On the Prospect website

Meyerson on TAP

Canceling Kimmel. Canceling speech. Canceling comedy.

Making jokes has never been this dangerous, except in authoritarian states.

The almost instantaneous decision of Disney’s ABC to indefinitely suspend—its euphemism for “cancel”—Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show after the head of Donald Trump’s FCC expressed displeasure with Kimmel may signal that the country is on a path to repression that exceeds McCarthyism or even the political repression of 1918–1920. In those two cases, the government’s criminalization of speech and belief was largely directed at radicals—members of the Communist Party and other left organizations. To be sure, virtually none of those radicals had engaged in any form of subversion; some were pillars of mainstream culture. (Blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, after all, wrote—uncredited, of course—the screenplay for the classic romantic comedy Roman Holiday, just as the later-to-be-blacklisted Sidney Buchman had written the screenplay for Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.) But their political convictions were surely of the left.

Like Stephen Colbert, however, Jimmy Kimmel is nobody’s radical. They are mainstream liberals with mass followings. Trump’s second term, however, is defined by his all-out war on any of his critics, heedless of their actual politics, not to mention of the First Amendment. Republicans, of course, have a long history of deliberately conflating liberals with radicals with traitors—McCarthy did that routinely, as did Nixon, whose vice president, Spiro Agnew, coined the phrase “radical-liberal” to describe garden-variety Democrats. But neither McCarthy nor Nixon believed they could unilaterally and publicly wield the government’s power to compel every institution to bend to their will, preferably inflicting palpable suffering on their targets. Nixon’s Watergate endeavors, and his enlistment of the FBI and other agencies in his battle against the Democrats, were entirely under cover. Trump, by contrast, doesn’t have to secretly subvert the nation’s institutions; he publicly threatens them and wields state power against them, secure in the belief that his political base—including Republican members of Congress and all too many judges—will willingly, or feel compelled to, cheer him on.

In other words, this is McCarthyism or Nixonism or 1919-ism unleashed in the context of a largely nonviolent civil war. Decades of demonization of liberals by Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Fox News, and right-wing social media have helped produce a MAGA movement and Trump presidency unconstrained by any sense of national cohesion, or constitutional adherence, or toleration of others’ speech, or even acceptance of facts that run counter to Trump’s, or Kennedy’s, or Bondi’s, beliefs. Radicalism, shmadicalism; their ultimate enemy is empiricism, which at any moment can threaten Trump’s almost cosmic ignorance.

Comedy is increasingly verboten as well. After all, it frequently targets unmerited power and pomp, and if anyone perfectly personifies unmerited power, it’s our current president. SNL has been with us for 50 years; will it make it to 52? Combine Trump’s war on late-night comedy with his whitewashing of American history, and the collected works of Charlie Chaplin and the Marx Brothers may be bounced from the National Film Registry, and cable and streaming networks threatened, if they continue to make available performances of comics like George Carlin.

If there’s one thing Donald Trump absolutely cannot take, it’s a joke. He has arrayed the full power of the state to defend his pathologically insecure ego, and an entire political party has enlisted in this pathetic and dangerous defense.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter

Click to Share This Newsletter

The American Prospect, Inc., 1225 I Street NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC xxxxxx, United States
Copyright (c) 2025 The American Prospect. All rights reserved.

To manage your newsletter preferences, use our preference management page.

To unsubscribe from all American Prospect emails, including newsletters, follow this link to unsubscribe.