Mike Pence Is as Spineless as Ever

At The Atlantic Festival on Thursday, the former Vice President co-signed the firing of late-night host Jimmy Kimmel, while also identifying the exact reason it is unjust: because the Trump administration forced ABC to do it. 

“We ought ever to be vigilant, to ensure the right of every American to express their views without government interference or censorship,” Pence told The Atlantic’s Tim Alberta. “The First Amendment, though, does not protect entertainers who say crass or thoughtless things, as Jimmy Kimmel did in the wake of a national tragedy.”  

Kimmel poked fun at Trump’s admittedly strange change of subject when asked about how Charlie Kirk’s death affected him, and pointed out that the right was doing an all-out media blitz to convince the public that the shooter was a left-wing terrorist from a radical movement with little information out. 

Pence continued, getting so close to getting it right while still missing it completely. 

“Private employers have every right to dismiss employees, whether they’re a television talk show host or otherwise, if they violate the standards of that company. Now, I would have preferred that the chairman of the FCC  had not weighed in. But I respect the right of the networks to make the decision.” Pence went on to call Kimmel “callous” and “thoughtless” for his comments. 

The part Pence conveniently wedged between his very monotone outrage over Kimmel’s speech is what the issue is. This isn’t simply a disgruntled employer firing an employee for mouthing off; this is the Trump administration putting pressure on a network to fire someone for saying things they don’t like. From Mahmoud Khalil  to Rümeysa Öztürk to Kimmel, conservatives are being willfully obtuse about what speech crackdowns are really about. 

President Donald Trump on Thursday announced plans to station U.S. troops back in Afghanistan. The president, who campaigned on minimizing U.S. involvement in foreign entanglements, said he is in talks with the Taliban to regain control of Bagram air base.

The announcement came as Trump criticized the Biden administration’s 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan, which ended America’s longest war, during a press conference. Trump, arguing that he would have pulled out while retaining Bagram, described his efforts “to get it back,” without providing much detail.

“That could be a little breaking news,” Trump said. “We’re trying to get it back, because they need things from us. We want that base back.”

The president suggested that the Afghan air base, originally constructed by the Soviet Union in the 1950s, would serve a strategic purpose for Washington against China.

Without evidence, Trump alleged that “it’s an hour away from where China makes its nuclear weapons.” In recent months, he has repeatedly mused about the air base—claiming falsely that it is occupied or “controlled” by Beijing, and baselessly asserting its close proximity to Chinese nuclear weapons plants.

President Donald Trump is asking the Supreme Court to give him permission to fire whomever he wants—as long as he can come up with a reason.

The Trump administration went running to the Supreme Court Thursday to back up its efforts to oust Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled 2–1 Monday along ideological lines to block Cook’s removal, saying that she was likely to succeed in her statutory claim that she’d been fired without “cause,” as well as her procedural claim that she did not receive due process prior to her removal.

Trump’s attorney John D. Sauer submitted a request to stay the preliminary injunction Thursday, arguing that Cook was not entitled to due process and that Trump has a sweeping discretion to fire whomever he wanted as long as he claimed it was related to their job.

“The Federal Reserve Act’s broad ‘for cause’ provision rules out removal for no reason at all, or for policy disagreement,” Sauer wrote. “But so long as the President identifies a cause, the determination of ‘some cause relating to the conduct, ability, fitness, or competence of the officer’ is within the President’s unreviewable discretion,” Sauer wrote.

“The President’s strong concerns about the appearance of mortgage fraud, based on facially contradictory representations made to obtain mortgages by someone whose job is to set interest rates that affect Americans’ mortgages, satisfies any conception of cause,” Sauer continued.

(One might wonder if the same strong concerns would also apply to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who also made contradictory mortgage pledges, in his role shaping domestic and international economic policy.)

A federal district court had previously ruled that Trump couldn’t fire Cook over unproven allegations of mortgage fraud from Federal Housing Finance Agency Director William Pulte—who’s made similar accusations against a number of the president’s enemies—because it had nothing to do with her actual job. “For cause” typically refers to serious misconduct, or a neglect of duty.

