U.S. President Donald Trump at the White House on Monday.Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
It’s not against the law to insult, satirize or generally crack wise about the president of the United States, and odds are it won’t be any time soon. But if so, it won’t be thanks to Donald Trump.
Mr. Trump was gleeful last week after The Walt Disney Company, which owns the ABC network, suspended the late-night talk show Jimmy Kimmel Live! because the eponymous host said something the President and his followers found disagreeable.
Mr. Trump was no doubt less pleased on Monday after Disney announced that Mr. Kimmel will return to the air Tuesday, a needed show of defiance in worrying times.
Mr. Kimmel’s heresy was to say that the suspect in the assassination of the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk was a supporter of Mr. Trump’s MAGA movement. While the political leanings of the suspect weren’t known at the time, the comment proved very quickly to be wrong, adding to the emotional outrage on the right after that horrible killing.
Under no circumstances in a country that has a vaunted constitutional protection for free speech did Mr. Kimmel merit his fate (the same applies 1,000 times more to Mr. Kirk). His suspension suggested that personalities who make a living mocking and knocking the President could lose their jobs, and that their bosses and owners could suffer, too.
Jimmy Kimmel to return after suspension over Charlie Kirk comments
That was what appears to have also happened in July after CBS, which is owned by Paramount, announced it is cancelling The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, another late-night show whose host dedicates a lot of his comic energy to making fun of Mr. Trump’s appearance, mannerisms, political blunders, hypocrisies and reality-bending pronouncements.
The news that the long-running show will be ending next May came shortly after Mr. Colbert had accused Paramount of paying Mr. Trump a ”big, fat bribe” in the form of a US$16-million settlement for a questionable libel suit that the studio chose not to contest in court.
Paramount was seeking a merger with another studio at the time, and it needed the regulatory approval of the Federal Communications Commission to see it through.
Mr. Trump gloated about the cancellation, though, and said on social media that, “I hear Jimmy Kimmel is next.”
So when the short-lived suspension of Jimmy Kimmel Live! came after the Trump-appointed chair of the FCC – which also licenses TV stations – suggested it would be in Disney’s interests to drop the show, alarms went off loudly.
“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Brendan Carr said ominously. Mr. Trump called Mr. Carr a “patriot” and said flatly he was in favour of revoking the licences of networks that give him “bad publicity or press.”
Hundreds of Hollywood stars sign letter defending free speech over Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension
Mr. Trump has never hidden that he is determined to punish and silence his critics. “I hate my opponent,” he said at the memorial for Mr. Kirk on Sunday, just after Mr. Kirk’s widow made a point of forgiving his killer. “And I don’t want the best for them.”
The President and his allies are now determined to use the death of Mr. Kirk as a launching pad to crack down on Mr. Trump’s antagonizers, whether they are political foes, demonstrators or comics with a TV show.
Were they able to successfully silence comedians, it would be a tragedy for the United States. The country was built on the proposition that free people can speak their minds about their leaders without fear of being thrown in irons for the crime of lèse majesté.
No democracy can thrive if the public can’t laugh at their naked emperors and buffoonish aristocrats. Humour, and especially satire, reduce those with an authoritarian bent to a human scale and strips them of their power. Silencing the jokers and jesters is the first step toward silencing everyone.
It happened in Russia under President Vladimir Putin, as many are pointing out this week. In 2000, he pressured a Moscow TV network to cancel a show that used puppets to satirize Russian leaders and elites. Mr. Putin’s predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, didn’t like the show but tolerated it.
Not so Mr. Putin, who went on to force TV networks to drop other targeted shows, and to slowly squeeze the media until it became the Kremlin puppet show it mostly is today.
Just as Groucho Marx once said he wouldn’t join any club that would accept people like him as a member, no one should want to live in a country whose head of state turns satire and criticism into firing offences. Freedom of speech ends up being the butt of the joke.