Has Trump cancelled Jimmy Kimmel over Charlie Kirk?

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0:30No bouncing between tabs. And best of all, no spreadsheets. Stop managing software and start managing your business with one unified system. Try for free today at odoo.com. That's O-D-O-O dot com. Decisions made in Washington can affect your portfolio every day. But what policy changes should investors be watching? Washington Wise is an original podcast from Charles Schwab that unpacks the stories making news in Washington right now. and how they may affect your finances and portfolio. Listen at schwab.com slash Washington Wise. That's schwab.com slash Washington Wise. Donald Trump has finished his second state visit to the UK.

1:17Unprecedented second state visit. And the big headline is, well, he behaved. They got on really well, it would seem. We'll unpack what was and what wasn't said. And we'll also talk about the row of a free speech in America after the death of Charlie Kirk. That row continuing. Jimmy Kimmel, the talk show host, being the latest victim of it, taken off the air. Welcome to AmeriCast. AmeriCast. AmeriCast from BBC News. When Donald Trump calls, they say, yes, sir. Right away, sir. Happy to lick your boot, sir. We are the sickest country in the world. Oh, dear. Are you worried that billionaires are going to go hungry?

1:57Of course the president supports peaceful protests. What a stupid question. Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein?

2:10Hello, it's Sarah here, speaking to you from a radio car in the grounds of Chequers, the Prime Minister's country residence. It is Mariana, a.k.a. misinformation, in what is just below the usual worldwide headquarters of AmeriCast at the BBC in London. Yeah, we've been kicked out of our studio. it's Justin alongside Mariana in our news studio which looks just as good I have to say and I should say why we've been kicked out because it's an odd time for us to be doing this so it's half past six in the evening British time after the visit finished the visit, the state visit and after of course that news conference and let's start there Sarah with your thoughts first about, we'll talk a bit about the whole visit in a second but you were there weren't you?

2:50Tell us about it. Yes I was, I was lucky enough to get a seat on the American side of the aisle in the press conference in a very grand room in Checkers. After all of the splendour at Windsor Castle yesterday, you could see that the American delegation were pretty impressed with Checkers as well as we all assembled in that room surrounded by sort of 18th century oil portraits and things. And this was the opportunity, obviously, for us to ask both Keir Starmer and Donald Trump questions. And this was the moment of great jeopardy within the visit. This is what Downing Street had been the most worried about because this is when they lose control of events.

3:26Who knows what Donald Trump is going to say, especially when people were asking questions designed to elicit the differences of opinion that there were between the president and the prime minister. So whether it was on Israel, Gaza, on Ukraine, on immigration, all sorts of questions were coming at them to point out where they don't agree. and it was the most amiable and polite and disciplined I've ever seen Donald Trump in my life. He was not rising to it. So they both stated their case. They didn't always agree, but it was almost as though they were talking past each other and therefore talking past the disagreements.

4:05It was very, very diplomatic and that's not something we often say about Donald Trump. Yeah, let's hear a bit of it because exactly as you say, right from the start, really, you could tell, couldn't you, that this was going to be not only best behavior. I think it actually goes a bit further than that. I actually decided by the end that there's something about Starmer that Trump seems to like, and we could maybe get into that in a second. But let's hear a bit first from, well, right at the beginning when they're talking principally about trade. This enduring connection is why I was thrilled that the United Kingdom was the very first country with which we made a historic trade deal and a very good trade deal.

4:44He's a tough negotiator. I think it was a better deal for you than us, but these are minor details. It's a very good deal for both of you. He's a great negotiator. The body language was really striking as well while they were doing this press conference. They kept touching each other on the arm or on the shoulder in a way that looked, you know, almost genuinely affectionate. I think these two do really like and respect each other. I think that as unlikely as it is, as impossible as it is for us to wrap our heads around, it is a real relationship that's been bolstered by all the flattery and honouring that Donald Trump has enjoyed over the past 48 hours or so.

