Jimmy Kimmel And The Light At The End Of The Tunnel

In a recent newsletter, Paul Krugman addressed what had been my own somewhat optimistic “take” on Disney’s retreat during the Jimmy Kimmel episode.

Krugman began by acknowledging Trump’s efforts at autocracy–and noted that, as his poll numbers have fallen, he has amped up his efforts to intimidate, secure in the knowledge that “craven congressional Republicans and a complicit Supreme Court” will continue to abet his destruction of democratic safeguards. The administration’s demand that Kimmel be removed from the airwaves was part and parcel of that autocratic ambition.

But as Krugman also points out, thanks to American public opinion, Trump’s efforts to mimic Putin and Orban are failing.

When Putin and Orban were consolidating their autocratics, they were genuinely popular. They were perceived by the public as effective and competent leaders. Just nine months into his presidency, Trump, by contrast, is deeply unpopular. He is increasingly seen as chaotic and inept. As David Frum says, this means that he is in a race against time. Can he consolidate power before he loses his aura of inevitability? Will those who run major institutions – particularly corporate CEOs – understand that we are at a crucial juncture, and that by accommodating Trump they have more to lose than by standing up to him?

To put it bluntly, is the Jimmy Kimmel affair the harbinger of a failed Trumpian putsch?

When Putin and Orban began their respective takeovers, they enjoyed several years of popularity–mostly by improving the economic postures of their countries. Thanks to Trump’s incredible ignorance (and his insane belief in tariffs), he took the robust economy he inherited and is in the process of tanking it. Krugman shared the widely available poll results that document Trump’s unpopularity–he is in deeply negative territory, and the people who strongly dislike him vastly outnumber those who strongly approve of him.

If we had a working Congress, unpopularity at this scale would already have turned Trump into a lame duck, but as Krugman notes, he has instead been able to operate as a quasi-autocrat, thanks to a “party that accommodates his every whim, backed by a corrupt Supreme Court prepared to validate whatever he does.”

As a result, Trump has been able to use the vast power of the federal government to deliver punishments and rewards in a completely unprecedented way. But the fact is that Trump has not yet locked in his autocracy. Timid institutions are failing to understand not only how unpopular Trump is, but also how severe a backlash they are likely to face for surrendering without a fight.

And so we come to Trump’s thin-skinned assault on comedians–most recently, Jimmy Kimmel.

Krugman says the signs were there, but Disney ignored them. There were several such signs: Target’s effort to appease Trump by ending its commitment to DEI–an effort that led to a large decline in sales and a falling stock price; capitulating law firms that lost clients and partners to law firms that didn’t. And of course, Tesla…

And yet,

Disney was evidently completely unprepared for the backlash caused by its decision to take Jimmy Kimmel off the air, a backlash so costly that the company reversed course after just five days — too late to avoid probably irreparable damage to its brand…

It’s important to understand that Trump’s push to destroy democracy depends largely on creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. Behind closed doors, business leaders bemoan the destruction that Trump is wreaking on the economy. But they capitulate to his demands because they expect him to consolidate autocratic power — which, given his unpopularity, he can only do if businesses and other institutions continue to capitulate.

If this smoke-and-mirrors juggernaut starts to falter, the perception of inevitability will collapse and Trump’s autocracy putsch may very well fall apart.

So how can we make a Trump implosion more likely? The public can help by doing what Target’s customers and Disney’s audience did — make it clear that they will stop paying money to institutions that lend aid and comfort to the authoritarian project.

Big corporations and fancy law firms may fold. Republican legislators may lack integrity and spines. Supreme Court justices may be unfathomably corrupt. But the effort to silence Kimmel has once again confirmed that We the People have the power to remind all of them that we are Americans who value our liberties more than our access to consumer products or entertainment.

The public response to the Jimmy Kimmel episode may well be the light at the end of our current dark tunnel…..

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Memorize This Paragraph!

A recent paragraph in a Lincoln Square newsletter really–really–struck me. Here’s that paragraph:

The Republican Party in 2025 is locked in a state of sycophantic paralysis. MAGA is not just Trump’s mood swings; it’s a tribal identity. Step out of line, and you get exiled. That’s why even senators with Ivy League résumés suddenly sound like they’re auditioning for a spot on a right-wing podcast — they’re terrified of losing the mob’s loyalty. And here’s the uncomfortable truth Democrats keep sidestepping: a huge chunk of MAGA voters are perfectly willing to suffer. They’ll put up with higher prices, worse health care, collapsing schools, potholes the size of moon craters — and they’ll smile through it — so long as the pain lands harder on someone they hate. Call it recreational spite or political CrossFit: the pain is the point, and the workout “counts” if the libs hurt more. That’s the dynamic behind why they support him.