Since Trump hit the campaign trail, the Supreme Court has been located securely in the president’s pocket, granting him “immunity” and then green-lighting move after move of his sweeping agenda when he resumed office. Despite the rulings of lower courts, it’s entirely possible this trend will continue.

The Federal Communications Commission’s involvement in canceling Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show not only appears to have violated the First Amendment, but it also defied one of Donald Trump’s own executive orders.

Jimmy Kimmel Live! was put on indefinite hiatus Wednesday by Nexstar, one of the largest owners of ABC stations in the country, over supposedly controversial comments that Kimmel made about the political affiliation of Charlie Kirk’s suspected assassin. (Kimmel said that MAGA was rushing to claim that Tyler Robinson was “anything other than one of them”—which is technically true.)

The network, which is in the midst of a multibillion-dollar acquisition that requires the FCC’s approval, yanked Kimmel hours after the federal agency’s leader, Brendan Carr, publicly threatened to revoke the broadcast licenses of anyone still platforming the comedian.

But beyond the flagrant infringement by the government on Kimmel’s freedom of speech, the irony of Carr’s command is that it also breached the Trump administration’s own policies.

One of the first executive orders that Trump signed when he returned to office in January promised to ensure that “no Federal Government officer, employee, or agent” would engage or facilitate “any conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen.”

It also swore that “no taxpayer resources” would be used to similarly restrict a citizen’s First Amendment right to free speech.

The discrepancy should sic Attorney General Pam Bondi on Carr, as the order instructed should happen for any potential free speech infringements that the Trump administration deemed had occurred during the prior presidential administration.

Regardless, Nexstar’s decision was widely celebrated by conservatives. Trump wrote on Truth Social that Nexstar’s decision to unplug Kimmel was “great news for America,” while Carr commented to The Hollywood Reporter that the broadcast network was “doing the right thing.” Both suggested that more of America’s major television companies should follow suit.

President Trump took some time out of his press conference with British Prime Minister Kier Starmer to throw more dirt on Jimmy Kimmel’s name and mislead the public about why he was actually fired Wednesday night. 

“We saw the dismissal of a very well-known chat show host in America last night, Mr. Kimmel,” a British journalist asked Trump. 

“Well, Jimmy Kimmel was fired because he had bad ratings more than anything else, and he said a horrible thing about a great gentleman known as Charlie Kirk,” Trump replied. “And Jimmy Kimmel is not a talented person; he had very bad ratings. And they should’ve fired him a long time ago. So y’know, you can call that free speech or not. He was fired for lack of talent.” 

It seems clear at this point that Kimmel was fired because he dared to poke fun at Trump’s very flippant reaction to a question about Kirk’s death. Kimmel didn’t say anything that horrible, other than quoting Trump directly and noting that the administration was pushing Kirk’s shooter as a leftist terrorist without proper evidence.

The president and his administration, having already been trending toward McCarthyism for months, had their feelings hurt, and made FCC head Brendan Carr threaten to revoke the broadcasting licenses of ABC if it didn’t properly reprimand Kimmel.  

Trump trying to convince people that Kimmel mostly got fired because he was a bad host is facetious at best. 

For at least the third time, President Donald Trump on Thursday mistook the country of Armenia for Albania, falsely claiming he’d brought an end to an Azerbaijan-Albania conflict that never took place. The gaffe came during a press conference in England, where the president touted his purported record as a peacemaker.

Attempting to mention a peace declaration he arranged, laying the groundwork to end a decades-long conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia, Trump said: “To think that we settled … uh … Azerbaijan and Albania, as an example.” (Beyond the country mix-up, the president botched the pronunciation of Azerbaijan, saying something like “Aber … baijan” instead.)

The 79-year-old president made an identical flub in an August 19 appearance on a conservative radio show. “You saw the Aber … baijan,” Trump told the host (his mispronunciation so egregious that the show’s transcript registered it as “Arab or Bhaijaan”). “That was a big one going on for 34, 35 years with, uh, Albania. Think of that.”

In a Fox News appearance last week, he again boasted about brokering peace between “Azerbaijan and Albania.”

