Kimmel Returns to Late Night After Trump's Failed Crackdown

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0:52Listeners can get an exclusive 20 % off IXL membership when they sign up today at IXL.com slash 20. Visit ixl.com slash 20 to get the most effective learning program out there at the best price. Welcome to The Beat. I'm Ari Melber. We have news that's coming in almost breaking, but more like, to use the term, developing, because the Trump DOJ may be seeking an indictment of James Comey. That's something we've heard a lot about. The president has demanded it. We have a legal expert coming up. So that's a big developing story, even though we don't yet know what will happen there. We begin with what Nicole and I were just discussing.

1:27Late night host Jimmy Kimmel is back, triumphantly returning to his show last night after staring down a government effort to censor and silence him. It's a Trump effort that first looked shockingly effective last week when corporate giant Disney gave in to the Trump FCC chair's blatantly unconstitutional demands. Demands that all legal experts who've seriously looked at this say would fail in court if they were tested in court. But they weren't, because Disney first folded. Kimmel then stood strong, the censorship sparking a massive revolt that really did go beyond some of the many skirmishes we have in politics right now.

2:08And it led to Disney's then unusual reversal of its own suspension to start this week. And so after so many people, literally millions of people had weighed in in some way on this effort to silence Kimmel, I just want to remind you of something fairly basic, but that's part of the news. We tell you things that you might already have a hunch about. What we saw last night, Kimmel's return is the first time he has addressed this roiling, ongoing censorship plot, the pressure on him and his team. So this monologue crystallized a free speech win against powerful forces. I'm going to show you some of the key points because Kimmel mixed grace and appreciation with jokes about some of the absurd facets of what he dubbed a still quite serious struggle that's about a lot more than any single comedy show.

3:11A lot of people have been asking me if there are conditions for my return to the air, and there is one, Disney has asked me to read the following statement, and I agreed to do it. Here we go. To reactivate your Disney Plus and Huda account. I've been fortunate to work at a company that has allowed me to do the show the way we want to do it for almost 23 years. I've done almost 4 ,000 shows on ABC. And over that time, the people who run this network have allowed me to evolve and to stretch the boundaries of what was once traditional for a late night talk show, even when it made them uncomfortable, which I do a lot.

3:57Every night, they've defended my right to poke fun at our leaders and to advocate for subjects that I think are important by allowing me to use their platform. And I am very grateful for that. With that said, I was not happy when they pulled me off the air on Wednesday. I did not agree with that decision, and I told them that, and we had many conversations. I shared my point of view. They shared theirs. We talked it through, and at the end, even though they didn't have to, they really didn't have to. This is a giant company. We have short attention spans, and I am a tiny part of the Disney Corporation.

4:34They welcomed me back on the air, and I thank them for that.

4:42That's true. And he's probably not spinning there. He understands quite clearly in the larger economic math how that speck on the balance sheet could have been wiped away. But it wasn't, partly because people cared, partly because of you, if you care. Kimmel summarizing that in a diplomatic way, the reporting and evidence we have suggests Disney was quick to fold to government pressure to oust him, only to fold again days later when the pressure and response proved mighty and apparently surprisingly large for them. So Kimmel there thanking his employer, the broadcaster, thanking the public and the many people who spoke out against this censorship.

5:23And I'm going to show you a little bit more of that point in a second. But again, we're balancing the big weighty issues and the cultural moment. And so he made this other nod to a bit of TV lore and history when Tonight Show host Jack Parr had first returned to the airwaves after he previously walked off that show in an internal clash over editorial choices. Anyway, as I was saying before I was interrupting... As I was saying before I was interrupted... If you're a real comedy nerd or history, buff, you can feel the echoing there. And it speaks to something, that free speech and the ability to do this in whatever method people choose.

6:09Some people do comedy, some people do politics, some people are just artists and writers until they find the government comes for them too. This matters across history. Kimmel joking about how the government crackdown was going to grow his audience. Nicole Walls and I just discussed that with the TV ratings coming in. Last night's show was a ratings bonanza. Six million live TV viewers. Online clips of this monologue are going viral, passing 15 million views on YouTube in under a day. The count is still rising as we speak and report. It's already now Kimmel's most watched monologue on YouTube ever.

6:46Now, that type of interest and response to people saying, don't watch this, or we might take this away, or the government doesn't want you to see this, actually matches a wider communications dynamic you might have heard of. When you try to suppress something, you sometimes draw more attention to it. This is called the Streisand effect. For a time when the star's effort to hide and suppress a single picture of her home ended up backfiring and drawing far more interests. So it is a fact that there's more interest in Kimmel's monologue, but, yes, but, I'm sorry, there's always a but these days, that still will only matter in reality if there is the freedom to find the material and get it.

