Kimmel's Suspension Isn't the Worst Thing Trump Has Done, But It Should Scare the Hell Out of You

It's really important to get this part right: Late night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel was not insulting or even talking about Charlie Kirk when he said on Monday that last weekend we saw "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." Under pressure from the federal government, ABC, owned by Disney, suspended Kimmel's show indefinitely, which is censorship by any measure. The FCC chair, Brendan Carr, who looks like the creepy uncle who touches you too much, claimed that the real issue is that Kimmel "misled" people on the political beliefs of Tyler Robinson, Kirk's murderer, and that's not allowed.

Except that's not what the actual words there are doing. What Kimmel and his writers were saying is that Donald Trump and the entirety of MAGA world is distancing itself from Robinson. We don't know what Robinson believes. We have various hints, but we don't know. Before we knew even the small amount we know now, the MAGA media machine, including the president and his administration, accused everyone from George Soros to Rachel Maddow to "Antifa" for being somehow responsible for the murder, and, again, with no evidence, called for organizations and individuals on the left to be declared terrorists and silenced, forced into poverty from lawsuits, and arrested. That wasn't misleading? 

The other thing Kimmel said is simply undeniably true. Trump and his minions and accomplices are exploiting Kirk's death. Because I'm damned to be included on the mailing lists of assholes, I've gotten multiple emails from right-wing organizations seeking to raise money off it. It's being used as a cudgel against anyone daring to do something as terrible as quote Charlie Kirk on Instagram. They are wallowing in the opportunities the murder has provided them. Indeed, they keep accusing the "left" of "celebrating" Kirk's death (and, yes, there have been some people who posted things cheering it), but the real celebration is on the right as they engage in an orgy of self-righteousness and performative outrage. Which is their First Amendment right, as it is the First Amendment right of anyone to say that what they're doing is scoring political points.

What makes the Kimmel suspension and Carr's promise that "we're not done yet" so insidious and, yes, frightening is that it lowers the bar from mocking Kirk's death to any criticism of Trump or the MAGA movement being reason enough for censorship, intimidation, and punishment. Even worse, as Greg Sergeant points out, is that Carr is making it clear that this really is about Trump by using the FCC's "public interest obligation" as a sledgehammer. But, see, "public interest" is now not about the Constitution or even, really, the public. The administration is saying that "public interest" tied to Trump, that if you attack Trump, you're undermining the public interest. The FCC is saying that what's good for Trump is good for America and everything needs to follow that. If a plane was carrying the Epstein files, I assume Trump would shoot it out of the air and claim it's for the good of the country.

It gets worse. Even as unlikely compatriots like Karl Rove and Tucker Carlson decry the federal government's insertion of itself into TV content moderation, we have a parade of right-wingers saying that maybe they don't think the First Amendment is all that great. Wyoming Senator Cynthia Lummis, who looks like she's waiting to see you drink the tea she put cyanide in, said, "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." So I guess our rights didn't come directly from God, as Republicans are fond of saying. 

Trump himself threatened to strip networks' affiliate stations of their licenses to broadcast, saying, in essence, the hell with the right to free speech: "When you have a network and you have evening shows and all they do is hit Trump, that’s all they do—if you go back, I guess they haven’t had a conservative one in years, or something—when you go back and take a look, all they do is hit Trump. They’re licensed. They’re not allowed to do that." 

Except they are. That's the whole point of the First Amendment. The freedom to shit-talk someone, even after death, even Charlie Kirk, is one of the founding principals of this country. The Declaration of Independence is a long shit-talk about King George III. The founders themselves regularly shit-talked each other (when they weren't, you know, dueling), sometimes in print, sometimes in debates. In a letter written for publication in 1800, Alexander Hamilton accused then-President John Adams of "disgusting egotism,” “distempered jealousy,” and “ungovernable indiscretion." That's just a little sample of vituperation leveled at Adams. There's nothing more American than shit-talking the president.