5:24That's done no harm whatsoever. But this is a relationship which has respect as well as affection in it. We'll probably get on and talk a great deal about foreign affairs. I'll give you one little glimpse. I managed to grab a word with Susie Wiles, Donald Trump's chief of staff, probably the most powerful woman in America, just before the press conference. And I asked her how much discussion there had been about Israel, about Ukraine during the course of the day or any international affairs. She said none. She said they'd been talking about the tech partnership, other things, but not international relations at all.

6:01Except she didn't know what had gone on in one half-hour period when it was just the two men in a room together with no staff whatsoever. And it became clear, as we'll hear through the press conference, that there had been discussion about Israel-Gaza, about Ukraine. So they obviously do that one-on-one in an atmosphere of what must be enough mutual respect to exchange views that are not the same. Do you think that there's an element of it which feels a little bit like Donald Trump doesn't really care what Keir Starmer says about things. Almost like the level of influence that we have here in the UK is perhaps less than we would like it to be.

6:40I don't know whether it felt like that or it did genuinely feel like respect, mutual respect. Well, I think you have a very good point, Mariana. And let me sort of interrogate it a little bit because does Donald Trump care that a small, less influential, less wealthy country isn't following exactly the same policy as him. No, probably not. But we're talking about areas where about issues he does care a very great deal about. So let's look at Israel Gaza and the fact that Sakhir Starmer is preparing to recognise Palestinian statehood, waiting until Donald Trump leaves the UK before he does it. But then he will announce that that's the UK policy.

7:21Donald Trump does not agree with that, which he made clear in the press conference because he thinks it's rewarding Hamas. So, you know, it's not simply that the UK is on the sidelines issuing statements like this. This is going to be a big deal next week at the United Nations when the UK is not the only country that's going to do that. And that is upsetting Donald Trump's plan for how things should go in Israel. He was very clear that he thinks all the hostages need to be released before any kind of change of policy at all. And also, I think it's unthinkable that the US will ever, certainly under Donald Trump, recognise Palestinian statehood.

7:56So, yeah, even if he does see us as a minnow, these are influential foreign policy things that are being discussed. But the real question, of course, is did that state dinner, all of the pageantry, all of the flattery, all of the lavish grandeur, does it buy us influence? And so I was able to ask Susie Wiles again, his chief of staff, how much difference this makes. And she loved that dinner, by the way. I mean, you could see that she was absolutely beguiled by the romance of all of the royal stuff as well. But does it actually mean that Keir Starmer has more influence than Donald Trump, than other leaders or than he did before?

8:39Absolutely not, she said, because the president will always make decisions in America's best interest, not caring what his friends, allies have to say about it. He's not going to be lobbied by the United Kingdom into changing his mind about something that he doesn't think is the best for America. And so she was pretty clear, actually, that, you know, the prime minister is not going to get anything in return for this, except solidifying that relationship, which I think what Keir Starmer has bought himself is the ability to disagree with Donald Trump without paying any price for it. He's not going to be isolated or insulted in any way.

9:20So the UK can follow its own foreign policy without having to spend quite so much time and energy worrying about whether it's going to upset Donald Trump. So Keir Starmer, I don't think, has earned the right to change Donald Trump's mind, but he has won the ability to disagree with him agreeably. Fascinating point, that. And we should listen to what Trump actually said about Gaza, because I think it backs up what Marianna is saying, that actually you could interpret it to say, what the heck, it really doesn't matter to me. Or you could have a more generous interpretation and say, yeah, we've taken it seriously, but we just don't agree with it.

9:54Let's listen to it. It's actually Chris Mason, wasn't it, our colleague, who asked them about their differing views on the recognition of a Palestinian state. And Donald Trump, as you were saying, Sarah, very clear it was an area that they had disagreed on during that private chat that they had. I want an end. I want the hostages released. And I think it's going to be OK. But it has been a brutal period of time. But this has been going on for a long time. This is not something that's over the last year, two years. This has been for decades and decades. But we want it to end. We have to have the hostages back immediately.

