The startling decision by ABC News to pull comedian Jimmy Kimmel’s show under pressure from President Trump requires a real response from Democrats. It has to go well beyond expressions of outrage and defenses of the First Amendment—though those are critical—and spell out potential future consequences, political and possibly even legal, for those participating in this escalating lawlessness.
The bare facts about this situation already demonstrate that this is a breathtaking abuse of power. Critically, it turns on the willingness of accomplices to bend or break the law to assist in Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of power, in this case Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr. Which might provide an opening for Democrats.
Carr is not doing much to hide the corrupt nature of what just happened. The MAGA right has been furious with Kimmel for allegedly mischaracterizing Charlie Kirk’s killer as one of them. Though the shooter’s motives remain murky, that may indeed prove false.
But it’s still speech. And on Wednesday, Carr went on a far-right podcast to directly threaten ABC News with retaliation for Kimmel’s offense. Carr flatly declared that if “these companies”—meaning ABC News and its parent, Disney—don’t “take action on Kimmel” for spreading misinformation about Kirk’s killing, there will be “additional work for the FCC ahead.” Carr added that this could mean pulling the licenses of ABC broadcast affiliates.
That’s appalling by itself. But Carr went even further, in some revealing comments to Fox News’s Sean Hannity on Wednesday night. In that appearance, Carr claimed that mainstream media outlets conspired to stop Trump’s 2024 election with their coverage of things like Joe Biden’s age and Russia’s efforts to help Trump win in 2016.
Carr was lying, of course. But then he added this:
Trump punched back. And when he did so, he was standing up for the American people that simply don’t trust those outlets anymore. We at the FCC are going to enforce the public interest obligation. There’s broadcasters out there that don’t like it—they can turn their license in to the FCC.
Carr continued that these media outlets had run a “narrow partisan circus” during 2024, and added: “Whatever the public interest means, it’s not that.”
This is simply extraordinary. The invocation of the “public interest” is a reference to the fact that by law, the FCC licenses network affiliates to operate on behalf of the public interest. And so Carr here is going further than in his original rationale, i.e., that the FCC could pull licenses in the “public interest” due to Kimmel’s supposed spreading of misinformation about Kirk.
Rather, Carr basically said to Hannity that broadcasters are operating contrary to the “public interest,” and thus could see licenses revoked, if they cover Trump in ways that Carr decrees are overly critical of him and thus illegitimate.
All of this constitutes a major abuse of power. The problem is that in authorizing the FCC to license network affiliates, the law doesn’t clearly define what “public interest” means. Carr is exploiting this by defining “public interest” in an absurd and dangerous way.
To be as clear as possible about this: Carr himself essentially told Hannity straight out that he reserves the right to declare coverage inimical to the public interest—and thus subject to FCC retaliation via the revocation of licenses—if he declares it by fiat to be overly hostile to Trump.
“That makes it even more egregious and more clear,” First Amendment lawyer Ken White tells me. White notes that to win a First Amendment case here, it would be necessary to show that Carr threatened private actors—in this case, Disney and ABC—to coerce them to censor Kimmel.
“There’s a clear, obvious violation here,” White says. “Kimmel could sue Carr and other government actors to get an order telling them to stop it, though it’s doubtful they’d obey.”
“This is an unprecedented abuse of the FCC’s power,” adds Caitlin Vogus, senior adviser of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. “The ‘public interest’ standard was never meant to be used as a cudgel for the government to pressure broadcasters into only saying what the president wants them to say.”
Carr’s threats may be unlawful in addition to violating the First Amendment, says Anna Gomez, who is the only Democratic-appointed commissioner on the three-member FCC. Gomez notes that federal law also bars the FCC from censoring broadcasters.
“What the administration is doing violates the First Amendment and the Communications Act,” Gomez tells me, noting that the government is “using the public interest standard to go after anything it doesn’t like.”
“This administration is increasingly using the weight of government to suppress lawful expression,” Gomez said, decrying Trump’s “campaign of censorship and control” to “silence dissent.”
There may be another dimension to Carr’s abuse of power, as well. Recall that media conglomerate Nexstar, which runs many ABC affiliates, first announced that it will yank Kimmel, boosting the pressure on ABC. But Nexstar’s move came after Carr suggested that “individual licensed stations” must “step up” and take action against Kimmel.
Nexstar is seeking FCC approval for a merger with megabroadcaster Tenga. So the question is: Did Nexstar understand Carr to be saying that the merger could depend on it agreeing to pull Kimmel from its stations?
“I believe there was strong pressure against [Nexstar’s] broadcasters to preempt Kimmel,” FCC Commissioner Gomez tells me.
Is it legal for the FCC chair to threaten to pull the licenses of broadcasters unless they refrain from Trump coverage that he arbitrarily declares illegitimate? Is it legal for the FCC chair to apparently hint that Nexstar won’t get its merger approved unless it yanks someone whose speech Trump dislikes?
Those experts all told me that Carr may be keeping his public commentary about all this just vague enough to avoid direct lawbreaking. But Democrats should do all they can to find out whether Carr is breaking the law in addition to violating the Constitution. They can scour every corner of the relevant statutes. And they can declare clearly that if and when they retake congressional power, they will scrutinize every crevice of Carr’s decision-making with subpoena power to assemble a clear picture of the deliberations and private communications behind his public threats.
Meanwhile, Democrats who go on ABC News might try to inform the network’s audience that it capitulated to Trump’s autocratic abuses of power, and that it isn’t serving the public well by doing so. They might even directly and publicly ask ABC News journalists if they’re comfortable with this outcome, which they surely are not.
Democrats need to let it be known that any and all Trump accomplices who carry out corrupt or illegal actions on his behalf will face accountability later. It’s the only language these authoritarian thugs will ever understand.
