I’m seeing some Hollywood stars with clout stepping up against the assault on free speech. As they should. More should follow. And there’s a lot of talk that inside Disney there’s some serious nervousness about a boycott, not just of the networks but the parks. With the clampdown on tourism, they could be facing some serious financial problems for succumbing to the government when they didn’t have to. Nextstar could have said no and simply abandoned its quest for an obscene merger that would put broadcast stations in the hands of just a couple of owners. Disney certainly could have said no. They did not because they are greedheads who couldn’t see beyond the immediate dollar signs of a deal they need the government to approve. Well, they also need viewers and customers. Maybe they should have thought of them.
There is political danger as well. Here’s Dan Pfeiffer on the threat to conservatives in backing this Orwellian attack on free speech:
We are living in dangerously absurd times, and it can be easy to lose perspective. The full breadth of Trump’s assault on democracy over the last nine months is hard to process because we all believed for so long that such things could never happen here. There’s a poverty of imagination about the real dangers, and therefore a tendency to normalize the abnormal — to cover this as just more “Trumpian politics.”
But the Trump Administration pressuring a major media company to suspend a comedian because they disliked his commentary is far from normal. As Jim Rutenberg wrote in the New York Times:
“[Trump] is now conducting the most punishing government crackdown against major American media institutions in modern times, using what seems like every tool at his disposal to eradicate reporting and commentary with which he disagrees.”
Kimmel is the beginning, not the end, of this censorship campaign. Brendan Carr, the FCC Director, suggested on Thursday that he wanted to go after The View, and Trump threatened late-night hosts Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers. All of this comes on top of a larger effort to punish anyone critical of Charlie Kirk in the wake of his murder. Pete Hegseth has people combing through the social media of troops, and JD Vance urged the public to turn in anyone who is insufficiently mournful of Charlie Kirk to their employers.
I will just add that yesterday Hegseth issued a new order that says the news media is only allowed to publish or broadcast authorized unclassified statement or they will lose their press passes:
That’s coming from a former member of the media.
Pfeiffer continues:
Trump has, of course, done innumerable bad things since taking office. Some have no political purchase with the public. Others have broken through and hurt his political standing. I believe Trump could pay a steep price for this hyper-aggressive government censorship campaign. If — and when — Democrats win back the House next year, the GOP will look back at their weaponization of Charlie Kirk’s murder with great regret.
Here’s why.
1. Kimmel + Kirk Is a Major Story
The best way to understand politics in our fractured media ecosystem is that each side has a group of hyper-engaged partisans who aggressively follow every twist and turn, while the rest of the country has largely opted out of political news. Most of the things you and I obsess over never cross the transom of the less engaged, so they don’t move the poll numbers. There are, however, a handful of moments so significant or viral that they break out of the political news bubble. Thus far, the tariffs, the illegal deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, and the Epstein files have all truly broken through to the larger public. You can almost match declines in Trump’s approval to those moments.
The Kirk assassination and Kimmel’s suspension are huge stories. According to data from What’s Resonating, content about Kimmel, Kirk, and freedom of speech is receiving by far the most engagement.
People are paying attention, and that’s not good for Trump and the Republicans.
2. Trump Is Overstepping His Mandate
Donald Trump likes to pretend he won a massive victory with a strong mandate for his MAGA agenda.
Like most of what Donald Trump says, it’s delusional nonsense.
Trump may have won the popular vote and swept the battleground states. Still, a majority of Americans voted for someone else, and he had the narrowest popular vote margin in American history. In this century, only Al Gore won the popular vote by less.
At the risk of oversimplifying the complex nature of elections, Trump won the presidency because a significant number of voters who did not particularly like him voted for him, believing he would do a better job of lowering costs and securing the border.
That’s it. That’s Trump’s mandate — lower costs and secure the border.
Sure, his fanboys and the MAGA base had big visions of upending American democracy, implementing a right-wing agenda, and exacting revenge on political opponents. But that’s not what the voters who decided 2024 — and who will decide the 2026 midterms — were looking for from Trump and the GOP.
The narrowness of Trump’s mandate matters because the fastest way to lose the midterms is to forget why you won the election.
Most people do not want their president policing speech or micromanaging the late-night lineup. If the economy were roaring and prices were coming down, people might have more patience for this unconstitutional sideshow, but the opposite is true. Prices are up and the economy is flashing warning signs, so voters are rightly going to ask why Trump is so focused on Jimmy Kimmel instead of them.
In another particularly potent example of the dumb stuff at the top of Trump’s to-do list, on Friday the White House Press Secretary announced that Trump would not approve a deal to build a new stadium in Washington, D.C., unless the local NFL team changed its name back to “Redskins.”
Seriously.
3. Losing the Manosphere Influencers
One of the keys to Trump’s successful campaign was the support of a set of podcasters, YouTubers, TikTokers, and influencers with large audiences of young men. For this group, freedom of speech and hostility toward so-called “cancel culture” were major reasons to support Trump.
Now this group is particularly exercised about the administration’s crackdown on speech. Tim Dillon, Dave Smith, Andrew Schulz, Akaash Singh, and several Barstool Sports personalities have criticized Trump for violating his promises to end government censorship.
Trump was already on thin ice with them over his refusal to release the Epstein files. Without the support of these highly influential voices, he loses a gateway to the young men who helped him win the election. Even worse for Trump, he is already bleeding support among young men. According to pollster John Della Volpe:
“Since Mr. Trump took office in January, his approval ratings among men under 30 have fallen by 29 percentage points on the issue of inflation, 25 points on jobs, and 21 points on the economy. Yet those losses don’t automatically translate into Democratic gains, because many of these men still see Democrats as weak, ineffective, and unresponsive.”
Hard to fix that problem when the people with the most influence over young men think you are assaulting free speech and covering up a relationship with a notorious child sex trafficker.
Attention is everything in this chaotic world. And this whole thing has gotten people’s attention.
Maybe that will work out well for the right. They do seem to have a willingness to take action regardless of the risk while everyone else seems either paralyzed by fear or wanting to put their heads in the sand and wish it away. But as Pfeiffer shows, that’s their only power. They don’t have massive support and frankly, they don’t even have unity among themselves.
They can be beaten.