Lazy Caturday Reads: Another Horrible Week Under the Trump Regime

Good Morning!!

By Leonid Kiparisov

It has been another horrible week under the Trump regime. Almost no one who is paying attention still believes that we still live in a democracy. We retain a few of the trappings–the courts (except the Supreme Court, of course), a few Congresspeople, some courageous journalists, citizens protesting in the streets.

The “president” who would be king is busy slapping gold on the walls of the oval office and talking to architects about his planned $200 million golden ballroom, while Stephen Miller runs the country. Oh, and he’s still signing executive orders prepared by Project 2025 and throwing tantrums when anyone dares to criticize or make fun of him.

Andrew Perez, Nikki McCann Ramirez, Asawin Suebsaeng summarize the latest dictatorish happenings at Rolling Stone: Donald Trump’s Most Authoritarian Week Yet.

It was clear Donald Trump and his allies would ramp up their crackdown against any and all opposition in the wake of the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk — and this week, the president’s second administration unleashed its most authoritarian blitz yet.

The Trump administration got late-night host Jimmy Kimmel’s show taken off the air by threatening companies’ broadcast licenses if they continued to run his show. Trump and his team threatened to strip the tax-exempt status of liberal nonprofit groups, while the president called for left-wing activists to be jailed for protesting him at dinner. Trump announced he’ll once again try to designate “antifa” — America’s disparate anti-fascist movement — as a terrorist group, with no legitimate basis, clarifying once again where he stands on the whole fascism question.

Meanwhile, the administration worked toward its goal to deport a legal U.S. resident for speaking out against Israel’s relentless assault on Palestine. Reports trickled out that Trump would fire a U.S. attorney for failing to bring charges against one of his enemies, before Trump publicly called for his departure and he quit.

This ugly, authoritarian week didn’t happen in a vacuum. Trump just last month mused about how Americans want a “dictator,” and the administration now appears to be using Kirk’s shocking murder as an excuse to escalate Trump’s ongoing campaign for total power.

The ramp-up began on Monday, as Vice President J.D. Vance hosted Kirk’s podcast from the White House and huddled with Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy White House chief of staff and the man responsible for leading his mass vengeance campaign.

“You have the crazies on the far left who are saying, ‘Stephen Miller and J.D. Vance, they’re going to go after constitutionally protected speech. No, no, no,” Vance said, before immediately pledging to go after a network of liberal nonprofits that supposedly “foments, facilitates, and engages in violence.”

During the discussion, Miller repeatedly invoked Kirk’s death to justify the effort to shut down liberal groups.

On the Jimmy Kimmel firing:

…[O]n Wednesday, Trump’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairman, Brendan Carr, began issuing explicit threats, demanding that broadcasters take Jimmy Kimmel Live! off the air.

Speaking with right-wing influencer Benny Johnson, Carr pressured broadcasters to tell ABC: “‘Listen, we are going to preempt, we are not going to run Kimmel anymore, until you straighten this out because we, we licensed broadcaster, are running the possibility of fines or license revocation from the FCC.’”

By Diya Sanat

Carr added, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to take action on Kimmel, or there is going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”

Within hours, ABC had indefinitely suspended Kimmel’s show and two large broadcast companies, Nexstar and Sinclair, announced they wouldn’t run it. (Note: The companies all have regulatory matters before the FCC.) Sources told Rolling Stone that while multiple executives at ABC and its parent company, Disney, did not feel that Kimmel’s comments merited a suspension, they caved to pressure from Carr.

“They were terrified about what the government would do, and did not even think Jimmy had the right to just explain what he said,” a person familiar with the internal situation said on Thursday, calling the decision “cowardly.”

Throughout Trumpland and the federal government, there was a heightened sense of glee over their silencing of Kimmel. Administration officials feel emboldened by the multiple scalps they’ve now collected — first Stephen Colbert, now Kimmel — to the point that they’re confident they have momentum to pressure corporate bosses to get rid of Trump’s late-night nemeses over at other networks.

Trump has gotten so full of himself after this big win that he’s now claiming that criticism of him is illegal.

Luke Broadwater at The New York Times: Trump Says Critical Coverage of Him Is ‘Really Illegal.’

President Trump said Friday that news reporters who cover his administration negatively have broken the law, a significant broadening of his attacks on journalists and their First Amendment right to critique the government.

A day after asserting that broadcasters should potentially lose their licenses over negative news coverage of him, Mr. Trump escalated his condemnations of the press, suggesting such reporters were lawbreakers.

“They’ll take a great story and they’ll make it bad,” he said, speaking to reporters in the Oval Office. “See, I think that’s really illegal.”

He added: “Personally, you can’t take, you can’t have a free airwave if you’re getting free airwaves from the United States government.”

Mr. Trump did not cite a specific law he said he believed had been violated. It remained unclear Friday why Mr. Trump believed negative news coverage, which every president has faced and is protected by the Constitution, would be “really illegal.”

Asked for comment, the White House did not cite a specific law Mr. Trump believed was being violated, but a White House official pointed to settlements that media companies, including ABC, have agreed to pay after Mr. Trump’s legal team filed lawsuits against them, and suggested Mr. Trump was attempting to rein in “extreme left-wing bias in television.” [….]