7:31The Streisand effect does not work in North Korea or places with legal, practical tech limits on what you might find on your TV or on their version of what they call the internet, which is censored. Which is a point Kimmel also made last night, referring to autocratic countries and noting that while he is back on air right now, and you just saw the interest online on YouTube, many local affiliates are still today stopping Kimmel's show from being shown under this spat, impacting up to a third of ABC affiliates. There are signs, and some of this is still being reported out, whether that aligns with the MAGA government crackdown.

8:07So those are businesses making those decisions, but are they doing it for political and governmental efforts? Kimmel reflecting on that while guarding America's First Amendment freedom. This show is not important. What is important is that we get to live in a country that allows us to have a show like this.

8:34I've had the opportunity to meet and spend time with comedians and talk show hosts from countries like Russia, countries in the Middle East, who told me they would get thrown in prison for making fun of those in power, and worse than being thrown in prison. They know how lucky we are here. Our freedom to speak is what they admire most about this country. And that's something I'm embarrassed to say I took for granted until they pulled my friend Stephen off the air and tried to coerce the affiliates who run our show in the cities that you live in to take my show off the air. That's not legal. That's not American.

9:08That is un-American. And it is so dangerous. Brendan Carr, the chairman of the FCC, telling an American company, We can do this the easy way or the hard way, and that these companies can find ways to change conduct and take action on Kimmel, or there's going to be additional work for the FCC ahead. In addition to being a direct violation of the First Amendment, is not a particularly intelligent threat to make in public. Ted Cruz said he sounded like a mafioso. So, although I don't know, if you want to hear a mob boss make a threat like that, you have to hide a microphone in a deli and park outside in a van with a tape recorder all night long.

9:52This genius said it on a podcast. Well, one thing I did learn from Lenny Bruce and George Carlin and Howard Stern is that a government threat to silence a comedian the president doesn't like is anti-American. That's anti-American. If by anti-American he means anti-American constitution, fact check true. This is fundamental stuff. The Trump White House lost this round. They're backtracking now from the censorship goals they admitted in public, Kimmel pointing out that even nowadays when MAGA may get away with a lot, that was too much. And that it was, as he put it, less than a genius move. But compare Trump's recent confessions that he will try to punish critical coverage by yanking broadcast licenses with what they're saying today.

10:46Having lost this round, well, they can't admit that they lost or that they had a censorship plot going, even though we all live through Trump talking about it last week in his FCC chair. So briefly, I want to show you the misleading statement from the White House today, which is still a sign they know they're losing and need to say other stuff. They claim the whole thing was about ratings and not Trump's attacks on free speech. They give me only bad listening or press. I mean, they're getting a license. I would think maybe their license should be taken away. Take away their license because they're not covering the government the way it likes.

11:27That's the stated position of the president. And today, his spokespeople say the opposite. it. Which again, separate from the credibility, you'd prefer the government and the White House wasn't misleading so much. But that itself is a basically confession and awareness that they're losing this and need to get back off it because it didn't work, at least on this one for Kimmel. Trump is still threatening ABC, though. Last night as Kimmel was walking out, he posted an evening statement that he'll test ABC out. Let's see how we do. Last time I went after them, they gave me$16 million, this one sounds even more lucrative.

12:05And he means it. Trump proving the very point that so many have warned about, and that apparently Disney chief Bob Iger and others didn't understand. They are very smart, experienced people. They have a lot of strategic advisors around them, but they didn't figure out that surrendering and paying Donald Trump off only invites more attacks. That's true whether you're Disney or Harvard or some of these law firms that have not exactly cloaked themselves in glory or legal planning. Now, some big companies are going through this, their time in the box. I want to show a little more of something else Kimmel said that delves more into our side of the road, news and politics, because he very thoughtfully made a point using this big platform and audience to shout out some of the people who stood up for free speech values precisely regardless of whether you agree with the said speech.

13:03I want to thank the people who don't support my show and what I believe, but support my right to share those beliefs anyway. People who I never would have imagined. My friend Shapiro, Clay Travis, Candace Owens, Mitch McConnell, Rand Paul, even my old pal Ted Cruz. I don't think I've ever said this before, but Ted Cruz is right. He's absolutely right. The president of the United States made it very clear he wants to see me and the hundreds of people who work here fired from our jobs. Our leader celebrates Americans losing their livelihoods because he can't take a joke. He was somehow able to squeeze Colbert out of CBS.

