It appears that Americans required a second and even more brutal lesson than the one delivered during Donald Trump’s first term: Democracy does not come with guarantees, and requires not just the consent of the governed but also their active participation. Its so-called institutions, among them our nation’s increasingly threadbare 18th-century Constitution, are visibly crumbling, as if eaten away from within by an army of persistent termites.
Trump sat next to British Prime Minister Keir Starmer at the latter’s English country retreat on Thursday and delivered a veritable torrent of half-truths, misstatements, fantasies and flat-out lies: Inflation had been vanquished, fuel prices were down, the U.S. economy was booming, he had personally resolved seven (!) international conflicts, although those did not, sadly enough, include the ones in Ukraine and Gaza. Public opinion polls suggest it might be hard to find anyone in America who believes all that, even among Republican voters. But Trump and his minions have a plan — or concepts of a plan, we might say — to change that too.
When asked about ABC’s abrupt decision to “suspend” Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night talk show, the president tried to have it both ways in classic Trumpian fashion, strutting for his fans just a bit while also brushing off the question with obvious lies. “Jimmy Kimmel was fired because he had bad ratings” and “for lack of talent,” he said, but oh yeah, by the way, Kimmel had also “said a horrible thing about a great gentleman known as Charlie Kirk.” (Unnecessary fact check: Kimmel hadn’t said anything about Kirk, horrible or otherwise, and had offered routine social-media condolences to Kirk’s family.)
Jimmy Kimmel isn’t the point here, as I hope everyone understands. Jimmy Kimmel will be fine. It’s already been suggested over the weekend that, under some benevolent compromise, he may be allowed to return to the airwaves, lack of talent and all. It isn’t quite right to call Kimmel a canary in the coal mine; we’ve had plenty of those already. His literal cancellation is more like a test case, designed to measure the breadth and power of the accelerating authoritarian coup now underway in America.
The MAGA assault on late-night comedy — which is doubly vulnerable, as both a fading cultural institution and the veritable definition of First Amendment-protected speech — represents a kind of pincer movement, bringing together multiple overlapping fascist tendencies. On one hand, we see the consolidation of mainstream media companies, now increasingly under the oligarchic control of Big Tech and finance capital, and increasingly dependent on the corrupt Trump regime to approve their corrupt cartel-building mergers and acquisitions. On the other, we see the regime’s undisguised campaign to restrict and punish dissent, and to redefine “free speech” as a conditional benefit conferred only on its most loyal grovelers and forelock-tuggers, and subject to revocation at any time.
Jimmy Kimmel’s cancellation is a test case, designed to measure the breadth and power of the accelerating authoritarian coup now underway in America.
Those two tendencies are, of course, not independent or purely coincidental. They are part of a larger pattern, which former Salon columnist Bill Curry (also a former Democratic Party insider) described in a recent Facebook post as a “Gaza-like assault on civil society.”
As a media creature and low-grade oligarch himself, as well as a hopeless cable-TV addict, Trump remains personally fixated on the idea of manipulating public opinion by forcing the networks to lavish him with 24/7 praise and affection. It was his slavishly loyal pals at Nexstar and Sinclair, the right-wing corporations that between them control nearly 400 local TV stations across the U.S., who led the pitchfork brigade against Kimmel’s show and forced Disney/ABC corporate leadership to choose between commitment to principle and capitulation to power. (Sinclair announced on Thursday that suspending Kimmel was “not enough,” saying it wouldn’t bring his show back to its stations absent “immediate regulatory action” and a public display of contrition.)
Did Nexstar and Sinclair take marching orders directly from the White House, or did their leaders just seize an opportunity to curry favor and demonstrate obedience in advance? It hardly matters (although I’d go with option A), but the importance of those hundreds of outlets, whose cookie-cutter local news broadcasts are overtly driven by the MAGA agenda and overwhelmingly watched by lower-income senior citizens, should not be underestimated. Consider this extraordinary remark from Trump’s attack-dog FCC chairman, Brendan Carr, in a recent Fox News interview: “We’re going back to that era where local TV stations, judging the public interest, get to decide what the American people think.”