There’s a substantial body of research confirming that puzzling observation. Illogical as it seems, people who harbor bigotries–people who hate those they label “other”–really are willing to overlook damage they suffer personally if they believe that “those people” are being hurt even more.

Bizarre as that finding is, it explains a lot.

The author quoted Lyndon Johnson, who made the statement as he was signing the Civil Rights Act. Johnson acknowledged that he was signing a measure that would cost Democrats the votes of much of the South (this was back when Southern Democrats were the racists; Democratic support for the Civil Rights Act probably was a factor in the defection of those racists from the party and their migration into today’s White Christian Nationalist cult, aka the GOP.) Johnson quite accurately noted that “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”

As the author noted, “MAGA is basically the LBJ theorem in a red hat. The cruelty isn’t the glitch, it’s the subscription plan — the down payment on the fantasy that at least you’re not on the bottom rung.”

Philosophers and theologians, not to mention psychiatrists, can theorize over the deficits in personality and humanity that lead otherwise normal humans to detest those “others” to such a degree that they will accept considerable personal privation if only they can be convinced that those others are suffering more…

The essay referenced the psychological research that explores–but doesn’t explain–this phenomenon.

There’s actual scholarship that explains why this kind of thinking has such a grip. Relative deprivation theory tells us people don’t measure life by absolutes; they measure by comparisons. You’ll tolerate your own struggles as long as your neighbor isn’t doing better; the second you think they’re moving up, resentment flares. Then comes the darker twist. In 2009, Combs and colleagues documented partisan schadenfreude — the perverse pleasure people feel when the “other side” suffers, even if they’re collateral damage themselves. That’s the political equivalent of the Joker in The Dark Knight setting a mountain of his own stolen cash on fire just to watch Gotham panic. Or think of Cartman, South Park’s eternal bully, who will happily wreck his own life if it means making someone else miserable — and still ends up the kid everyone hates. That’s the mindset: voters cheering their own decline as long as someone they despise loses more.

Once I read this, I began to recognize how it works in Trumpland.

Are those tariffs making groceries and everyday items more expensive? Are even immigrants who are in the country legally terrified of the ICE masked bullies who are rounding up anyone with dark skin? Is the war being waged against science–very much including medical science–making it more likely that you will contract a disease, or that a cure for what ails you won’t be forthcoming? Those and other negative consequences of official corruption and stupidity are bearable, because Trump is keeping his promise to go after “those people.” If there has been one through-line in this administration, it has been the unremitting effort to stamp out the progress made by women, people of color and LGBTQ folks, and to elevate White psuedo-Christian males to their former (albeit unearned) social dominance.

File under “pathetic.”

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Let Us Count The Ways…

It’s impossible for most of us to keep up with the unconstitutional, corrupt and overwhelmingly stupid actions of Trump and his merry band of incompetents and bigots–so today I thought I’d enumerate just a few of the actions that are taking my country down the path to fascism and global irrelevance. 

Keep in mind that this is a very partial list…..

The FCC has threatened to pull licenses from networks whose coverage of our thin-skinned president hurts his feelings. (What First Amendment?)

Is factual economic news negative? The government will eliminate quarterly reports by public companies, tighten controls on the release of employment data, and delay the release of inflation data, obvious moves to suppress facts and prevent citizens from understanding our declining economic health. As Lincoln Square recently reported,

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) abruptly postponed its consumer expenditures report, the dataset that determines how inflation is measured in the year ahead. No explanation was given. No new date set.

Last year, when the release was delayed, the agency cited an error and announced a rescheduled publication; this year it offered neither explanation nor date. The absence is striking because the report is central to the Consumer Price Index (CPI), which shapes interest rates, wages, and the daily cost of living. Critics warn the delay is not accidental but political.

It’s not just economic data. The administration has removed statistics from DOJ websites that inconveniently showed that right-wing violence is by far the nation’s biggest domestic threat. RFK’s HHS is removing data that demonstrates vaccine effectiveness. Etc.

The administration is frantically trying to distract attention from its non-disclosure of the Epstein files. (Pretty much confirms that you-know-who is in those files…)

The administration’s war against education keeps ramping up. Assaults against universities, efforts to destroy public education, demands that museums and national parks scrub the parts of history Trump doesn’t like have recently been joined by administration plans to partner with Christian Nationalist organization Prager U to create a new “Civics Education” for the nation’s children. (Can we spell White Christian indoctrination??)

