court that she’s a woman. Hilariously weird stuff.)
We know full well that Mr Carr will not be pursuing any pro-Trump voices for airing misinformation. We know full well that his only targets, for as long as he holds the post, will be people or organisations the President doesn’t like.
The more this happens, the less you get to complain about the accusations that Mr Trump has authoritarian leanings, because every day those charges ring a little truer.
The Jimmy Kimmel thing would be troubling enough on its own. Its significance grows greatly when placed in the context of an administration, and a President leading it, who have displayed a much broader pattern of censorious behaviour.
A few days ago, Vice President JD Vance urged Americans to tattle on people who were saying bad things about Mr Kirk after his death. Mr Vance essentially told them to call those people’s employers and try to get them fired.
Meanwhile, Attorney-General Pam Bondi suggested the administration would go after critics of Mr Kirk for “hate speech”, First Amendment be damned.
You will find no clearer example of cancer culture run amok.
This week Mr Trump announced he was suing The New York Times for $US15 billion over articles he felt were too mean to him. He previously bled 60 Minutes for millions of dollars over its routine editing of an interview with Kamala Harris. And that isn’t even the only ridiculous settlement, agreed to by a media organisation, since he resumed office.
Also this week, Mr Trump threatened to rat out an Australian reporter to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese for daring to ask whether it was appropriate for him to have so many business interests, as President, and to be profiting from his influence over American government policy.
What else? When CBS recently cancelled another late night comedian, Stephen Colbert, despite his relatively strong ratings, it insisted the decision was “not related in any way” to the “content” of his show, but was “purely a financial decision”. Which may be true.
But it did not escape the notice, of more cynical observers, that when Colbert was chopped, CBS’s parent company just happened to be seeking approval for a multi-billion dollar merger from the Trump-run FCC.
“Government censorship of speech is intolerable in a free society.”
That’s a quote from one of the symbolic executive orders signed, this year, by Mr Trump.
The order accuses the Biden administration of curtailing people’s free speech and forcing private businesses to “moderate, deplatform, or otherwise suppress speech that the federal government did not approve”.
The absurdity of being lectured about freedom of speech by someone who is, frankly by far, the most hostile US President towards speech rights of my lifetime. What a strange situation that is. An anti-cancel culture President who endorses, indeed celebrates, the cancellation of some TV comedian, using government power, for making an unfunny joke that could, depending on your personal interpretation of his meaning, be incorrect.
Jimmy Kimmel could stay on air for years without saying anything more ridiculous, or worthier of scorn.