Indeed, you could argue that the real patriots are the ones willing to shit-talk Donald Trump, Charlie Kirk, and anyone else. And while, yes, obviously, there's a difference between suffering personal consequences for what you post on social media and the government demanding you be silenced, I'd argue that the government has a responsibility to come in and tell, say, a university that fired someone because a couple of trolls got a screenshot of single thing a professor wrote on Instagram that it's violating that professor's First Amendment rights. (I'm pretty sure that public universities, which are government institutions, will have this come up in lawsuits.)

Instead, what we're getting is everyone on the right cheering on the mass censorship of anyone who would dare suggest that Charlie Kirk said the things that he actually did say, which were awful and violent and degrading. But none of that matters because this is an opportunity for the totalitarian right to use this to force its demented control over the speech and actions of the country. It is, to put it simply, a chance to outlaw much of what the left says and stands for. It's a low-rent version of Naomi Klein's idea of the shock doctrine in action: using a "crisis" in order advance a harmful political agenda. Usually, it involves natural disasters or a terrorist attack. This wasn't the latter, but they're trying to make it into one and respond accordingly.

Look, I know that what's happened to Jimmy Kimmel pales in comparison to what the US government is doing to migrants (or what we're funding in Gaza, for that matter). Kimmel is a wealthy man with all kinds of resources at his disposal, and I'm hoping that he tells ABC, Disney, Trump, Sinclair, and everyone else to go fuck themselves as they try to force him to apologize to Kirk's widow (which would be weird since he didn't insult Kirk), give her money, and donate to Kirk's hate group (fuck you, that's what it is when you're on the receiving end of the hate), Turning Point USA. I'm hoping that he says he wants to sue the Trump administration and goes for it. Hell, Disney is a big damn, wealthy corporation run by rich pukes who, of course, want to protect the bottom line for their investors because that's all the morality capitalism can muster. 

But surely they have to know that it's never going to be enough for these monsters in the White House. ABC paid Trump off and had George Stephanopoulos apologize for saying that Trump raped E. Jean Carroll, which, you know, he did. It wasn't enough. Kimmel didn't say a damn thing about Kirk's politics and even sent out sympathies to Kirk's family and expressed horror over the shooting. It still wasn't enough. There is no satiating them, there is no end point, and they will always, always, always find another way to extort and threaten and blackball and punish. People with the means to do something need to fucking well do something. As I and many others have said, what's the use in having "fuck you" money if you don't occasionally say, "Fuck you"? It's not even that big an ask. George Soros just gave $10 million for the redistricting effort in California. The money's there. Whatever a lawsuit would cost will be far, far less than the next round of extortion.

Meanwhile, the rest of us without deep pockets or portfolios that would allows us to retire are left to wonder how we can react to this. I have friends in red states who feel like they're risking their jobs if they express an opinion on Facebook that isn't "Charlie Kirk is the awesomest human ever and I will bless him every night in my prayers which I definitely say before bed." I wanted to write something savage about the whole situation, but I didn't because I didn't want to wonder if I'd become the next target of Libs of Suck My Cock or whatever (sorry - I'm not going cold turkey). 

That's the way this works. It starts with Jimmy Kimmel and some professors and other workers, and it causes fear in others in media, entertainment, and anyone who writes or posts. That's of a piece with how this administration wants to spread fear, whether by picking up people in the country legally for protesting the war in Gaza or drone-murdering a boatload of Venezuelans or by deporting migrant children in the middle of the night or deporting migrant adults to countries they have no ties to or sending masked goons out to terrorize communities. It's the same with detention facilities and defunding universities and suing law firms. Fear and compliance are their tools. The counter to that is courage and protest and refusal, but that is far easier said than done.

