The following is a lightly edited transcript of the September 25 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
After Jimmy Kimmel reappeared on his show and spoke movingly and defiantly about President Trump’s failed effort to oust him, Trump lost it on Truth Social and threatened Kimmel yet again. What’s funny, though, is that Trump’s greed actually wrecked one of the biggest claims that Fox News and MAGA figures have been making about this whole saga now that Kimmel has been reinstated.
We think this chaos and absurdity actually points to a deep weakness. Trump and MAGA may be in the process of losing this battle. And that wasn’t supposed to happen. Mona Charen, policy editor at The Bulwark, has a great new piece arguing that with this Kimmel fiasco, Trump and his fascist enablers are exploiting the death of the assassinated Charlie Kirk to justify a crackdown on dissent that takes a page from dictators. We’re going to talk about how far Trump is actually getting with this. Mona, thanks for coming on.
Mona Charen: Greg, always a pleasure to be with you.
Sargent: So Disney and ABC had previously suspended Kimmel’s show indefinitely after FCC chairman Brendan Carr explicitly threatened government retribution against them if they didn’t act against Kimmel. Then after a tremendous outcry, Kimmel was reinstated. Kimmel spoke about this, saying he never intended to make light of Kirk’s killing but strongly criticized the idea that Trump’s government would silence a comedian the president doesn’t like. Mona, what did you make of all that?
Charen: First of all, I’ve never, I don’t watch late night television. So I have to confess that though I’ve seen clips of Jimmy Kimmel, I haven’t really watched him, but I thought his return to the air was exactly the right grace notes to hit. He made the important really civic point. He said, ‘my show is not important, I’m not important. What’s important is that we live in the kind of country where you can say what you like without fear of government retribution.’ That is the whole point. And thank you, Jimmy Kimmel for getting it, for nailing it really.
Sargent: Yes, I thought he absolutely nailed it too. This isn’t about me, he said. This is about whether people like me can speak. I mean, that’s exactly right. That is the essential civic message. And there’s a sort of subtle beauty to it as well, which is it cuts against Trump’s megalomania. If you think about it.
Charen: Yes, because, you know, it is a pleasure to hear someone say it’s not about me when we live in an era where the guy who’s megalomania, as you say, is is world historical.
Sargent: It is world historical and that brings us to Trump’s new threat. In a Truth Social rant, he said: “I can’t believe ABC fake news gave Jimmy Kimmel his job back. The White House was told by ABC that his show was canceled.” Trump also said, “I think we’re going to test ABC out on this. Let’s see how we do.” Mona, you wrote in your very good piece that Trump’s crackdown on dissent is incredibly serious stuff. So what do you think Trump meant by this latest threat and how seriously do you take it? Where might it go?
Charen: This is the stuff of dictators: To go after comedians. If we remember one of the first things that Putin did after he had really consolidated absolute power within Russia was he went after a particular TV show that had puppets. And the puppets used to make fun of him. And he couldn’t stand it. And so he took them off the air. And I think there may have been actual punishments for the creators of that satire. That’s the way that megalomaniacal dictators behave. They cannot bear any criticism. My colleague Andrew Egger in his piece this morning was talking about what it must be like to live as Trump does, where he is just, I mean, he starts out with this crazy narcissism, but then surrounds himself by lickspittles and yes men who all repeat the same themes that he wants to hear, and he comes to believe that any slightest deviation from the worshipful attention that he has arranged to get is unacceptable.
And this goes to the heart of our system. I have begun, Greg, to have some doubts about whether our civil society has the strength to push back. Because the antibodies that used to be there, that were there when I was growing up, for example, at any suggestion of inhibiting free speech in any way—there was always a huge pushback from left, right and center. Everybody agreed these were certain just foundational American beliefs about what it meant to be an American—that it’s a free country. You can say what you want. You can go out in front of the White House and say the president is a fascist and not worry about getting arrested and or have any other punishment visited upon you—like losing your job. The fact that we are at a moment where that is blatantly happening and there isn’t—I mean, there was an outcry, and that’s good. I mean, it is really, really good news. I don’t want to downplay it. It was great news that Disney-ABC brought Kimmel back. That is great news. Shows there’s life in the old system yet. But the threat could not be more serious.
