To believe that Trump and Carr made a strategic mistake by not letting a grassroots backlash against Kimmel develop organically, you need to believe that the president wants American institutions to fear right-wing cultural power.
He doesn’t. He wants them to fear his power.
It would have done nothing for Trump personally if spontaneous public outrage had driven Kimmel’s show off the air. He wants cultural stakeholders to answer to him and his government—not Republican consumers—for their crimes against MAGA. And he wants the right itself to warm up to that idea by getting comfortable with the prospect of state censorship. They’ve been whining about left-wing media bias for generations. It’s time to let their hero do something about it.
It’s not a coincidence that he and his deputies were so eager for Americans to know during the Cracker Barrel idiocy a few weeks ago that the White House had spoken directly to management about the restaurant’s new logo. Consumer pressure alone probably would have led the company to revert to its old logo, but Trump didn’t want to let an opportunity pass to spook corporate America by reminding them that he’s always watching and prepared to act. Fear him, not his fans.
As such, the “own goal” logic reminds me a bit of Democrats muttering that the White House’s militarized crackdown on Washington, D.C., is a “distraction” from things like health care and the Epstein files. It isn’t; it’s the authoritarian program in full flower. Same with Kimmel and ABC. The ostentatious jawboning isn’t an “own goal.” It’s the point.
Taking credit.
ABC News reporters repaid the president for his recent demagoguery of their network by publishing a big scoop on Thursday night. According to the story, Trump is planning to fire the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, one of his own nominees, because prosecutors there have been “unable to find incriminating evidence of mortgage fraud against New York Attorney General Letitia James.”
The White House wants revenge on James after she pursued Trump in New York and has latched onto evidence that she falsely claimed on a mortgage document that the home she was purchasing would be her primary residence. The problem, according to ABC, is that the loan officers who approved her mortgage never considered the document. It’s hard to prove fraud when the alleged victim wasn’t actually deceived.
If the report is true, it won’t be the first time that the president has demanded that a U.S. attorney subordinate the law to his own sleazy politics. It happened earlier this year when the Justice Department pressured Manhattan prosecutors to dismiss an indictment against New York Mayor Eric Adams in hopes of securing his cooperation on immigration enforcement. In that case, the prosecutor resisted dropping charges against a defendant who was probably guilty; in this case, the prosecutor is resisting pursuing charges against a defendant who probably isn’t. One is considerably worse than the other.
Eventually, Trump will be asked on camera whether the report is true. What do you suppose he’ll say?
A traditional president would never concede that he fired a lawyer for refusing to bring a vindictive, meritless prosecution against one of his enemies. My guess is that the current one will cop to it frankly. Tish James is guilty, Trump will declare, and anyone who can’t or won’t prove it isn’t fit for the job. His new U.S. attorney will “find” the smoking gun, just as he expected election officials in Georgia to “find” the ballots in 2020 that would put him over the top there.
He’s going to take credit for firing the current U.S. attorney—and it won’t be an “own goal” when he does. He wants other federal prosecutors, not to mention the rest of American society, to understand that he expects his antagonists to be persecuted and that all of us should conduct ourselves accordingly. The jawboning is the point.
This also explains how a government crackdown on speech ostensibly designed to punish leftists for Charlie Kirk’s murder has transformed in the span of a few days into a crackdown to punish them for criticizing Donald Trump.
“They’re giving me all this bad press, and they’re getting a license. I would think maybe their license should be taken away,” Trump said yesterday when asked about Brendan Carr threatening television networks. “When you have a network and you have evening shows and all they do is hit Trump, that’s all they do—that license, they’re not allowed to do that.” (Fact check: They are allowed to do that.) The week began with the right seeking to cancel degenerates who celebrate political assassination, and it ends with the White House seeking to cancel companies that let comedians tell lame jokes about the commander in chief.
It’s not a strategic mistake: The jawboning is the point. And I suspect the president is privately impatient with some of his fans for continuing to pretend otherwise instead of embracing the idea and backing him up on it.
Consider how he handled the subject of “hate speech” this week. MAGA influencers blasted Attorney General Pam Bondi after she hinted at prosecuting such speech, which may have been their way of warning the White House to drop the idea. But Trump was undaunted. He turned around the next day and implied that ABC News should be prosecuted for “hate speech.” Then, on Thursday, he answered a question about Charlie Kirk’s criticism of the concept of “hate speech” this way: “He might not be saying that now.”
The same populist heroes who were dogging Bondi a few days ago have been quiet about Trump’s more ominous comments. They’re beginning to understand, I assume, that the president expects them to take the same authoritarian shine to persecuting dissent that he has, notwithstanding what they learned in school about the virtues of free speech. To repeat what I wrote on Monday, he’ll demand that every right-winger choose between the First Amendment and owning the libs by any means necessary.