We need some leaders here on this, but, sadly, we are bereft of them. There's a line that's been haunting me from Tony Kushner's  A Bright Room Called Day, a frighteningly prescient play about artists facing the rise of Hitler in Germany. A character comments on how he and his circle are not ready for what's coming, "This age wanted heroes. It got us instead." Maybe Kimmel can be that hero. Maybe AOC, who delivered a hell of a speech on who Charlie Kirk really was while most Democrats just meekly acquiesced to a vote on an official day of remembrance. Hell, maybe it's you or me. Just know that this fight is gonna be hard and it's gonna end up hurting a lot of us as they contort all the tools of the government to serve themselves and wreck the rest of the country. You should be scared now. But not too scared to act.

Well, Shit, I Guess I Gotta Write Something About Charlie Kirk

Before yesterday afternoon, I was debating what to write about today. The legitimately fucked-up birthday letters to Jeffrey Epstein were a strong possibility because they do a good job of revealing one of my favorite facts: ultra-rich people are often incredibly stupid and have no taste whatsoever. Like there's not a good joke in the whole batch. It's all just smug, wink-wink, boy, Jeff sure loves to fuck young chicks and, hey, here's a lifetime of sexual assaults written off like boys-will-be-boys shenanigans. There's an air of desperation, too, like they all really liked being in this club and are begging for the cool dude at the top to pat them on the head. And that's before you get to the rape and sex-trafficking. Surely, those who participated in this parade of horrors need to be prosecuted and buried in prison cells, up to and especially including Donald fucking Trump and, if needed, Bill Clinton.

I totally could have done that pretty easily, but I took a pass. 

I was absolutely sure I was going to write on the budget deadline coming up and how Democrats need to leverage the little power they have now, right fucking now, in order to extract something from the Republican brutes who behave like hungry jackals rampaging through the savanna. Minority Leaders Hakeem Jeffries in the House and Chuck Schumer in the Senate are negotiating a pretty fucking low price on Democratic complicity in a budget resolution that will allow the Trump administration to continue to wreck lives, consolidate power, and get his party to coalesce around a metastasizing fascism whose end is, frankly, the suppression if not elimination of the Democratic Party. Yes, subsidies for people who get their policies from the Affordable Care Act are important, as they keep insisting, but it's pretty thin gruel. That's like negotiating over the price of a car and saying, "If you give me a pine-scented air freshener, I'll pay the sticker." The ask should be restoring all Medicaid and Medicare funding, forcing the president to release all funds that Congress had budgeted and he rescinded, ending the immigration torture camps, and more. Fucking fight to win, even if you're gonna lose. Sometimes it's more noble to get punched in the face than cower in a fetal curl, crying, "Don't hit me." 

Unfortunately, I had to move on from that because Charlie Kirk died.

It would have been a no-brainer to write about the United States straight up drone murdering a boatload of Venezuelans by claiming they were gang members importing drugs, which is fucking deranged even if it's true. We have a goddamn Coast Guard that can stop boats and apprehend the suspects. They do it all the time. Then everyone stands in front of piles of perfectly good cocaine or meth or fentanyl about to go to waste, like they just bagged the biggest crocodile in the Nile. You could get Vice President JD "The 'D' is for 'douche'" Vance to use his patented shit-gobbling smirk while posing with the haul or the suspects instead of sending him out to act like a sassy bitch on X defending the obvious crime. And now that we know that not only was the boat turning around when it was hit, and not only do we not have any proof that it was carrying drugs and not, say, migrants, and not only has the Venezuelan government said the people on boat were not the supposed terrorists in Tren de Aragua, but we hit the boat "multiple times" in order to kill everyone on it. There is no scenario here where we're not the bad guys. 

Yeah, I could have gone on about that, but, you know, Kirk was murdered.

