Trump Cheers The Suspension of Comedian Jimmy Kimmel After His Show’s Charlie Kirk Remarks

Trump Cheers The Suspension of Comedian Jimmy Kimmel After His Show’s Charlie Kirk Remarks

JUDSON Bennett–Coastal Network

Trump cheers comedian Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension for on-air Charlie Kirk remarks

By Dawn Chmielewski and Jonathan Allen

September 18, 2025 4:10 PM EDT

*ABC pulls ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live’ amid regulatory threats

*Trump says Kimmel has no talent, poor ratings

*Writer, actor unions say suspension attacks free-speech rights

Sept 18 (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump celebrated the suspension of talk-show host Jimmy Kimmel from the airwaves, inflaming a debate over whether Trump and Republicans are infringing free speech as they sought to punish some critics of murdered right-wing activist Charlie Kirk.

Trump, speaking during a state visit to Britain on Thursday, said Kimmel had been punished for saying “a horrible thing” about Kirk, a close political ally of the president who is credited with building support for Trump among young conservative voters.

The broadcaster ABC announced on Wednesday that it was yanking “Jimmy Kimmel Live” indefinitely. Writers, performers, former U.S. President Barack Obama and other prominent Democrats condemned Kimmel’s suspension, calling it capitulation to unconstitutional government pressure.

Since returning to the White House in January, Trump has used his office and the courts to attack unflattering speech about him that he has called defamatory or false.

Kimmel’s suspension came after owners of local TV stations had said they would stop broadcasting his celebrity-filled late-night show, and the nation’s top communications regulator threatened to investigate Kimmel’s commentary about Kirk.

Kimmel, a comedian who frequently lampoons Trump, said during his nine-minute opening monologue on Monday that allies of Kirk were using his assassination last week to “score political points”. Kirk, 31, was shot onstage at a university in Utah on September 10, where he was holding one of his frequent public debates with students over his political views in an event organized by his advocacy group, Turning Point USA.

“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 do everything they can to score political points from it,” Kimmel said, using an abbreviation of Trump’s slogan: Make America Great Again.

Kimmel, who tapes his show in Los Angeles, also mocked Trump’s responses to Kirk’s death: “This is not how an adult grieves the murder of someone he called a friend. This is how a four-year-old mourns a goldfish.”

Trump, who hosted the TV show “The Apprentice” before becoming president, said that Kimmel was not talented, had bad ratings, and “said a horrible thing about a great gentleman known as Charlie Kirk.”

“So, you know, you can call that free speech or not,” Trump said, stood alongside British Prime Minister Keir Starmer. “He was fired for lack of talent.” ABC has not said that it fired Kimmel, who did not respond to a request for comment.

Viewership of late-night shows and traditional TV in general has declined as audiences shift to streaming and social media. “Jimmy Kimmel Live” averaged 1.57 million viewers per episode for the TV season that ended in May, according to Nielsen.

In the week since Kirk’s murder, Kimmel is the most famous American to face professional blowback for comments condemned by conservatives as disrespectful of Kirk, alongside media figures, academic workers, teachers and corporate employees.

A 22-year-old technical college student and videogame-enthusiast from Utah was charged with Kirk’s murder on Tuesday.

Prominent Democrats said Trump was mounting an assault on free speech rights guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment. Republicans have said they are fighting against “hate speech” that can spiral into violence, and accuse some Kirk critics of trying to justify his murder.

Obama, who was succeeded by Trump in 2017, said media companies must not capitulate to government coercion.

“After years of complaining about cancel culture, the current administration has taken it to a new and dangerous level by routinely threatening regulatory action against media companies unless they muzzle or fire reporters and commentators it doesn’t like,” Obama said in a statement.

Writers’ and actors’ labor unions called the targeting of Kimmel an unconstitutional attack on the right to disagree. PEN America, a free-speech advocacy group, condemned what it called “an act of government-instigated censorship against satire and comedy.”

FREE SPEECH, PUBLIC INTEREST

Kirk’s death spurred an outpouring of grief among fans who saw him as a staunch advocate for public debate and conservative values. Others have challenged or derided Kirk’s support for right-wing politics and Christian nationalism and derogatory comments he has made about immigrants, Black people, leftists and transgender people.

Long before Kirk’s murder, Trump had threatened to pull licenses from television stations, pressured broadcasters to stop airing content he finds objectionable and tried to control what universities, which he says are overrun by Marxists, can research and teach. This week, he filed a $15 billion defamation lawsuit against the New York Times.

Hours before Kimmel’s suspension, Brendan Carr, the Trump-appointed chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, urged local broadcasters to stop airing the show.

ABC, owned by Walt Disney (DIS.N), pulled the show after Nexstar and Sinclair Broadcast Group, which own many of ABC’s local TV affiliates, said they would stop airing the show following Kimmel’s monologue. Sinclair said Kimmel’s show would be suspended until he apologizes to the Kirk family.

Shares of Disney traded down nearly 1% on Thursday, suggesting investors did not think the suspension would damage the company’s financial prospects.

“This is a very significant moment, because local broadcasters are now pushing back on national programmers for the first time that I can think of in modern history,” Carr, the FCC chairman, said in an interview with CNBC. He said the FCC would defend the principle that licensed broadcasters must act in the “public interest.”

U.S. Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer demanded that Trump fire Carr, calling him “one of the greatest threats to free speech America has ever seen.”

Trump, speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One as he returned to the U.S., complained that he had read somewhere that television networks “were 97% against me” and only gave him bad publicity.

“I would think maybe their license should be taken away,” Trump said, although federal law prohibits the FCC from revoking a broadcaster’s license for negative coverage or other speech disliked by the government. “It will be up to Brendan Carr.”

Reporting by Dawn Chmielewski in Los Angeles and Jonathan Allen in New York; Additional reporting by Steve Holland in Chequers, England, Dave Shepardson and Trevor Hunnicutt in Washington and Lisa Richwine in Los Angeles; writing by David Gaffen and Jonathan Allen; Editing by Lincoln Feast, Alistair Bell and David Gregorio