Does our tech sector rely on recruiting “the best and brightest” from around the world? Hit those “furriners” with a 100,000 fee per visa. 

The corruption of this administration becomes more obvious every day. Not only is Trump making out like the bandit he is with patently illegal grifts, not only has he instructed the Department of Justice to bring phony charges against his political enemies (and fired ethical lawyers who refused to manufacture evidence), his administration has also shut down investigation of his border czar’s bribery–despite the fact that Homan’s acceptance of $50,000 from undercover FBI agents was captured on tape.

As I said in my introductory paragraph, this is a very partial list of the wreckage being done every minute of every day by the idiots and grifters currently in charge of our federal government. As Paul Krugman recently detailed in his Substack, what passes for policy in this administration is insane.

We attracted investment from around the world in part because we had rule of law: Businesses trusted us to honor property rights and enforce contracts. So the Trumpists turned us into a nation where the government extorts ownership shares in corporations and masked government agents seize foreign workers, put them in chains, and imprison them under terrible conditions.

We lead the world in science thanks to our unmatched network of research universities and globally admired government agencies like the National Institutes of Health. So the Trumpists are doing their best to destroy both university and government research.

And our economic success — the way we have pulled ahead of other advanced nations over the past generation — rests almost entirely on our leadership in digital technology. So the Trumpists are pulling the rug out from under tech, too.

H-1B visas are a critical ingredient in America’s success. They allow the best and the brightest from around the world to teach in our universities, do research in our research institutes, and work in our tech sector.

Every day, Americans are inundated with propaganda extolling these incredibly harmful attacks on our liberties, our economic well-being and our global preeminence. Thanks to MAGA’s unremitting attacks on those who dare to tell the truth, it gets more and more difficult to separate propaganda from journalism, fact from fiction.

That difficulty is immensely dangerous.

Hannah Arendt said it best, back in 1951, in Origins of Totalitarianism: “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.” 

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Media Consolidation And Free Speech

There has been a huge reaction to the silencing of Jimmy Kimmel by our thin-skinned, can’t-take-a-joke (let alone criticism) wanna-be King. Pundits have pontificated. Some citizens have protested by canceling their Disney streaming subscriptions and/or trips to Disney theme parks, others are demanding a boycott, and a number have even turned up in front of Disney offices in California and New York. All of those actions have been entirely appropriate, but very few have focused on an element of our media environment that has enabled–even invited–the sort of ham-handed blackmail that has allowed the administration to muzzle speech of which it disapproves.

A recent essay from Lincoln Square connected the dots between that blackmail and the unprecedented media consolidation that has made it much more effective than it would otherwise have been.

As the essay noted, Kimmel was suspended because “billionaires who own the American media decided they were willing to capitulate to a dollar-store despot who decided his voice was no longer acceptable.” When a government regulator of broadcasting licenses goes on television and threatens to punish a network if it doesn’t rid the administration of the offending comic, the subsequent and immediate removal of the program “isn’t free will. It is state coercion made possible by billionaire media consolidation.”

The suspension also exposes a structural problem. A handful of companies control nearly every lever of American media. Nexstar is in the process of buying Tegna, a $6.2 billion deal that would give it reach into almost 80 percent of U.S. households if regulators (like Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr) approve it. Sinclair already holds enormous power. Gray is not far behind. Together, they dominate what gets marketed and sold as “local news.”

On the studio side, Larry Ellison and his son, David, just closed an $8 billion merger with Paramount. They are now openly vying for a Warner Bros. Discovery deal. Combined, that would give them control of two of the largest content pipelines in the world. Oracle, Larry Ellison’s company which has made him the richest man in the world, is also expected to play a central role in a restructured TikTok, potentially handing him primary cloud partnership and equity shares in a U.S. majority carveout. Ellison is also one of president Trump’s top political donors.

The picture is stark: The same billionaire network of Trump allies (including Rupert Murdoch and Fox News) controlling the studios, the broadcast stations, and the digital platforms — which we saw with Trump’s recent tech dinner. When government pressure comes, those choke points collapse inward. That is what just happened with Jimmy Kimmel.

And–as the essay points out–it’s interesting that those on the Right who’ve previously been the loudest about the importance of free speech have been suspiciously silent.

The cancellations of Colbert and Kimmel are examples of the power that media consolidation gives to into the billionaires who own the media and especially to the regulators acting–as the essay puts it– as “mob enforcers for the White House.” As it concludes:

If we let this moment pass without rightfully losing our shit and naming it for what it is, then the precedent will harden. The next comedian, journalist, or critic who challenges Trump or his allies will face the same weaponry — or think twice before doing so. And if Rogan and the rest of the self-proclaimed “free-speech advocates” continue to stay silent, then they are not allies in this fight. They are accessories to the silencing.