Hell, I could have written about the batshit insane story of the South Korean workers who were in the US completely legally but were rounded up, shackled, and detained by ICE while setting up a Hyundai plant in Georgia that would provide thousands of jobs for the state. I could have gone on quite a bit about the bugnuts Trump-fellating GOP congressional candidate who called in a "tip" about the plant and has pretty much fucked the state and possibly a good chunk of the American auto industry which depends on relationships with South Korea. I could have also gone into what we're learning about the subhuman conditions in which we're holding people in detention. I could have tied that and the boat story into something about the end of due process in this goddamned country. I could have added in about the racist cuntmites on the Supreme Court making it legal for ICE or the cops to stop anyone who looks Hispanic and ask them to prove right then and there that they're citizens or face being imprisoned in horrific detention facilities. I would have had all kinds of names for the justices, like John "Bitchface" Roberts.

I might have spent my time writing about a hundred other important things that touch the lives of so many people, so many nightmares ongoing now, so much awful shit, the disgraceful and embarrassing and dangerous things being done in our name by our government and by governments in red states, like the attempts to destroy universities over false antisemitism accusations, cheered on and enabled by sad, greedy fucks who never even went to college but pretend that they have insight when they really are fucking idiotic losers who attracted rich fascist pukes to give them tons of money to spread their hate or we would have never heard of them, like...well, you know.

I thought about writing on this 24th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks about how we're in as much danger as we were before then because of the rank incompetence of our supposed security leaders in DC, like Kash "Always Looks Like Someone Told Him He Got Syphilis From the Donkey He Fucked" Patel, and the fucktastrophe of mass firings across every agency that was created to prevent this shit. But now, apparently, it doesn't matter if it's all dismantled and instead of dealing with real threats, the entire security apparatus is devoted to making sure that migrant families are tortured before deportation. 

But, of course, I can't write about any of that because someone shot Charlie Kirk and killed him. So I'm obligated to say something about him. And what I'll say is this: over the years on this blog I have written virtually nothing about Charlie Kirk because fuck him and fuck Turning Point USA. He objectively, intentionally made life worse for millions of people and he's not worth wasting my time on. I stand by that. 

And now I've written something about Charlie Kirk, like a good pundit should.

Why It Matters If Trump Is Dead or Incapacitated Beyond Who Is President

Let's be completely honest: There are lots of people we'd like to see die. And we're not saying we want to kill them. There's a wide, wide gulf between wishing someone stopped existing and putting in the time and effort to make that happen. I'll put it this way: I'd love to eat a piece of a really great chocolate cake, but I'm not gonna spend months learning how to bake one and ice it properly. But if someone puts a slice of a cake they made in front of me? Hell, yeah, I'll gobble that up and compliment the baker. 

We don't even necessarily want most of our hopefully-soon-dying humans to die horribly. I mean, I don't give a shit if, say, Pete Hegseth falls into a wood chipper feet first or if too much coke stops his heart and he drops before he knows what's happening. I'd like Alex Jones to spend a few years homeless and begging to blow drunk dudes for their "protein shakes" before he has a stroke that leaves him unable to speak or move for years and no one has the decency to let him die. Don't get me started on Stephen Miller. But, again, it's all chocolate cake. Gimme a big ol' chunk of it, but I'm not cooking.

When it comes to Donald Trump, you'd think I want him to suffer. You'd think I'd want him to shit out his insides on live television as he begs for someone to help him, his orange glaze melting off his sweaty, pasty face while his wisps of hair become greasy strings against his bald head. You'd think I'd want him to be left alone in a room of women who Jeffrey Epstein trafficked when they were girls, each of them holding a straight razor. And while I don't not want those things, mostly, I just want him gone. Done. Gone or done.

For a brief, gleeful period of time this past weekend, speculation was running rampant that the absolutely thinkable had happened. Because he hadn't appeared in public for a couple of days or made one of his screaming mimi calls to some nutzoid right-wing outlet, over on BlueSky and Threads and, I assume, X (because fuck X), people were thinking that it meant Trump had fucking died. The thoughts and prayers of the hopeful varied from tentative "what if" to full-bore "pleasepleaseplease." You can say it's ghoulish or morally wrong or whatever weak-ass sentiment you want to put out there and pretend you're better than those of us who think it's actually more moral to hope that someone who is actively hurting millions of people is gone. But, goddamn, it was a beautiful few hours, like it was possible we'd get through this nightmare.