Sargent: Yes, I think that’s what we should take away from Trump’s latest tweet as well. I want to say that I think I’m a little more optimistic than you are about what we just learned about civil society, but I’d love to close on that. For now, what I think it’s worth observing is that Trump’s threat badly undermines what Fox News and MAGA have been saying lately. One figure after another has tried to argue that Kimmel’s reinstatement proves the government never actually corruptly pressured Disney and ABC. I’ll read a few examples. Sean Hannity scoffed that this showed that Kimmel’s original ouster was a “decision by ABC Disney, not the government.” Jesse Waters said this was “a showbiz decision.” Scott Jennings tweeted, “so we don’t live in an authoritarian regime? Got it.” Now that’s just preposterous. Brendan Carr just did explicitly threaten Disney and ABC. And the mere fact that it didn’t work doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. But that aside—
Charen: Well, wait, let’s not put that aside. Can we drill down on that for just a second? Because all these folks at Fox, all these little factotums who are saying the party line, they have very short memories. Just a few days ago, I recall Senator Ted Cruz saying about the Carr statement that it sounded like a mafioso. Nice network you’ve got there. Be a shame if anything were to happen to it. That was Ted Cruz. So the fact that it didn’t work in the end and that there was more pressure coming from the other side is great. Doesn’t negate the fact that the pressure was applied in the most ham-handed and obvious and public way. I mean, if this had been done behind closed doors, you know, and then it had leaked, you know, that this had been done, maybe people would have been more receptive to the idea that it was corrupt and awful. But I guess, you know, one of the Trump geniuses is that when you do the horrible things very openly, people think there must not be anything wrong with it.
Sargent: Absolutely. And Mona, there’s another smoking gun piece of evidence here, which is Benny Johnson’s big tweet in which he announced that FCC chair Brendan Carr had made this threat on his show. He did not treat this as a joke or as something that didn’t happen. I’m just going to read from it. Benny Johnson, he’s the right wing podcaster who had Carr on his show. He said this, “Breaking: The FCC chairman is threatening immediate action against Jimmy Kimmel, ABC and Disney.” And he goes on, this is Benny Johnson, far right podcaster, goes on to say, “Chairman Carr calls Kimmel’s malicious lies truly sick and says they should result in Kimmel’s immediate suspension and may lead to ABC losing its broadcast license.”
Charen: Yeah. Small quibble: ABC doesn’t have broadcast licenses. I wouldn’t expect Benny Johnson to know that. He doesn’t know it.
Sargent: Actually, could you clarify that? Because this is lost on a lot of people. It’s basically the affiliates that have the broadcast licenses.
Charen: It’s the affiliates. It’s the local stations who have broadcast licenses. It’s an antique system that harkens back to a time when broadcast spectrum was scarce, and therefore it was government regulated. It’s arguably no longer even relevant, should no longer be the case that these stations need a license because in an era of the internet and cable and everything else, it’s passé. Yeah, it’s absurd.
Sargent: I think it’s worth underscoring though that Chairman Carr actually explicitly threatened the local licensees as well. That’s the key point.
Charen: Correct. That is exactly right. He did do that. And he also—and this administration has done this again and again and again—they use the lever of the FTC and other government agencies having a power over corporate mergers to pressure companies and that’s proved to be incredibly successful in the past with big media companies.
But Greg, if you don’t mind, let me just hijack your show for just a second. I wanna make another point. I wanna make another point about what the people on the right are saying. I mean, it’s so ridiculous, but they’re saying, Well, this is just turnabout. Turnabout is fair play. What about when the Biden administration was pressuring social media companies to so-called censor opinions that they didn’t like, etc. So first of all, this did get litigated back during the Biden years. The Supreme Court threw it out actually on a standing, a matter of standing. But it was, I mean, the fact is that the Biden administration did tread very close to the line in terms of applying kind of a little bit of government pressure.
But remember what that was about, okay? This is kind of important—to me, anyway. The reason the Biden administration was leaning on Facebook and others was that they were very worried about the spread of COVID misinformation. They were worried that people were gonna die because they were getting false information about vaccines and other things. The lab origin story, they have less of a good case on that one, but on the vaccine misinformation in particular, the reason that they were doing what they were doing and walking right up to the line of using illegitimate government coercion or pressure was because they were trying to save lives. In this case, there is no colorable claim that this administration is doing anything other than using the power of the government to suppress criticism of the Dear Leader. There’s a world of difference between those two things. You know, what Biden did was arguably wrong, but in a completely different universe of wrong.
Sargent: I’d like to underscore that a little more, if I may. As you put it, Biden went up to the line. They were very conscious of a very difficult tension in their position. They, they they were worried about trampling the first amendment. And one could argue that maybe they went over the line, but at least they were conscious of the line.
In this case, Trump went out and he himself on Air Force One said explicitly that maybe Brendan Carr should yank the licenses of people who are overly critical of Trump. That’s not exactly the quote, but it was extremely close to that. And there’s no way anyone in good faith could compare what Biden did with that by Trump, which is an explicit and direct threat that’s all about speech about Dear Leader.
Charen: Exactly. And of course he has gone after CBS because he didn’t like the way they edited the “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris. And he’s gone after, you know, everybody who criticized him. When Jonathan Karl said, you know, Are you worried about the First Amendment implications or what do you think? I think he asked him, what about Pam Bondi’s statement that there’s hate speech and we’re gonna go after it.
Sargent: He said maybe we should go after you.