Billionaires loyal to the president are about to own nearly 80% of local and national media in this country — ahead of midterm elections and widespread military and police crackdowns in Democrat run cities. Jimmy Kimmel may be one of the first high-profile hosts to feel the wrath of this new system, but he will not be the last.

What went dark this week wasn’t just the Jimmy Kimmel Live! studio. It was a signal about where the First Amendment stands in Trump’s America.

Americans who still insist that “it can’t happen here” need to consider a “blast from the past” in a recent column by Charlie Sykes. The column reproduced a 1939 article from the New York Times, titled “Goebbels Ends Careers of Five ‘Aryan’ Actors Who Made Witticisms About the Nazi Regime.”

Read it and weep.

A postscript: since this was written, Kimmel’s show was returned to the airwaves. Evidently, the huge negative public reaction to Disney cowardice had an effect. We the People need to keep up the pressure!

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The War Against Facts

I keep thinking of Kellyanne Conway’s remark, during Trump’s first term, about “alternative facts”– because if there is one through line in Trumpism, it is the daily effort to replace reality with the would-be King’s preferred alternative.

The Bulwark, among other media outlets, recently reported on one especially egregious example

The Department of Justice has removed content highlighting a decades-long trend: far-right extremists have carried out the overwhelming majority of ideologically motivated killings in the United States. The removal comes days after the assassination of conservative media figure Charlie Kirk, amid a renewed push by the Trump administration to blame the “radical left” for political violence.

Instead, visitors to that government website were informed that official websites were being reviewed, and that “some content” might be unavailable.

One bit of “unavailabe” content was a National Institute of Justice–funded study that documented the fact that far-right extremists have been responsible for the great majority of ideologically motivated killings in the United States since 1990. As the article noted, the study’s conclusion was hardly controversial; it was in line with decades of evidence from the Extremist Crime Database and from watchdog groups such as the Anti-Defamation League.

The study vanished just days after the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, an event the Trump administration used to sharpen its argument that the “radical left” is driving political violence. The contrast was stark: while the data showed a persistent pattern of far-right lethality, the government was simultaneously scrubbing its websites and amplifying a narrative that cast blame in the opposite direction.

Evidently, when the facts don’t support your preferred narrative, the obvious remedy is to bury the facts.

Among the material no longer reachable was research funded by the National Institute of Justice (NIJ), long a sponsor of work by criminologist Steven Chermak and others who study extremist violence. Their Extremist Crime Database (ECDB) has consistently documented that far-right extremists account for far more killings than their far-left counterparts. One NIJ-published article put the point bluntly: far-right violence, it concluded, “continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism.”

Independent evidence supports the same pattern. A 2021 ECDB-based study found that, between 1990 and 2020, far-right extremists were responsible for the overwhelming majority of ideologically motivated homicides. And the Anti-Defamation League reported that in 2023, every extremist-related murder in the United States was committed by far-right actors.

The real damage being done by the elimination of officially vetted evidence and facts isn’t that those facts disappear; the independent studies and other sources of information remain easily accessible. The problem is, the absence of an official, neutral and reliable source of information adds to an already massive problem–the internet’s invitation to indulge in confirmation bias. MAGA folks can find plenty of sites offering propaganda more consistent with their desired “facts.” For that matter, so can progressive folks. The absence of an official report, with numbers and data attested to by civil servants not in thrall to a politically desired result, encourages the polarization that has left Americans fragmented, polarized and unable to conduct civil conversations. It is one more step toward constructing alternate–and dramatically inconsistent–realities.

Granted, Trump is hardly the first to attempt to bend reality (although he may be the first President who is clearly unable to perceive or live in it…) As the Bulwark concluded,

Moments of crisis have long been leveraged to redraw the boundaries of legitimacy. Richard Nixon used the language of law and order to denounce protestors; George W. Bush invoked the “war on terror” to consolidate national unity and presidential power. Trump’s rhetoric fits that lineage but also departs from it, casting blame in ways that cut against the weight of evidence. By turning Kirk’s death into an ideological fulcrum, he signals not just how this White House interprets violence but how it intends to shape the nation’s memory of it. The question is whether Americans will accept that framing—or remember the data it seeks to eclipse.

I’ve forgotten who to credit with a quote that seems more apt every day: “Facts don’t care whether you believe them or not.” We do ourselves no favor when we choose to reject evidence in order to reside in a false alternate reality.

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