The Weekly Sift

For the first time, Trump used autocratic power in a way that the public couldn’t ignore, and a popular pushback forced a big corporation to stand up to him. Is that an anomaly or the start of a turn-around?

After Charlie Kirk’s murder, ABC’s latenight comedian Jimmy Kimmel said something Donald Trump didn’t like:

We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang 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.

Four things are worth noting:

• Kirk’s assassin was brought up in a conservative family, but later developments showed that Kimmel was wrong to imply that he was MAGA himself.
• Kimmel was right that MAGA pundits did everything they could to score political points from the assassination.
• Kimmel did not insult Kirk, or in any way make light of his assassination.
• But he did make fun of Trump’s response to the assassination. He played a clip of Trump being asked about Kirk and then seguing to the new White House ballroom he wants to build. “That’s not how an adult grieves the murder of someone he called a friend,” Kimmel said. “This is how a 4-year-old mourns a goldfish.”

For these dubious sins, Trump’s FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr leaned on ABC to fire Kimmel, implying that ABC stations might lose their licenses otherwise.

Appearing on Benny Johnson’s podcast on Wednesday, the Trump-appointed chairman said, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.” Hours later, a spokesperson for Disney’s ABC confirmed to PEOPLE that Jimmy Kimmel Live! would be put on an indefinite hiatus.

This is far from the first time that corporations who want future favors from the government (like approval of mergers) have given in to an autocratic demand from Trump. But this time the public pushed back. Even Republican senators like Ted Cruz and Rand Paul pushed back. Kimmel returned to ABC on Tuesday (to record ratings), and even conservative local affiliate owners like Sinclair have ended their boycott.

If you haven’t watched Kimmel’s return-to-the-air monologue, you should.

Be sure to watch to the end of the 28-minute clip so you can see Robert De Niro play the new head of the FCC. Nobody can deliver a mafioso threat like De Niro, who clarified the new meaning of “free speech”.

“You want to say something nice about the president’s beautiful thick yellow hair and how he can do his make-up better than any broad, that’s free,” De Niro said. “But if you want to do a joke like, ‘He’s so fat he needs two seats on the Epstein jet’, that’s going to cost you.” The actor struggled to suppress a smile.

Kimmel asked: “For clarity, because it’s a pretty good joke, how much would that one cost me?”

“A couple of fingers, maybe a tooth,” came the reply.

Trump howled with rage at Kimmel’s return.

I can’t believe ABC Fake News gave Jimmy Kimmel his job back. The White House was told by ABC that his Show was cancelled! Something happened between then and now because his audience is GONE, and his “talent” was never there. Why would they want someone back who does so poorly, who’s not funny, and who puts the Network in jeopardy by playing 99% positive Democrat GARBAGE. He is yet another arm of the DNC and, to the best of my knowledge, that would be a major Illegal Campaign Contribution. I think we’re going to test ABC out on this. Let’s see how we do. Last time I went after them, they gave me $16 Million Dollars. This one sounds even more lucrative. A true bunch of losers! Let Jimmy Kimmel rot in his bad Ratings.

His post should settle a few previously contentious points:

• Trump was deeply involved in Kimmel’s suspension. Why else would ABC have told the White House that the show was cancelled? All the MAGA attempts to attribute the suspension to bad ratings or other legitimate causes were bogus.
• Trump reiterated his threats of censorship. Kimmel’s criticism of Trump “puts the Network in jeopardy”. Nice network you got there; be a shame if something happened to it.
• In Trump’s mind, the issue is criticism of him, and has nothing to do with Charlie Kirk. That was already apparent from Trump’s tweet of September 17, shortly after Kimmel was taken off the air: “That leaves Jimmy and Seth, two total losers, on Fake News NBC. Their ratings are also horrible. Do it NBC!!!” Late-night hosts Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers didn’t have a Kirk problem, they’re just Trump critics.
• Trump has not won any of his media lawsuits in court. Instead, he has used his government power to extort settlements out of parent companies that need favors. (These settlements are essentially bribes, as Stephen Colbert was cancelled for pointing out.) If ABC-owner Disney stands firm, Trump’s proposed lawsuit will fail.

And yet, that howl has not produced any action so far. David Frum and Paul Krugman each suggest that Trump is in a race against time: His bid for authoritarian power is racing against his plunging popularity. At some point, he will have so much autocratic power that politics barely matters any more, but he’s not there yet. And if his targets begin to believe they can stand up to him and win, while his Republican allies begin to worry that he will drag them down with him, that autocratic creep might stop or even reverse.

Krugman summarizes the situation:

It’s clear that if Trump were subject to normal political constraints, obliged to follow the rule of law and accept election results, he would already be a political lame duck. His future influence and those of his minions would be greatly reduced by his unpopularity. But at this juncture he is a quasi-autocrat. He is the leader of a party that accommodates his every whim, backed by a corrupt Supreme Court prepared to validate whatever he does, no matter how clearly it violates the law. As a result, Trump has been able to use the vast power of the federal government to deliver punishments and rewards in a completely unprecedented way. … This has created a climate of intimidation, with many institutions preemptively capitulating to Trump’s demands as if he already had total power.

… It’s important to understand that Trump’s push to destroy democracy depends largely on creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. Behind closed doors, business leaders bemoan the destruction that Trump is wreaking on the economy. But they capitulate to his demands because they expect him to consolidate autocratic power — which, given his unpopularity, he can only do if businesses and other institutions continue to capitulate.

If this smoke-and-mirrors juggernaut starts to falter, the perception of inevitability will collapse and Trump’s autocracy putsch may very well fall apart.

Jay Kuo lists a number of areas in which Trump’s autocratic push is meeting resistance. But a key source of Kuo’s optimism is that there is a limit to how far the Supreme Court will let Trump go. So far, they have largely delayed ruling on the legality of his actions while allowing those actions to continue temporarily. One big question still to be resolved is which way they will ultimately go: Will they defend the Constitution, or will they usher in the new fascist state?

In large part that may depend on how Trump’s self-fulfilling prophecy plays out in John Roberts’ mind.