President Donald Trump[the Felon] Friday reiterated his claim that critical television coverage of him is “illegal” and pushed back on criticisms that his administration was taking actions that chill free speech.“When 97 percent of the stories are bad about a person, it’s no longer free speech,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office, complaining about an apparent asymmetry between his victory in the 2024 election and his treatment by media organizations. It was not immediately clear what statistics or laws he was referencing.
Trump’s comments came days after Disney indefinitely suspended the late night host Jimmy Kimmel after Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr suggested on a podcast that his agency may take regulatory action against ABC, which Disney owns. . . . After Kimmel was suspended, Carr said “I don’t think this is the last shoe to drop” and suggested the FCC — an agency, overseen by Congress, designed to act independently from the president — may target other shows, including ABC’s “The View.”
The Kimmel saga caused Democrats and some free speech hawks to protest. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer demanded Carr’s resignation.
One notable Republican also weighed in: Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who on a podcast released Friday called Carr’s actions “dangerous as hell” and “right out of ‘Goodfellas.’”
The Felon's touchiness about criticism is in keeping with his malignant narcissist diagnosis as noted by one mental health professional:
Despite the fact that people with narcissistic personality disorder often act boastful and overconfident, their self-esteem can actually be pretty fragile. They have a tendency to be preoccupied with how they are perceived by other people and feel shocked or disappointed when people don’t lay on the flattery.
The big question is one of how far will the Felon push the effort to end freedom of speech in order to stop well deserved criticism and mockery. While Ted Cruz - hardly one of my favorite individuals - has spoken out strongly against the Felon's Mafia like threats to CBS and now Disney/ABC, many within the GOP continue to try to claim the effort to crush free speech is something other than what it obviously is. Sadly, it may come down to the courts and regular Americans boycotting those who give in to dictatorship to protect this constitutional right. A piece in The Atlantic looks at the gyrations some in the GOP are going through rather than admit reality:
Minutes after news broke that ABC had bowed to the Trump administration’s threats and indefinitely suspended Jimmy Kimmel, Ari Fleischer, the former Bush-administration press secretary, tried to explain why the thing that just happened was not actually what happened. “Liberals want to make this firing about ‘free speech,’” he wrote on X, “Did it ever occur to them the issue might be accuracy?
These are glorious, heady days for the Republican Party’s unselfconsciously authoritarian wing. Every day President Donald Trump tramples on the rights of their enemies, and the natcons rejoice, This is what I voted for.
But we should spare a thought for the party’s more conflicted wing, the anti-anti-Trump conservatives such as Fleischer. They profess support for free speech, democracy, and the rule of law while attempting to remain Republicans in good standing. They resolve this tension by focusing on the hypocrisy and foibles of their old liberal foes and ignoring the actions of the world’s most powerful person.
It is a survival strategy, and not a pleasant way to spend four years. That which causes the natcons unremitted joy forces the anti-anti-Trumpers into painful mental contortions. No event to date has given them more anguish than Trump’s gleeful defenestration of Kimmel.
As the story developed, a slightly more complicated explanation than Fleischer’s hasty effort took shape. The anti-anti-Trumpers conceded that the sequence of events looked bad. Yes, the Federal Communications Commission chair, Brendan Carr, threatened to revoke broadcast licenses from ABC stations, warning, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.” Rolling Stone reported that “multiple execs” at ABC and Disney considered Kimmel’s comments to be minor, but “the threat of Trump administration retaliation” forced their hand.
The conservative commentator Mike Solana insisted that, despite the perception that Trump ordered Kimmel off the air, “this didn’t happen.” Rather, Solana elaborated on X, “jimmy’s ratings were abysmal. he spread a conspiracy theory about kirk. two major affiliates refused to carry his show. ABC fired him.”
Ilya Shapiro, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, argued on X that Kimmel was fired because his show “was losing money”—“there was thus no govt coercion here.”
Trump’s FCC chair threatened to destroy ABC’s business, and the network just so happened to then do something Trump very much wanted it to do, but only paranoid leftists would presume these two things were somehow related. Sure, the threat was “unhelpful” for the way it might seem like coercion to the uninitiated. But if anybody was the victim here, it was Trump, who was unfairly blamed for the blunders of a subordinate.
Alas, as often happens when his friends attempt to devise a tortured alibi, Trump promptly blurted out his intentions the following afternoon.
“I have read someplace that the networks were 97 percent against me again, 97 percent negative, and yet I won, and easily,” Trump said about the 2024 election to reporters on Air Force One on Thursday. He added: “I would think maybe their license should be taken away. It will be up to Brendan Carr.”
Indeed, the idea that Trump would threaten the networks because he wants them to stop criticizing him was floated by Trump himself last month: “Despite a very high popularity and, according to many, among the greatest 8 months in Presidential History, ABC & NBC FAKE NEWS, two of the worst and most biased networks in history, give me 97% BAD STORIES. IF THAT IS THE CASE, THEY ARE SIMPLY AN ARM OF THE DEMOCRAT PARTY AND SHOULD, ACCORDING TO MANY, HAVE THEIR LICENSES REVOKED BY THE FCC.”
Awkwardly, these comments do make it seem like Trump may very well be extorting the networks by threatening their broadcast licenses so they’ll remove his critics from the airwaves.
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