13:53Then he turned his sights on me. And now he's openly rooting for NBC to fire Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers and the hundreds of Americans who work for their shows who don't make millions of dollars. And I hope that if that happens or if there's even any hint of that happening, you will be 10 times as loud as you were this week. We have to speak out against that. Good side.

14:20Powerful. Kimmel with the receipts, using his platform to acknowledge and thank the people who came up and stepped up for him, but also very aware of the way we live now and the career he's had. He knows how things work and how fast you can be hot or not or whatever. And saying, don't just stand up for him. Stand up for these free speech values. and he seems to think, based on his experience, that Donald Trump's not done with this. That when he says he'll go after the parent company in other ways for money or a shakedown, that he will. That when he says he'll go after NBC or these other outlets, that he will.

14:57And that requires a sustained response. There's an old saying in politics that it's a thin line between the impossible and the inevitable. Meaning sometimes something that you don't think could ever happen, happens. And when that thing is bad and you say, how is it that in America in 2025, you can have a leader who, whether you agree with his politics or not, it's not really the point. You could have a leader who openly tries to abuse government power to sacrifice or end the very first amendment of our constitution, the basis for all the rest of our civic dialogue and democracy. How can that be inevitable?

15:35Well, that's where we are. And the rest is up. As Kimmel said, rest is up to us. I want to bring in Vanity Affairs' Holly Jong-Fast, an MSNBC analyst and author, and Michael Hirshhorn, who's here with his interesting portfolio. He has worked in anti-Trump democracy efforts. He's also a very, I would say, acclaimed, if it's possible, acclaimed reality TV show producer. A lot of people don't think of that field that way. But he created a lot of reality TV and has thought a lot about this culture-politics blend. Is that fair? Yeah, I mean, I think at this point, culture is politics. And so I think it's right and important that you take this Kimmel story as seriously as, I don't know, salt talks might have been taken seriously 40 years ago.

16:23What did you think Kimmel was achieving last night, what he was expressing? I think it was an important moment. I think it was something extraordinary. And it was something extraordinary because up to now we've had this massive failure of elites. And across the board, nobody has stood up. Nobody has had guts until him. And he could have chosen not to do that. So personally, I feel like a little spring in my step. I got emotional watching him. How this plays out, as you said, depends on whether other people get any guts and whether there's a broader shift towards people sacrificing immediate self-interest and short-term gain for a longer-term principle.

17:10Here was Kimmel on that point I mentioned on the ratings last night. He had no talent. More importantly than talent, because a lot of people have no talent, they get ratings. but he had no ratings. Well,

17:30I do tonight.

17:35Yeah, look, he did crazy numbers last night, which I think is a sign that this is broken through. I think about when Tom Hanks got COVID. That was a moment a lot of Americans saw that COVID was real. Maybe Jimmy Kimmel being censored by Disney and Nexstar, maybe that's the moment where Americans see that this is real. But what I think is the most interesting about this is resistance. And I'm here to tell you, even though people got sick of the catchphrase, it actually works. What we're seeing is working is what worked in 2016, where people got together and they were like, this is not who we are.

18:11And I think it's a real important and valuable lesson because if people don't resist, like what we saw with all of the different elites, the billionaires and the universities and the lawyers, when they get together and make these deals with Trump, they are captured institutions. They are no longer within the bounds of the law because all of these deals are not really their extra at best. They're extra legal. Right. They're sort of their own nebulous thing. And so those people have no protection. And so Donald Trump knows that. And he keeps going and going and going. And what we see here is that appeasement doesn't work.

18:44And honestly, you really see how when Cherry Redstone canceled Colbert, it was actually really every step got us here has gotten us to more censorship and being less free. Yeah, I think one of the things I've diagnosed, I mean, we all know a lot of people that are very high up in their various professions. A lot of people have not gotten to the point where they understand that they're not safe unless they do something. And until Kimmel, I was in a kind of constant low state of depression. And there was something about this that felt like, oh, yes, you can stand up for yourself. You can fight back.

19:28It is possible. Everything isn't like the clay hasn't hardened yet. We still have some time. I would just add that Donald Trump's polling the worst he's ever polled. Okay. He's underwater on the economy. He's underwater in Texas for the first time ever. This is not a popular president. The fact that people are scared of him because we're all soft and not used to this kind of thing may be true, but it doesn't necessarily reflect reality. And you can see this from stores like Target. They were boycotted for going against DEI, and it was real numbers, and that's what we're seeing here. I mean, these are real numbers for Kimmel.