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At least we can’t accuse Carr of concealing his intentions. I don’t know whether that’s more menacing or more ridiculous: We will tell the TV stations what to say, and they will decide what you think. That is straight-up Donald Trump’s thinking — and although public opinion doesn’t exactly work like that, it probably works more like that than most of us would like to admit. If it sounds like Carr is describing an unachievable MAGA-world dystopia, let’s consider what has already happened in actual reality:
- The Washington Post, now owned by Amazon tycoon Jeff Bezos, has declawed its opinion section, decreeing that it must advocate for “personal liberties and free markets.” It recently fired Karen Attiah, its only full-time Black opinion columnist, for posting comments about race and gun control (that did not directly mention Charlie Kirk’s killing).
- CBS, CNN, HBO and Paramount are all likely to end up under the control of Big Tech billionaire Larry Ellison and his son, David, who are Trump supporters eager to push those venerable news organizations to the right. Along the way, CBS has already forced out the editorial leadership at “60 Minutes,” paid Trump $16 million to settle a specious lawsuit and canceled Stephen Colbert’s late-night show. Reports suggest that Bari Weiss, founding editor of the conservative Free Press and a staunch supporter of Israel, will land a leading editorial position at the network that once employed Dan Rather, Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow.
- ABC News also settled a bogus Trump defamation suit it could likely have won, paying him $16 million and forcing “Good Morning America” anchor George Stephanopoulos to apologize. Then came Kimmel, of course.
- NBC News is likely next on the list: Trump has said he hopes to force its late-night hosts Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers off the air as well. Recently spun-off subsidiary MSNBC covered itself in infamy by firing commentator Matthew Dowd, a former Republican strategist, for anodyne comments about the Kirk shooting.
- Twitter and Facebook became … whatever it is that they became. I’m so old that I can remember when people thought Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg were cool!
- Oh, and there’s the New York Times. Let’s have that conversation another time, shall we? Ezra Klein, Tom Friedman, Ross Douthat and David Brooks are still hanging out together in bearded-dude podcast-land, trying to be Responsible Voices of the Sensible Center, and no doubt there’s an audience for that. (It might be my mother’s cousin in Savannah and a few of her book-group friends.)
As I suggested earlier, Jimmy Kimmel was a test case, deliberately pushing the outer edges of MAGA power to see what was possible. It may turn out to be a slight overreach, given the existence of weirdo Republicans like Ted Cruz and Rand Paul who cling to the last tattered remnants of libertarian ideals. But as with all acts of state terror and intimidation — as with Kilmar Ábrego García and Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk and so many other people whose names we don’t know — the specifics are less important than the heightened climate of fear and the much larger and more ominous message: We will do whatever we want to whoever we want whenever we want, and you are powerless to stop it.
At least we can’t accuse FCC chair Brendan Carr of concealing his intentions, which are both menacing and ridiculous: We will tell the TV stations what to say, and they will decide what you think.
If Donald Trump is personally obsessed with the media, the people who actually steer his administration — first and foremost that would be Stephen Miller, the Gríma Wormtongue of MAGAville — understand that they can never exert full control over what can be said, seen and heard. Furthermore, they know that’s only one element of an authoritarian seizure of power, which demands, to quote Bill Curry again, “the nullification of our Constitution and the collapse of every institution our democracy runs on.”
In other words, the point of forcing ABC/Disney, and effectively every other major media corporation, to bend the knee before a president who got 49.8 percent of the popular vote (and won by the smallest margin in 24 years), is to convince everyone — on the left, the right, the center and nowhere in particular — that no one is fighting back and there’s no point in fighting back. The Supreme Court has given Trump free rein, the FBI and Justice Department have become his enforcers, the civil service has been co-opted and subverted, the public health agencies have been conquered by moonbats and Republican state legislatures are doing their best to rig the midterm elections. As Curry puts it, leaders at white-shoe law firms, elite universities and major foundations have repeatedly surrendered without a shot, revealing themselves as “traitors, cowards, rank opportunists or simply inept.”
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Maybe there’s a valuable lesson in the near-total capitulation of mainstream media conglomerates: It might just put to rest the innocent neoliberal doctrine that the marketplace of capitalism prefers democracy over tyranny, or values “diversity” as a market opportunity. I would suggest there are bigger lessons available as well, too big to tackle here and now.
Those institutions of democracy that fill Americans with so much outmoded pride served as inspirations to the world; that much is true. But they were always intended to sustain an unstable compromise between true popular sovereignty and the oligarchic forms of power created and demanded by an economy built on private enterprise. That compromise has now been breached by dedicated and determined enemies of democracy, and the institutions can do nothing to stop them. Only the people can do that.
