Trump’s latest desperate moves
Earlier today, the Federal Communications Commission’s David J. Brown issued a letter that would have been unthinkable coming from the FCC under any other president. The letter was not to inform or protect the American people from any real threat, but instead to further the President of the United States’ personal hit list. And his reason for sending this letter was clear. To go after anyone who refuses to fall in line with Trump’s demands, and to scare and silence dissent on Donald Trump’s behalf. That intent became clear when he invoked federal authority to target the network airing a comedian the President has publicly demanded be fired.
Buried inside that letter is where it becomes more dangerous. In just a few lines of bureaucratic language, the FCC invoked rules that were never meant to be used because a president doesn’t like someone, the criticism directed at him, or a comedian’s jokes. They are claiming the authority to force a broadcaster into early license renewal simply by declaring it “essential” to an investigation.
Not because the license is expiring, or because a violation has been proven or even identified. But because labeling something “essential” gives them a pretext to act. And once that process begins, the government can examine whether that network has met its so-called “public interest obligations,” a standard so broad it can be stretched to justify almost anything, including targeting Jimmy Kimmel because Donald J. Trump has a longstanding vendetta against him and is now willing to weaponize the federal government to punish him for speaking out.
Donald Trump’s contempt for Jimmy Kimmel is nothing new, but it rose to a new level on Thursday, April 23rd, after Kimmel said: “Our First Lady, Melania, is here. Look at Melania, so beautiful. Mrs. Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow” on a segment of his late night show that pretended to show Melania and their son Barron sitting in his studio. Kimmel said the “widow” joke was about the age difference between Melania Trump and her husband. A light roast. The kind of thing that has been standard fare at the Correspondents’ Dinner for decades. But two days after it aired, the incident at the correspondents’ dinner happened, and the White House decided it was the perfect opportunity to blame Kimmel for someone else’s actions.
The White House’s new coordinated attack on Kimmel started on Monday, with Melania posting a statement calling Kimmel’s joke “hateful and violent rhetoric intended to divide our country.” She called on ABC to “take a stand.” She also called him a coward. “Kimmel hides behind ABC,” she wrote, “because he knows the network will keep running cover to protect him.” That is the First Lady of the United States publicly pressuring a broadcast network.
Trump also took to social media to attack Kimmel, posting that the joke was “a despicable call to violence” and demanding Kimmel be “immediately fired by Disney and ABC.” Karoline Leavitt stood at the White House podium and condemned Kimmel for “disgusting” remarks.
It didn’t stop there. Steven Cheung, the White House Communications Director, took to X, the platform formerly called Twitter, today, and called Kimmel “a shit human being” and said Kimmel “should be shunned for the rest of his life.” That is actually what the White House Communications Director said on his official government account.
Jimmy Kimmel’s response came quickly. He opened his Monday monologue with this: “You know how sometimes you wake up in the morning and the First Lady puts out a statement demanding you be fired from your job? We’ve all been there, right?”
Then he got serious. He explained what the joke actually was. “It was a very light roast joke about the fact that he’s almost 80, and she’s younger than I am.” He said it was “obviously a joke about their age difference and the look of joy we see on her face every time they’re together.” And then he said plainly: “It was not, by any stretch of the definition, a call to assassination. And they know that.”
He also said this: “Donald Trump is allowed to say whatever he wants to say, as are you and as am I, as are all of us, because under the First Amendment, we have, as Americans, a right to free speech.”
And then he said something that I thought was generous given the circumstances: “I am sorry that you and the President and everyone in that room on Saturday went through that. I really am. Just ‘cause no one got killed doesn’t mean it wasn’t traumatic and scary, and we should come together and be best.”
But if the Trumps really believed his joke had induced violence, Kimmel had something to show them. He played the clip. “If you want us to believe that a joke I made three days before this dinner had any effect on anything that happened, well, then, maybe someone should look into this psychic lady, too.” And then he played a video of the White House Press Secretary, Karoline Leavitt, from just a few hours before the actual shooting, standing on the red carpet outside the dinner hotel, telling Fox News: “This speech tonight will be classic Donald J. Trump. It will be funny, it will be entertaining, there will be some shots fired tonight in the room. Everyone should tune in, it’s going to be really great.”
