We all know why Jimmy Kimmel got pushed out of his job.
It’s because Donald Trump can’t take a joke.
Has there ever been anyone whose skin was so predominately orange and, at the same time, so preposterously thin? I mean, one of the main reasons Trump ran for president was because Barack Obama had sliced him into small orange pieces at a White House correspondents dinner.
Trump hates to be made fun of. More than that, he hates the people who make fun of him, particularly those who do it for a living. And now, as he continues his adventure from wannabe dictator to full-blown authoritarian, he has figured out a way to rid us of late-night comics.
The strategy is simple enough. He threatens, he bullies, he cuts off funding, he says he’ll withdraw licensing. And many TV networks and newspapers and law firms and universities capitulate. That sound you hear is not wind turbines. It’s megabillionaires sucking up to Trump. And just like that, networks are paying off Trump rather than fighting him in court.
The thing is, Trump is getting better at it.
Kimmel made a joke about Trump and his MAGA henchmen trying desperately to assure the world that the killer was not of the MAGA persuasion. It wasn’t a great joke. But Kimmel made it before we knew about the texts that were released, giving us more insight into the killer’s likely motives.
But it was enough of a pretext to go after the guy who Trump seriously hates. He wins. The First Amendment loses.
And so life goes during the Trump Restoration, one horror after the other.
Want early access to
Mike’s columns?
Subscribe to get an
exclusive first look at
his columns twice a week.
But you also have to understand, what happened to Kimmel is not only about freedom of speech, as important as it is. It’s not only about the president failing to defend the Constitution he has sworn to uphold, as important as that is.
And it’s not even simply about FCC Chair Brendan Carr — “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” he said — threatening to use the full force of government to strong-arm Disney-owned ABC into dumping Kimmel.
No, it’s more than that.
It’s about the laughs. We need the laughs. We’re desperate for laughs. We need the rim shots. We need the satire. We need the jokes.
We need nightly or weekly visits from the people who will stand up to Trump so they can cut him — and his bumbling henchmen — off at the knees with ridicule. The nightly monologue is a long and valued late-night tradition, going back, in my lifetime, to Jack Paar and Johnny Carson. Imagine Nixon trying to get Carson kicked off the air? That would have gotten him impeached for sure.
Trump has his masked ICE goons. He has the National Guard and the Marines. He’s got the Supreme Court, although, fortunately, not all of the judiciary. He’s got the House and Senate. He seems to be able to fire federal workers at will. He can send migrants, many in the country legally, to a Salvadoran hellhole of a prison. He blows up speedboats manned by other Venezuelans because he claims — we’ve seen no evidence so far — that they were drug smugglers who posed an “imminent” threat to the United States.
I mean, when deputy attorney general Todd Blanche goes on CNN and says they’re looking into RICO charges against the four women who heckled Trump at a Washington restaurant, where can we turn?
What we have (or had, or will have had) is Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, Jon Stewart, Seth Meyers, John Oliver, SNL, the Daily Show, et al.
But for how much longer?
I ended my last column — about the Trump thugocracy exploiting the assassination of right-wing provocateur Charlie Kirk to bring McCarthyism back to our shores — by asking who will be next.
It was published the same morning that Disney chief Bob Iger would capitulate and Kimmel would get the ax.
Why did Iger cave?
First you have to know how the full-force-of-government thing works under Trump. The FCC’s Carr threatens the ABC network and suggests that locally-owned ABC stations “push back” and “pre-empt” coverage that doesn’t serve “their local communities.”
“When you see stuff like this, I mean, look, we can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr told a far-right-wing podcaster. “These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action frankly on Kimmel or you know there’s going to be additional work for the F.C.C. ahead …”
Before you knew it, Nexstar, which owns 32 ABC affiliates, says it will “pre-empt” the Kimmel show. It’s just a coincidence, I guess, that Nexstar intends to buy its largest rival, TEGNA, in a transaction that must be approved — wait for it — by the FCC. You may remember that TEGNA owns 9News, and Nexstar owns Fox affiliates in Denver and Colorado Springs.
The easy way or the hard way? Well, right-wing Sinclair, which owns 33 ABC stations, opts for the easy way — because why not?
As David Letterman put it in an interview with The Atlantic, “Who hired these goons — Mario Puzo?”
So, Trump got rid of Colbert — does anyone believe CBS officials when they say that dumping Colbert at the end of his contract was a financial decision? — and now Kimmel. And if you watched any of the late-night shows on Thursday, you saw Colbert and Fallon and Stewart (doing a special Thursday night edition) pretending to suck up to Trump. If you missed any of it, The New York Times has the clips for you.
So, funny? Yes, for now.
Because it gets worse. Trump clearly intends to use the strongarm tactics against not just the comics, but also the “radical left media” and the billionaires who own them.
Here’s Trump talking to reporters about the Kimmel firing on Air Force One, “I have read someplace that the networks were 97% against me, again, 97% negative, and yet I won and easily, all seven swing states. … They give me only bad publicity, press. I mean, they’re getting a license. I would think maybe their license should be taken away.”
Uh, 97%? Can someone strip Trump of his license to do fake math?
Look, as I write this, RFK Jr.’s bumbling gang of vaccine advisers is making a mockery of medical science. The jokes, as joke writers never say, write themselves.
But who will tell the jokes?
As Will Rogers, the lasso-twirling comedian and satirist, said more than a hundred years ago: “Everything is changing. People are taking their comedians seriously and the politicians as a joke.”
We should take comedians seriously. Because losing the right to free speech is no joke.
Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.
The Colorado Sun is a nonpartisan news organization, and the opinions of columnists and editorial writers do not reflect the opinions of the newsroom. Read our ethics policy for more on The Sun’s opinion policy. Learn how to submit a column. Reach the opinion editor at opinion@coloradosun.com.
Follow Colorado Sun Opinion on Facebook.