Will it be an “own goal” politically when he does?
Frog-boiling.
Case in point: Trump’s friend Tucker Carlson has spent the last few years leaning ever more heavily into gonzo postliberalism, but he sounded downright libertarian a few days ago on the subject of “hate speech.” If laws punishing hateful speech are enacted, Carlson warned, “there is never a more justified moment for civil disobedience than that. Ever. And there never will be.”
Early polling on l’affaire Kimmel also suggests potential for backlash. Asked how they felt about ABC taking Kimmel off the air after the head of the FCC jawboned the network, 35 percent of respondents told YouGov that they approved, versus 50 percent who disapproved. Moving American opinion on a value as fundamental as freedom of speech will be a heavy lift even for Trump.
But let’s not sell him short. He hasn’t put his shoulder into it yet. And if you look closely, you’ll find some Republicans already skating to where they expect the political puck will be by proposing, shall we say, more nuanced views of the right of free expression.
“For all the concern about the ‘the First Amendment, the First Amendment,’” former Trump White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said on Fox News last night, “what about all the amendments that Charlie Kirk lost? Because Charlie Kirk has no amendments right now. None.” The government doesn’t gain moral authority to deprive blameless citizens of their rights because a random lunatic undertook to deprive another blameless citizen of his own, and a Harvard Law grad like McEnany knows it.
But she also understands the choice that the president is asking his supporters to make. And she’s making it.
If you doubt that support for “hate speech” argle-bargle has room to grow in a political movement whose highest loyalty is to a lowbrow authoritarian, chew on this quote from Sen. Cynthia Lummis, a Republican from Wyoming.
“Under normal times, in normal circumstances, I tend to think that the First Amendment should always be sort of the ultimate right. And that there should be almost no checks and balances on it. I don’t feel that way anymore,” Lummis added.
“I feel like something’s changed culturally. And I think that there needs to be some cognizance that things have changed,” she added. “We just can’t let people call each other those kinds of insane things and then be surprised when politicians get shot and the death threats they are receiving and then trying to get extra money for security.”
Cynthia Lummis knows what time it is. Or, perhaps, she fears that Republican voters know what time it is and that getting reelected will require her to pretend to know it too. Either way, it sure doesn’t sound like she thinks Trump will be scoring an “own goal,” at least in her blood-red state, by pushing for restrictions on left-wing speech. Why should any of us feel more confident than a U.S. senator does about the direction that our country’s right-most half is headed?
As for the polling, I doubt that the president will be deterred if his position on free speech remains unpopular, as he’s surely realized by now that many Americans don’t care about civics. Most will give you the right answer if you ask them whether things like democracy or free speech matter, but when it comes to voting—check the scoreboard.
Besides, Trump’s popularity has always been greater than the sum of its parts. Nate Silver’s polling tracker has his job approval underwater, in some cases deeply, on an array of key issues—6 points on immigration, 16.8 points on the economy, 20.7 points on trade, and 30.4 points(!) on inflation. Overall, however, he’s just 6 points net negative, better than Barack Obama or George W. Bush at this point in their second terms. His support is and has always been extremely “sticky,” probably because those who’ve gradually shed their morals and principles over time to remain on Team Red are in too deep to divest now.
What’s one more principle at this point?
Trump will happily tolerate seeing his approach to free speech lose lopsidedly in poll after poll if his overall support holds steady as he goes about ruthlessly jawboning left-wing opponents while the rest of institutional America cowers in fear. Republican voters will warm up to the process, I expect, as they come to understand that the point of the effort is to weaken liberal groups that might otherwise help Democrats win the midterms. To the modern right, there’s no evil greater than the prospect of liberals wielding power—even a small degree of power like control of one house of Congress in a divided government.
And however Republican officials in government might feel privately about Trump’s ambitions, they’ll keep their criticism gentle or muted entirely. Presumably, they’ll end up doing the same thing they’ve done many times before, most infamously during his 2021 impeachment trial: They’ll assume that the courts will figure it out, sparing lawmakers from having to supply an iota of civic courage.
So, no, I’m not sold on the idea that making a scapegoat of ABC and Jimmy Kimmel was an “own goal.” That implies that Americans are capable of mustering a degree of indignation sufficient to restrain the president in his ambitions, and there’s simply no evidence of that. The better understanding of what happened this week is that it’s the latest case of frog-boiling, desensitizing the country to abuses of power by committing them openly and flagrantly. The president wants you to get used to the heat. And he especially wants you to know that he can always turn it up higher.