10:30That's what the people of Israel want. They want them back. And we want the fighting to stop. And it's going to stop. But a lot of bad things. You know, Hamas said that they're going to put the hostages up as bait. They're going to put the hostages in front of any attack. And that's pretty brutal. We haven't heard that one in a long time. So we have to remember that. So I have a disagreement with the prime minister on that score. One of our few disagreements, actually. So that's that. But of course, that isn't that because Gaza is a moving situation. and I think the thing that sort of hangs over it, Sarah, presumably, is that, I mean, we've had an Israeli minister talking in the last 24 hours or so about real estate opportunities in Gaza, suggesting that he'd even have had discussions with people in the White House and you don't need to have a huge imagination, do you, to see ways in which they diverge a lot on Gaza over the next few months and it gets to be a bit more of a difficulty.

11:31Yeah, so there will be that going forward. And it may very well be that the prime minister was laying the groundwork for some of that in his conversations with Donald Trump today. But also a lot of the questions, which were quite flattering some of them to Donald Trump, because that's a good way to get him to answer you, is to butter him up a little bit in the question. People were saying to him, look, basically, you are the most powerful person in the world and you are the only person who can influence Benjamin Netanyahu over Gaza. You are the one who has the power to try to stop what's happening there.

12:05Will you use it? And if not, why not? And so that's, I mean, that's a fascinating question, regardless of whether or not he agrees with Keir Starmer. And his answer seemed to be that he is not going to meaningfully intervene until all of the hostages have been returned. That's clearly his priority at the moment. And he seemed to be saying there was no point. in him trying to intervene further, even to alleviate some of the suffering and starvation that is happening in Gaza until Hamas releases all of the hostages. I thought it was quite interesting. I mean, the shift or the difference and the difference in the dynamic when they were talking about the situation, the war in Ukraine, and particularly Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump's relationship with Putin.

12:49And like you say, Sarah, I guess a lot of the questioning kind of played into the fact that Donald Trump does seem to have these rapport, a dialogue, not just with Netanyahu, but also with Vladimir Putin, which seems to have gone slightly sour recently. And Trump actually said, essentially, Putin's let me down, but also stuck to that kind of Republican way of viewing the war or certain Republicans way of viewing the war, which is it doesn't affect us very much here in the US. Let's listen to that, because, I mean, I was when he said those words, Vladimir Putin has let me down. And he said it pretty clearly.

13:25And you thought, oh, hang on, what's coming now? This could be a big news line. This could be the announcement of a change of heart. But actually, then he said this. He has let me down. I mean, he's killing many people and he's losing more people than he's, you know, than he's killing. I mean, frankly, the Russian soldiers are being killed at a higher rate than the Ukrainian soldiers. But, yeah, he said, let me down. I don't like to see. It's death. I hope we're going to have some good news for you coming up. But again, it doesn't affect the United States. And he, look, it doesn't so much affect you.

14:00Of course, you are a lot closer to the scene than we are. We have a whole ocean separating us. But I will say this. Now, Keir Summer had a very different perspective. He said very clearly, we have to ramp up the pressure on Putin in order to get him to the table to talk about a ceasefire and potentially to end the war. But Donald Trump wasn't taking the bait on that either. He wasn't about to announce any way in which he was going to ramp up the pressure on Putin. In fact, what he said was Europeans need to stop buying Russian oil. And the UK buys negligible amounts, I think, of Russian oil. But Donald Trump was, I think, pretty clear.

14:38Anybody who wants him to get tougher with Vladimir Putin needs to make sure that they are not buying oil from Russia in the first place before they come and talk to him about changing his policy. He was able to just kind of completely skate past Keir Starmer saying that it is time that the pressure on Putin is ramped up. We're obviously talking about this press conference because, understandably, it's big news and you were there, Sarah, and everything else. But looking on the undercover voters feed, my fictional characters with their profiles across the main sites, like the whole kind of point of this, and I guess maybe this is why it's a kind of semi win for Keir Starmer, is that generally it was quite not punchy, which, as we know, the recommendation systems, the algorithms don't tend to favour.

15:19And much more of the conversation online about this visit has focused very much on the royal part of it and on one of mine and Sarah's favourite topics, outfits, and particularly Melania Trump's incredible hat. I thought you were going to say Taylor Swift was at the dinner. No, no, she wasn't. Yes, I thought she was going to say that too. And I was trying to work out how I could have possibly missed Taylor Swift being at a royal banquet. Clothes, clothes. But just all these memes of saying Melania Trump is now witness protection because she was kind of standing in the back corner. Just before we get on to Jimmy Kimball and freedom of speech and all the rest of it, just a final thought about a thing that really didn't come up.