Mr. Trump’s comments on Friday came a day after he suggested that protesters who called him “Hitler” to his face inside a Washington restaurant should be jailed.

The president, who has accused the protesters of being paid agitators and said such people “should be put in jail,” told reporters on Air Force One that he believed the protesters were “very inappropriate” and “a threat.”

Trump got some pushback from a surprising source. NBC News: Ted Cruz rips FCC chair’s Jimmy Kimmel threat as ‘unbelievably dangerous.’

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, blasted Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr on Friday for threats he made this week related to Jimmy Kimmel’s show, calling the Trump administration official’s actions “dangerous as hell.”

“I think it is unbelievably dangerous for government to put itself in the position of saying we’re going to decide what speech we like and what we don’t, and we’re going to threaten to take you off air if we don’t like what you’re saying,” Cruz said on his podcast, “Verdict with Ted Cruz.”

Girl with Cat – Augusta Oelschig , 1945 American, 1918–2000

“I like Brendan Carr. He’s a good guy, he’s the chairman of the FCC. I work closely with him, but what he said there is dangerous as hell,”Cruz said.

Cruz is chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, which has jurisdiction over the FCC. He warned Carr’s actions could have long-term consequences.

“It might feel good right now to threaten Jimmy Kimmel, yeah, but when it is used to silence every conservative in America, we will regret it,”Cruz said….

Cruz went on to say Friday: “I hate what Jimmy Kimmel said,” but likened Carr’s comments about Disney taking the easy way or the hard way to a classic mob movie.

“I gotta say, that’s right out of ‘Goodfellas.’ That’s right out of a mafioso coming into a bar going, nice bar you have here, it’d be a shame if something happened to it,” Cruz said.

Of course Kimmel never said anything critical of Charlie Kirk. What he did do was make fun of Trump blowing of a question about how he was recovering from the loss of his friend to brag about his White House ballroom construction:

Kimmel has also mocked Trump for a specific comment he made in response to being asked by a reporter how he was personally “holding up” after the assassination of Kirk, who he has said was a friend.

Trump had replied saying he was “very good” and then immediately started boasting about the new ballroom he is building at the White House.

Kimmel said after the clip: “This is not how an adult grieves the murder of somebody called a friend. This is how a four-year-old mourns a goldfish.”

There’s also no evidence of involvement of left wing groups in the Kirk assassination. NBC News:

The federal investigation into the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk has yet to find a link between the alleged shooter, 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, and left-wing groups on which President Donald Trump and his administration have pledged to crack down after the killing, three sources familiar with the probe told NBC News.

One person familiar with the federal investigation said that “thus far, there is no evidence connecting the suspect with any left-wing groups.”

“Every indication so far is that this was one guy who did one really bad thing because he found Kirk’s ideology personally offensive,” this person continued.

In addition, two of the people familiar with the probe said it may be difficult to charge Robinson at the federal level for Kirk’s killing, while the third source said there is still an expectation that some kind of federal charge is filed against Robinson.

Factors that have complicated the effort to bring charges at the federal level include that Robinson, a Utah resident, did not travel from out of state; Kirk was shot during an open campus debate at Utah Valley University. Additionally, Kirk himself is not a federal officer or elected official.

Disney (and perhaps even right wing Sinclair) apparently regret the sudden firing of Jimmy Kimmel.

Screen Rant: Disney Is Scrambling After The Backlash To Jimmy Kimmel’s Cancellation Blew Up.

Wholly unsurprising to anyone paying attention, the backlash over the abrupt cancellation of Jimmy Kimmel Live! is only continuing to grow and spread, and Disney is now scrambling to fix a situation quickly spiraling out of its control. After far-right podcaster Charlie Kirk was shot and killed, reactions have been intense, but it’s Disney’s knee-jerk reaction that has drawn the most ire.

Carl Wilhelmson, Svarta Katten (Black Cat).

There has been considerable pressure from the right to crack down on anyone saying anything even remotely controversial about Kirk, and media companies have acquiesced to this pressure. Earlier this week, on Wednesday, Disney announced that it was pulling Jimmy Kimmel from the air indefinitely after a monologue in which he didn’t hold back about Trump’s seeming indifference to Kirk’s murder. [See the quote from Kimmel that I posted above.] You can watch the video at the link.

The media is generally framing it as Kimmel being indefinitely suspended for his comments about Charlie Kirk. If you just watched the above, however, and are now wondering why, as Kimmel’s jabs weren’t aimed at Kirk, but Trump, then you’ve hit on precisely why the backlash against Disney’s Jimmy Kimmel decision is growing – and why it’s not likely to stop any time soon.

The fallout from the decision to pull Kimmel off the air was immediate; the Jimmy Kimmel suspension is already so much worse than Stephen Colbert’s cancellation. On Thursday, hundreds of union writers and actors protested Kimmel’s suspension outside Disney’s Burbank studios (via Deadline). On-air and off-air talent have made their anger clear; mega-successful producer Damon Lindelof, for example, has stated he will not work with Disney unless it reinstates Kimmel.