We're lucky Trump is so bad at this

ABC placed "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" on indefinite suspension Wednesday at the request of the Trump administration, citing comments that Kimmel had made made Monday about Charlie Kirk.

1) Well not even about Charlie Kirk, actually. Or even about Kirk's murder, and only kind of about his murderer. Kimmel's comments were about how right-wing media has covered Kirk's murder.

“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.”

2) It seems like Kimmel is wrong about the shooter's motives, though the information space on this has been clouded from the start by good-faith errors and misinformation alike. From what I've read so far, it seems like the only explicitly MAGA-coded aspect of this kid's background was his apparent facility with a hunting rifle. A recent Bluesky post that I remembered but couldn't track down went something like this: the two groups of people with the most bizarre yet, unfortunately, highly consequential political ideologies are 1) swing voters and 2) school shooters.

3) But yes, the Right – everyone from manosphere podcasters up to the commander-in-chief – is fishing for any plausible link between the shooter and "the organized left." They're rummaging through your old tweets for any pretext at all to justify a broader crackdown on the last remaining structures of left-of-center cultural and political power. And they're not even a little bit picky!

4) On Wednesday night, Trump announced he is classifying Antifa as a terrorist organization. Now, it is commonly known to many, including Trump himself, that Antifa does not actually exist. And yet we're all acutely aware that Antifa's nonexistence will serve as no impediment to the Trump administration prosecuting people for being members of Antifa. Presumably this is in response to Charlie Kirk's murder, an event that was not organized by Antifa, owing largely to its nonexistent.

5) It's not that hard to imagine a different world: one where the Trump administration seized upon one truly egregious comment about Kirk's death (for obvious reasons, I'm not even going to speculate about what such a hypothetical comment might have been), prompting some kind of broad-based Trump censorship program. If it was a comment that went clearly over the line, maybe it scans to the average swing voter as a somewhat reasonable reaction from the government. And on this pretense, Trump makes his last push for dictatorial control – his Reichstag fire.

6) I don't think the average person hears this Kimmel comment and even entirely follows what Kimmel is saying, much less knows why someone should be upset by it. Even if you disagree with the conclusion Kimmel reaches about the shooter's motive (as the evidence at this point, I think, requires us to), the entire point of Kimmel's comment is that it's in poor taste to exploit Kirk's death for political benefit. So to accuse Kimmel of actually having been the one to exploit Kirk's death for political benefit, without even bothering to explain why, is just kind of confusing at best and self-evidently unbelievable at worst.

7) (But then again, by this strand of logic – that the transparent lunacy of Donald Trump's behavior should be immediately obvious to anyone with eyes to see – Trump never becomes president in the first place.)

8) This is a really weird fight to pick and an even weirder opponent. Jimmy Kimmel is entering his fourth decade of being on TV, and if there's anything Americans like, it's a guy who they've seen on TV a lot (see: Trump, Donald, presidency of). Eight percent more people like him than don't, and that's before supporting Jimmy Kimmel became a signal of small-d democratic virtue.

9) If ABC doesn't put Kimmel back on the air, it will be a major shock to the constitutional order and a deeply troubling omen of things to come, if for no other reason than as a sign of the depths to which major corporations will sink to collaborate with the Trump regime.

10) But successfully taking out Kimmel would not, in practical terms, achieve very much at all. Unlike in the academy, where the right actually is actually undertaking an effective campaign to cripple an important center of cultural power for the left, we just ... don't really care about Jimmy Kimmel like that? Only 1.75 million people watch his show, or about the same number of people who listen to Pod Save America, an influential source of liberal news that also has a political action arm. If you're Trump and you could only take out one or the other, you'd be much better off wiping out PSA. The only reason Trump is obsessed with whether or not late night shows are mean to him is because his brain is permanently stuck in 1993.

11) Even though late night talk shows are at the nadir of their cultural relevance, the median adult is old enough to have fond memories of a time when their late night show of choice would be on in their house just sort of by default. Instead of flipping through Netflix or Hulu, they'd be watching Letterman or whoever. That nostalgia and the lasting memory of these shows' cultural cache is a big reason networks have been persuaded to keep them shows around for so long past the point when anyone was still watching.

12) (There are also better, more substantive reason, such as the fact that studios have treated them like a farm system for young writing talent.)

13) Another somewhat important reason I think the backlash will be more than Trump bargained for is that the highest-ranking legal document in the land famously bans the federal government from "abridging the freedom of speech, or of the freedom of the press." This is legally significant, of course, for the purposes of deciding whether or not Trump should or will be allowed to do carry through with this (to the diminishing extent to which such things still matter at the Supreme Court).

14) But it's also an easily understood controversy that represents a clear violation of most people's values. Freedom of speech isn't some obscure doctrine that you need a law degree to understand. Year after year, for two and a half centuries, a new wave of kids in America's public schools has learned that their nation was born, in part, because their forefathers could not abide the imposition of a royal tax on newspapers. Americans today have a wide range of opinions about what freedom of speech should look like in practice, but almost all of them have been, from their earliest memories, hard-coded with the belief that robust freedom of speech is among the highest values to which a just country must aspire.

15) Despite the shock of Nov. 2024, most people still hate this guy and are only getting more fed up with his shit by the day. Even though it feels like (and it may indeed be the case) that Trump is building momentum for an authoritarian push, it's worth remembering that he's even more unpopular now than he was at the start of his first term. The only new people Trump has added to his coalition are the inhabitants of the c-suites at major media companies.

16) If Trump ends up fumbling the bag on this grasp for ultimate power, it will ultimately be because he's forgotten (or, more likely, never knew) that the autocrat actually does need to retain some measure of popularity in order to justify and maintain his hold on power. It's like he read an AI summary of Hitler's Wikipedia page that omitted the parts where Hitler actually had a theory, however morally appalling many aspects of it were, about how he was going to improve the material conditions for Germany. With Trump, we're doing the world's first voluntary recession and rolling science back to before the invention of antiseptics.

17) Trump just made the high-risk decision to interfere with America's regularly scheduled programming. It's a shocking violation of our broadly held social values, but as a purely strategic matter it just seems like it's going to piss a lot of people off while not giving Trump anything in return.