15:57In fact, it was mentioned by a journalist, wasn't it? Beth Rigby of Sky News saying it's the elephant in the room. And that was Peter Mandelson and the whole business about the Jeffrey Epstein fallout and the thing that had led to him being fired. And Donald Trump's response to that, I thought, Sarah, was what he said, something like, I don't know him or I don't know anything about him. Yeah, he said, I said, I don't know him, which was a good way of brushing off that whole topic. So that will have been of a great relief to a large number of people that he wasn't going to pick this up. But, yeah, we've seen him in the Oval Office on the day that the U.S.-UK trade deal was signed laughing and joking with the president, who even holds his hand at one point and says, oh, he's got such a beautiful accent.

16:46If only Donald Trump had an accent like that, he would have been president years and years ago. So, yeah, he's been very flattering towards Peter Mandelson on occasion. And now he says he doesn't even know him. I mean, how quickly one falls from grace, Justin, over once you're out, you're out. But I would just say that in terms of how to play this from Donald Trump's point of view, particularly in terms of the still quite rabid online crowd, the MAGA, Make America Great Again group online, who've been going after Donald Trump about Epstein. It is a wise decision to say, I don't really know. I don't know him.

17:21I don't know him because then they can't say, look, look, look, look, look, more evidence that Donald Trump supports these kinds of people, even if that's unfair or not true or whatever the case is. You can you can see I think it shows a knowingness. And it might be that he just came up with it in the moment. But my analysis would be that it shows a knowingness from his team about how to handle that, which actually they've not shown around the Epstein stuff necessarily up until now that well. OK, they were asked about freedom of speech, which is a huge topic. Obviously, it's a huge topic in Britain, but a huge topic at the moment in America because of the killing of Charlie Kirk and the things that have been said since he was killed and specifically said by the talk show host, Jimmy Kimmel.

18:04Let us listen first before we discuss that case, which was brought up and which Donald Trump had an opinion about. Let's hear actually what Jimmy Kimmel, the talk show host, said that got him fired. 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. In between the finger pointing, there was grieving. On Friday, the White House flew the flags at half-staff, which got some criticism. But on a human level, you can see how hard the president is taking this.

18:42My condolences on the loss of your friend Charlie Kirk. May I ask, sir, personally, how are you holding up over the last day and a half, sir? I think very good. And by the way, right there, you see all the trucks? They've just started construction of the new ballroom for the White House, which is something they've been trying to get, as you know, for about 150 years. And it's going to be a beauty. Yes. He's at the fourth stage of grief, construction.

19:11Demolition, construction. This is not how an adult grieves the murder of somebody called a friend. This is how a four-year-old mourns a goldfish, OK? And it didn't just happen once. So this is huge news in America because Jimmy Kimmel is a really, really big figure on late night television. And also because for all that the Trump administration like to lecture us about free speech and are convinced that free speech is being curtailed in the United Kingdom and that this is limiting Britain's freedoms and has complained about it quite frequently. Now we see somebody attacking either the Trump administration or the MAGA movement getting taken off air at the same time as the Attorney General has been talking about going after people for hate speech in a way that seems to be in defiance of the First Amendment.

20:04So, yeah, there's a real free speech debate going in the US at the moment, which probably meant that not too many lectures were handed out by any of the administration officials whilst they were in the UK. But it's a massive deal, isn't it? Because how many late night talk show hosts are there now left, Justin? Because Jimmy Kimmel has been taken off air immediately. We know that Stephen Colbert's show is not being renewed. So he's got another few months left on air. He also goes after Donald Trump a lot, very amusingly, very wittily. But, you know, he does attack Trump a lot and his show is not being renewed.