20:07And I think it's a really good example that people want normal American democracy. And Michael, the president and his sort of chief here at the FCC seem to understand that comedy and culture and mainstream discourse outside of political nerds matters a lot to them. It matters to how they're understood in the culture. And they have a schizophrenic or split messaging. Oh, it doesn't matter. And the ratings decline. And oh, I mean, if the ratings were low enough, presumably they wouldn't spend so much effort trying to stop Colbert and Kimmel. Right. I think I mean, I think the reason they felt they had that power is that traditional broadcast television, establishment media, establishment newspapers are in a kind of long term decline and they're vulnerable.

20:55And what I thought was interesting is the delta between the numbers that Kimmel had on ABC and the numbers that he had on YouTube. Yeah. And and so there's this big shift happening that is allowing them to kind of hammer away at broadcast because the numbers aren't what they used to be. The the you know, these companies, these conglomerates used to be all powerful. And right now they're not. And that's what makes it a kind of both scary moment, but also promising moment. Right. The irony is that if Kimmel was kicked off of ABC for good and he still might be, he would do very well on YouTube, on Instagram.

21:33on TikTok. And a lot of people that have been sort of booted out of traditional media are now having, you know, a very vibrant future online. So it's a weird moment. And Michael, I'm also curious your view on picking the enemy because Jimmy Kimmel might play one way to a really hardcore MAGA base. They see him primarily through the lens that he criticizes Trump. But this show has been on 23 years. He hosts award shows and other things precisely because of a lot of Americans know him as a star. They might by now know he's critical of Trump. But first and foremost, he's a star. And that seems to be different than other folks they've picked on.

22:15Right. I think he's a star in a different way than Colbert is. I mean, Colbert has always been like, you know, a fine French wine for a very specific sensibility and taste, whereas Kimmel is a much bigger star. I think it is notable when you think, and this is something you know well, which stars they're not picking on. And it's interesting that they're not going after Beyonce. They're not going after Bad Bunny. They're not going after Jay-Z. there's still a lot of cultural power. And if anyone knows cultural power, it's Donald Trump. How has Colbert aged as a wine? A fine wine. A fine one, yes.

22:59In conclusion, do you think that people will hear what Kimmel said? Or the next time they go after someone who's slightly less famous and maybe in a slightly less blunt, dumb way, there's a risk they can get away with it? I think there's a big risk. I think just to go on a slight tangent, there's a lot of work I think we have to do, right? Because the vulnerability on the left comes from years of cancel culture. And I think when I speak to my kind of normie friends or my kind of soft MAGA friends, they're always going to what about me? About you guys didn't complain when Megyn Kelly was kicked off the air, when Tucker Carlson was kicked off the air.

23:43And I think we have to do a little bit of work on our end to kind of shore up our understanding of what free speech means to us. Now, clearly— You're saying to your fellow liberals. To fellow liberals. And clearly, it's a lazy analogy because it's not like the government stepped in. But still, I think we need to think through from the left what a vibrant free speech culture looks like and how we engage with people who don't agree with us. Yeah, and you're speaking about the difference between free speech law, which is constitutional jurisprudence that governs what the government can do and where they were wrong.

24:16And I've reminded folks of the 9-0 rulings on that as of last year. And then free speech values, which we talk about on campuses and elsewhere. where what we saw sometimes some liberals do, for example, in the campus context, which is say, this speaker shouldn't be welcome, shouldn't be allowed to talk, right? They're not the government. They're just saying they're unwelcome because of their views. And that is against free speech values. You put it politically. I would just put it as someone who practiced First Amendment law. It's not a part-time thing. Either you think peaceful speech is how we want to govern ourselves or not.

24:51Yes, and I think on the left, we might embrace some of the hurly-burly, some of the inappropriateness, some of the kind of raw speech that that is how people speak to each other, I think would be a very powerful political move. I just would add that that may very well be true. I'm not disagreeing, but I think you can't take what's happened with Kimmel out of that this is happening because Donald Trump and his government want it to happen. Yeah, a crackdown. So I think, well, there certainly is whataboutism and there certainly are people who will say that. I do think this is part of the federal government trying to, you know, inject crony capitalism into making deals and saying, you know, we if you want to make this deal and sell Paramount to Skydance, you need to do these three things.

25:42Right. The shakedown. And that's very clear. Michael Hirschhorn, I want to thank you. Molly comes back. The Trump DOJ eyeing James Comey. We're back in 90 seconds.