Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
Charen: Yeah. Small quibble: ABC doesn’t have broadcast licenses. I wouldn’t expect Benny Johnson to know that. He doesn’t know it.
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.
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 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.
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.
Sargent: He said maybe we should go after you.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
Charen: My pleasure.
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