Donald Trump gloated over the news that ABC has pulled Jimmy Kimmel’s show off the air “indefinitely” after the host’s comments about the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
The president declared on Truth Social that the suspension of the late-night show was “Great News for America” and congratulated the network “for finally having the courage to do what had to be done.” Trump, who also reveled in the cancellation of Stephen Colbert’s The Late Show on CBS earlier this summer, claimed, “Kimmel has ZERO talent, and worse ratings than even Colbert,” before taking aim at Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers, calling them “two total losers, on Fake News NBC.”
During Kimmel’s Monday night monologue, the host accused right-wingers of attempting to “score political points” from Kirk’s killing, after they spent the weekend broadly pinning blame on the left, well before the public had any clarity about the shooter’s motives.
“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,” Kimmel said on his show.
Fox News was quick to interpret Kimmel’s comments to mean that he had suggested the “Kirk shooter was part of [the] ‘MAGA gang,’” despite Kimmel not actually conveying that.
By Wednesday, shortly after Nexstar kicked his late-night show off its U.S. stations, an ABC spokesperson told Rolling Stone that “Jimmy Kimmel Live will be pre-empted indefinitely.”
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Earlier in the day, Trump’s Federal Communications Commission chairman, Brendan Carr, publicly called on licensed broadcasters to stop airing Kimmel’s show. “I think that it’s really sort of past time that a lot of these licensed broadcasters themselves push back on Comcast and Disney and say, ‘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 if we continue to run content that ends up being a pattern of news distortion,’” Carr said when speaking with conservative podcaster Benny Johnson.
“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr continued. “These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”