20:41And yeah, if I was Seth Meyers, I would be a bit worried about my job. But of course, what Trump says, and let's listen to what he said at the press conference. And he does have a point here, I think. They're just not making the money that they used to make. They don't have the audiences they used to make. And maybe that's the heart of it. Here he is. Well, Jimmy Kimmel was fired because he had bad ratings more than anything else. And he said a horrible thing about a great gentleman known as Charlie Kirk. And Jimmy Kimmel is not a talented person. He had very bad ratings and they should have fired him a long time ago.

21:10So, you know, you can call that free speech or not. He was fired for lack of talent. The reason, though, that this has triggered such a lively debate or maybe not triggered is the wrong word. It's sort of further entrenched the debate that was already happening about freedom of expression. It is because, you know, again, whether you agree or disagree with someone, if you believe in absolute freedom of expression and certainly freedom of expression in the First Amendment form, that you should be able to joke about certain things. You should be able to comment on certain things. is worth saying that Jimmy Kimmel did express condolences in regards to the killing of Charlie Kirk after when it happened.

21:46But you can also imagine that when you do a programme like this, it's really not very surprising that you would joke about it in the same way that, you know, on satirical programmes here in the UK, you would joke about them. And that's why quite a lot of people are saying, hang on a second, this seems hypocritical. But Sarah, how much of this is about what was actually said and the level of offence? And actually how much of it is about something that's slightly more complicated and slightly more about the financial situation of the networks? Yeah, this is basically about a business deal because the company that owns all the regional and local affiliates who take programmes from ABC centrally and show them, and this is how most linear television is distributed in the United States, that company that owns most of them wants to buy the company that owns the rest of them, essentially, which will make it close to a monopoly and will mean that the FCC has to approve this merger.

22:38So basically, a Trump appointee has to allow this company an exception to be able to buy its rival and become a great television behemoth. That's not going to happen if the Trump administration is upset with them for showing the Jimmy Kimmel show. So all the little affiliates said they weren't going to carry the show anymore in furtherance of this business deal. And that was what then led ABC centrally to say, OK, well, we're suspending it indefinitely then because there was no point in making a show that the local stations weren't going to carry. And so actually, when you look at it like that, it's not really so much a case about free speech or about censorship.

23:21It's about the chilling effect of the Trump administration, where you know that they will bend the rules for friends and they will come down like a ton of bricks on people they consider adversaries or enemies, and therefore the way in which people who want to conduct business in the United States are contorting themselves to please the administration because they know that's what they have to do in order to make the bucks. Interesting that he didn't read the room, though. I mean, you know, whatever the rights and wrongs of what he said, and as Mariana points out, his initial response, actually, was perfectly sort of sympathetic to the obvious human disaster that this has been.

24:06But maybe he didn't read the room in his subsequent remarks. And maybe as well, you know, there are people on the right pointing out, aren't there, that when Tucker Carlson was fired by Fox, also a business decision essentially that Fox made because he was costing them a lot of money and he was getting increasingly difficult and there was a sort of multiplicity of reasons, weren't there? Back in, I think it was 2023 or so, he was fired. Actually, Jimmy Kimmel celebrated it. I mean, did quite a funny thing. I remember seeing it quite a funny thing where he said, well, he can go off and see his agent in Moscow.

24:37So maybe you live by the sword, you die by the sword. I mean, there is, you know, it's a pretty brutal world. Imagine if this is me being your contrarian, which is not usually this way round. Imagine if this was the other way round. We know, for example, we've chatted about it, but when Paul Pelosi, Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker's husband was attacked, there were people on the right, including people with influential channels, podcasts, who made really, really distasteful jokes about this. And that was celebrated. Donald Trump did. Yeah, yeah, it was celebrated. He said in a kind of mocking tone, how is Paul?

25:12How is this any difference? I think of all of the things that we've spoken about in terms of freedom of expression, a joke that is, you know, maybe not the world's most tasteful joke. I mean, not even the world's best joke, but nonetheless a joke. That feels like we're getting into a bit scary territory. Listen, guys, the only way I can leave Chequers, because as you can imagine, there's a huge security operation here, is to get on one of the White House's buses and it is going to leave in a few minutes. So if I'm not going to be stranded here overnight, I'm going to have to go. So we'll wrap up by saying, I guess this trip, certainly from the British side, they think it has been a great success.