Charen: We’ll go after you. And you know proudly he says I already got you know a settlement out of your employers, and maybe I’ll get more. He is utterly, utterly blatant and flagrant about what he’s doing trying to suppress speech.
Sargent: By the way, it’s worth underscoring that that Jonathan Karl’s employer was ABC News. So Trump actually extorted $16 million from ABC and then went on to threaten Disney and ABC with the aim—or at least had Brendan Carr do it—threaten Disney and ABC in order to get to get Kimmel yanked. So if I’m ABC, I hope that ABC learns a little something from this that you just can’t—like you can pay the extortionist $16 million, but all it does is encourage them to come back for more.
Charen: Exactly. Exactly. And you know, I thought everybody knew that appeasing aggressors doesn’t work, but they’ve forgotten that lesson.
Sargent: Well, let’s listen to this from JD Vance, because it’s of a piece with the other stuff that Fox News and MAGA have been saying. Listen.
J.D. Vance (voiceover): Well look, on the free speech conversation, I’m pretty sure that Jimmy Kimmel was back on the air last night, and to the extent that he’s not back on the air, it’s because he’s not funny and has terrible ratings. This is not a federal government problem. This is...and I want to answer your question in good faith. Well, people will say as well, you know, didn’t the FCC commissioner put a tweet out that said something bad? Well, compare that the FCC commissioner making a joke on social media. What is the government action that the Trump administration has engaged in to kick Jimmy Kimmel or anybody else off the air? Zero. What government pressure have we brought to bear to tell people that they’re not allowed to speak their mind? Zero.
Sargent: Mona, there are so many distortions here, it’s hard to keep track. He says Carr was joking about Kimmel, but as we mentioned earlier, Carr went on Benny Johnson’s podcast and explicitly made the threat. Johnson certainly didn’t think it’s a joke. Trump himself said it on Air Force One. But I just want to ask you whether you agree with me on this. I think there’s an element of backpedaling right now going on with JD Vance and even some of these Fox figures. They know that Trump can’t be associated with explicit government censorship in quite the way that Trump himself is fine being associated with it. Like they know it’s bad. They know it’s politically a problem, even if Trump doesn’t. And I see that in JD Vance’s kind of sleazy positioning here. What do you think?
Charen: Greg, I think, you know, it’d be nice to see it your way as a ray of hope, but I, there’s another way to look at it, too—a little darker—which is, this is them doing their retconning where, you know, January 6th, that, didn’t happen. I mean, that was a great patriotic display. The violence that you thought you saw that was not there, you know, etc. So they’re just, you know, they’re going to rewrite reality, to suit themselves is because it didn’t, it didn’t turn out the way they wanted.
Sargent: So just let’s review what happened here. It was Trump’s use of authoritarian state censorship that provoked the massive cultural backlash—a cultural backlash that was bigger in many ways than the one that greeted Kirk and led them to think they could get away with censorship in the first place. You had these unions who represented nearly half a million workers condemning Disney for caving to Trump’s autocratic pressure, a huge range of figures with huge followings from all across the culture spoke out, including, as you pointed out earlier, Ted Cruz. So even the occasional conservative Republican. As G. Elliott Morris showed, the backlash really encompassed everyone from small investors to ordinary consumers. And then there was pressure on Disney customers, you know, some of them canceled Disney+ subscriptions, canceled Disney World Vacations in protest. I think that there’s an underlying strength in civil society here that we risk overlooking if we kind of get too doomy about it, if that makes sense. Am I being too optimistic?
Charen: No. So thank you for pointing that out and for dragging me into the light a little bit. Let me also say that in the last few weeks, remember the Trump bleat about, you know, Chicago’s about to find out why they call it the Department of War, right? And so all the talk was about he was ready to send the troops into one of our great American cities. Well, what happened? The entire political establishment of Illinois rose up and had a big press conference and denounced this and said that they would fight it. And he backed down. He said, well, maybe we’ll go to Memphis. We’ll go to Memphis.
So I mean, when people actually show a little spine and resist, he can be backed down. I even go back to the very beginning of this awful second Trump administration. Remember that he wanted, who was the congressman? He wanted Matt Gaetz as his attorney general initially. And there was pushback and he said, okay, fine. I’ll choose someone else. I mean, he does back down. He can be resisted. But unfortunately, so many people have chosen the other path of, you know, well, I’ll just get mine. And yes, looking at you, Jeff Bezos and Tim Cook and all those other corporate leaders who decided to butter him up, that was not necessary. They have fuck you money, excuse my French. Why did they do that? We need more spine. We need more people like the civil society groups you talked about, like the individuals. And especially, I have to say, this time around there were more than a few Republicans who actually spoke up. So that was a healthy sign.
Sargent: Look, I think that this episode could maybe lead more and more people to kind of find that spine you’re talking about. At least I’m hopeful. Mona Charen, really terrific discussion. Thank you so much for coming on as always.
Charen: My pleasure.