“It was going on for years,” the president said Thursday of the ongoing conflict. “It was never going to be settled. If you remember, the prime minister and the presidents, they were there for many years. They said—when they were in my office, we settled. And they started off at both sides of the Oval Office. So far away. I didn’t know you could be so far away. And as we were together for an hour, they kept getting closer, closer. And by the time we finished, we all hugged each other.”

A Trump-appointed federal judge on Thursday shredded the administration’s flimsy excuse for trying to secretly deport children over Labor Day weekend. 

U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly wrote that the government’s claim that it had yanked children out of their beds to hastily reunite them with their parents in Guatemala had “crumbled like a house of cards.”

“There is no evidence before the Court that the parents of these children sought their return,” Kelly wrote in a 43-page filing. “To the contrary, the Guatemalan Attorney General reports that officials could not even track down parents for most of the children whom Defendants found eligible for their ‘reunification’ plan. And none of those that were located had asked for their children to come back to Guatemala.”

The judge excoriated the Trump administration’s defense for the children’s expedited removal, saying the government had “come up short on both the law and facts,” and “misstate[d] the legal standard” in trying to undermine the commonality requirement for a class-action lawsuit. 

“In any event, the record here is barren of evidence that any child in the proposed class wants to return to Guatemala, even if their parents can be found. All the evidence suggests the opposite: Plaintiffs have offered over 30 declarations from Guatemalan children who object to being sent back,” Kelly wrote. 

Earlier this month, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller claimed that a judge who’d initially blocked the children’s deportation was “effectively kidnapping these migrant children and refusing to let them return home to their parents in their home country.”

Kelly also slammed the Trump administration’s claim that it would not deport children deemed ineligible for removal, “given the possibility that Defendants may alter their criteria and then act in a way that would prevent judicial review, the risk of irremediable harm.”

“They cite no statute, regulation, or even policy statement requiring them. That means there is no legal roadblock preventing Defendants from changing the criteria (or how they interpret them) tomorrow, placing a currently non-eligible child onto the eligibility list, and hustling that child out of the country as they tried to do over Labor Day weekend,” Kelly wrote.  

He added that the government’s conduct plainly suggested the administration was “not applying their criteria accurately, consistently, or in ways that reflect good faith,” because it had attempted to rush the children out in the middle of the night on a holiday weekend, leaving little opportunity for legal intervention.

America’s allies have resorted to practically begging Donald Trump to be harder on Russia.

During a joint press conference Thursday, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer pushed back against the U.S. president’s interpretation of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, making plain how a strengthened American resolve could nip Russia’s recent incursions.

Trump first complained that Russian President Vladimir Putin “has let me down.”

“I mean he’s killing many people and he’s losing more people than he’s killing,” Trump said. “Frankly, Russian soldiers are being killed at a higher rate than the Ukrainian soldiers.

“But yeah, he’s let me down. It’s death. You know, it doesn’t affect the United States, we have—other than unless you end up in a world war over this thing, you could—this was a thing that would have never happened had I been president. And it didn’t happen for four years, most people agree, it didn’t happen. Nor was it close to happening,” Trump continued.

“I spoke to President Putin about Ukraine, it was the apple of his eye. I’ve said that many times, but he would have never done what he did, except that he didn’t respect the leadership of the United States,” Trump said.

“He, look—it doesn’t so much affect you, though you are a lot closer to the scene than we are,” Trump said, turning toward Starmer.

But Starmer couldn’t let the situation slip, instead spelling out—inches away from Trump—exactly why American opposition to Russia is so critical.

“We have to put extra pressure on Putin,” Starmer said, not facing the U.S. president. “It’s only when the president has put pressure on Putin that he’s actually shown any inclination to move.”

Starmer emphasized that Russia has only grown more bold in its invasion of Ukraine, referring to an incident in August when the Kyiv building hosting the British Council’s office was badly damaged by Russian bombs.

Trump has little to show for the profound international recognition he’s offered the Kremlin over the last few months. Against the advice of world leaders, Trump invited Putin to Alaska in August—tasking U.S. soldiers to literally roll out the red carpet for the Russian dictator. It was the first time that Putin had stepped foot on U.S. soil in more than a decade.