Now that Trump seems to have lumbered around a bit in front of distant cameras that can't get a real focus on him as some kind of fucked-up proof-of-life, the talk has shifted to whether or not he's had a stroke or a series of mini-strokes. We've been here before where Trump's obvious decline has been attributed to his failing heart or decaying brain. On top of that, we've had lumpy bearded skink J.D. Vance say, with little prompting, that he's ready to take over the presidency should he need to.

And that's the obvious reason it matters whether or not Trump's mobile and coherent enough to pretend to still be president. We can have all kinds of arguments over whether or not Vance would be worse than Trump (I lean on the side of him being more easily controlled and thus less chaotic, but I totally get believing he'd be a complete fucking nightmare - Trump but with a lifespan). But that's not why I think Trump being dead or incapacitated matters so much to so many of us.

Since he lost (no, really, he fucking well lost) in 2020, the speculating punditocracy has wondered if the MAGA (or Trumpist, if you prefer) movement could continue without Trump. The discussion has been around whether or not all this can possibly still go on once Trump is out of the picture, mostly as in not being able to run for president again in 2028, although, you know, that's still to be determined. And if there's one thing we learned after 2020, it's that Trump's presence as a figurehead of the MAGA movement looms large because he can still endorse and bitch endlessly online and at his rallies of the damned. So he'll be there whether or not he's trying to dare the Supreme Court to prevent him from having a third term (or if he just ends elections altogether and stays in power).

That's why, to my mind, the real question is what happens when Trump is really gone, as in not there. I genuinely believe, as I've said before, that this whole thing falls apart without Trump, and everyone around him knows that. If they thought this was sustainable without Trump, they wouldn't be rushing to kiss his ass endlessly and prop him up like a decaying stuffed walrus. The problem with a cult of personality is that without the personality, there is no cult. As I wrote when Trump announced back in 2015 (when I was right about him wrecking the GOP field but wrong about whether he would beat Clinton), "many voters simply will overlook [his many faults and fuckups] because he's the most goddamned entertaining clown in the circus, the only candidate they know, and his pop culture status has given him the aura of earthy wisdom instead of nonsensical shit-tossing." Also, "the voters are fucking dumbasses."

Yes, Trump tapped into their racism, ignited their religious fervor, and fed their fears like they're starving puppies, but the devotion has always been to Trump. You think that all those voters who like the funny TV man are gonna get their asses of their couches to go rally for Vance? This has always been about Trump over everything else. They'll buy his shit, they'll vote for who he endorses, and they'll give up their health and safety for him. They'll turn against their family and neighbors, they'll plaster their houses and cars with memes portraying him as a superhero or Rambo, they'll hate who he tells them to hate and love who he tells them to love, but once he's not there to do it, there is no one take his place. Not his terrible children. Not any of the Fox "news" troglodytes he's elevated. And certainly not any of the politicians who have latched onto him like desperate remoras on the side of a lumbering whale shark. 

You can call me blindly optimistic, even deluded. You can say that he's unleashed something in Americans that will never go away. Yeah, it takes a while for a poison to get out of your system, and it can leave you permanently damaged. But you're alive. It'll take a long time to completely extricate ourselves from his filthy grip - hell, I don't expect to live to see us fully recover - but that starts with him just being fucking gone.

(Note: I don't expect Trump's 2 p.m. "announcement" today to have anything to do with this. It'll be some shitty action, like renaming the Department of Defense to "Department of War" or maybe he'll say we're invading Chicago or Venezuela or maybe he'll say they're arresting Democrats. He'll slur his way through it, perhaps even in a pretape, before disappearing again.)