Still, Russia has not agreed to peace terms in its ongoing war against Ukraine. The superpower has instead insisted on receiving “international legal recognition” of its 2014 annexation of Crimea, an internationally recognized portion of Ukraine, along with four regions it has claimed in the three years since it first invaded Ukraine.

And Trump has continued to play it soft with the Kremlin. The U.S. leader offered a remarkably blasé comment regarding the breach of Russian drones into Polish airspace earlier this month, writing on Truth Social: “What’s with Russia violating Poland’s airspace with drones? Here we go!” Trump further suggested that the attack—which forced the Eastern European nation to shut down four of its airports as it scrambled to fire up its defense systems—“could have been a mistake.”

Russia took note of the absent pushback. Rather than de-escalate the situation, Russia decided to stoke more fear, tossing threats at Finland if it dared to oppose their power.

The censorship of Jimmy Kimmel was evidently a sacrifice at the altar of corporate interests.

ABC’s Wednesday decision to suspend Jimmy Kimmel Live! came after decisions to pull the show from Nexstar Media Group and then Sinclair Broadcast Group, which own many ABC affiliate stations across the country. Earlier Wednesday, President Donald Trump’s censorial Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr had threatened broadcasters for platforming Kimmel, due to the host’s recent monologue about the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. 

While Kimmel’s jokes focused on Trump’s and MAGA’s response to the killing, rather than the violence itself, Carr called it the “sickest conduct possible.” Nexstar and Sinclair followed suit, explaining their decision as a response to the purportedly “insensitive” and “problematic” comments. (Going beyond yanking the show, Sinclair also demanded that Kimmel apologize and donate to Kirk’s family and organization, and committed to broadcasting an hour-long tribute to Kirk during the show’s time slot.)

It is no coincidence that Nexstar is seeking to merge with another major media company, Tegna—a decision that requires not only FCC approval but also a change in regulations that limit companies’ reach. According to Poynter, the merger would expand Nexstar’s reach to 80 percent of TV households in the country, whereas the FCC currently has a 39 percent cap.  And Sinclair has pending business before the administration too—according to CNN media analyst Brian Stelter—and also proposed merging with Tegna, as The Wall Street Journal reported, following the announcement of Nexstar’s deal.

“So we know that two major TV station owners, both of which need to curry favor with the Trump administration, were the ones that most loudly and vocally condemned Kimmel and said they were going to not air the show tonight and in the coming nights,” Stelter said on Wednesday evening. “It’s an Occam’s razor situation. It’s exactly what it looks like.”

Fox News host Sean Hannity claimed that he couldn’t find a “single prominent conservative voice” pushing to knock Jimmy Kimmel off the air—but in July, President Donald Trump suggested that Kimmel would be “next” to be canceled.

“The left already—starting with humpty-dumpty CNN, Pritzker, Newsom—predictably claiming, ‘This is a conservative censorship. The MAGA crowd, Donald Trump got Jimmy Kimmel.’ That is false,” Hannity whined Wednesday night. “I can’t find a single prominent conservative voice in the country that even remotely wanted or hoped or was pushing to get Jimmy Kimmel taken off the air.”

But in July, after CBS announced that The Late Show With Stephen Colbert would be canceled, Trump celebrated the win against a vocal critic by listing who else he’d like to see taken off the air.

“I absolutely love that Colbert got fired. His talent was even less than his ratings,” Trump wrote on Truth Social at the time. “I hear Jimmy Kimmel is next. Has even less talent than Colbert! Greg Gutfeld is better than all of them combined, including the Moron on NBC who ruined the once great Tonight Show.”

It appears that Hannity is playing defense for the blatant act of political overreach from the Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr, who publicly pressured Nexstar Media Group, the broadcast company that owns ABC, to punish Kimmel for his speech. Nexstar is currently seeking FCC approval for a $6.2 billion deal to buy Tegna, an acquisition that would make Nexstar the biggest owner of local stations in the country.

During his show Monday, Kimmel said that MAGA had spent the weekend “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.” In fact, Republicans started doing that the same day Kirk was shot, casting blame on the left and the transgender community before the shooter was even identified.

Kimmel’s remark about MAGA comments wasn’t even a matter of opinion, it was a well-documented fact.