The rules, as always, only flow in one direction. Kimmel’s joke made days before the shooting: grounds for government retaliation and demands for termination. Leavitt’s “shots fired” comment made hours before actual shots were fired: not a word or a question. Because they knew Kimmel was doing his job. Being a comedian and making a joke. They saw an opportunity to try to twist his words into something sinister in the hopes of silencing him.
And we knew this was coming. Trump and his no longer independent FCC have been waiting for this moment. Seven months ago, in September 2025, FCC Chair Brendan Carr went on Benny Johnson’s podcast and said this: “Frankly, when you see stuff like this, I mean, we can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct, to take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.” He also raised the possibility of license revocation directly. He told broadcasters it was time to push back on Disney and say they would no longer run Kimmel, warning that stations were “running into the possibility of fines or license revocation from the FCC” if they continued. ABC suspended Kimmel within hours after the first attack. Then, under public pressure, they brought him back. Then Kimmel made a widow joke this week, and the Trump Administration took their threats further with this letter and demand. Carr told them in September exactly what was coming. And today he delivered.
What this letter really does is that it takes the eight ABC broadcast station licenses, not due for renewal until 2028 at the earliest, and in essence makes them due in thirty days. An agency that had not filed an early renewal order in decades chose now to start. The official justification is DEI practices. But nobody believes it has anything to do with that.
And Jimmy Kimmel wasn’t the only one on Trump’s retribution list. Stephen Colbert hosted the number one late-night show in America until last July, when he went on air and called Paramount’s $16 million settlement with Trump what it was: “a big fat bribe,” designed to ensure FCC approval of the company’s merger with Skydance. Three days later, CBS canceled his show. CBS, once one of the most trusted names in American broadcasting, bent to the pressure rather than protect its own. The network that gave us Edward R. Murrow standing up to McCarthyism chose silence over its number one host. Trump celebrated on Truth Social. “I absolutely love that Colbert got fired,” he wrote. And then he added, “I hear Jimmy Kimmel is next.”
This is not about protecting the airwaves. This is not about DEI. This is not about a widow joke. This is about the fact that Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert go on television every night and make millions of people laugh at the most powerful man in the country. And those millions of people include a lot of people who are not necessarily following the news as closely as so many of us are. People who are not tracking the constitutional erosion happening in real time. They turn on their television as part of their nightly routine, and through comedy and laughter, they see the absurdity of what is being done to their country. Kimmel is making concerned citizens out of people who might otherwise never have become them. And that is precisely, exactly, specifically why Donald Trump cannot let him keep going.
What Donald Trump and his enablers are doing is one of the oldest moves in the authoritarian playbook. They always go after the comedians first. In 1939, Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels publicly ended the careers of five German comedians who had joked about Hitler’s building programs and mimicked the physical mannerisms of Nazi leaders. Goebbels justified it in the simplest way: National Socialism planned to rule for 2,000 years. It had, he said, “neither the time nor the patience” for critical humor.
When Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000, one of his first targets was NTV, Russia’s last independent television network. NTV aired a satirical puppet show called Kukly. It was the most-watched show in the country. The Kremlin sent a written directive demanding that the Putin puppet be removed from the show. NTV refused. Not long after, the network was brought under state control through Gazprom, Russia’s state energy giant. The official reasons given were bureaucratic. Financial and technical concerns. The show’s creator, Viktor Shenderovich, later stated the truth: “It was never just about the fate of Kukly. After the show ended, the genre of satire disappeared. Under Putin, it became impossible to make fun of the head of state.” Today, Shenderovich lives in exile in Warsaw, branded a foreign agent by the Russian government.
And the method used against NTV is the same method being used against ABC right now. Not a direct order, or an obvious ban. Instead: bureaucratic pressure. Regulatory leverage. Financial risk. Technical justifications are offered for what are, in plain sight, political acts. The goal is not to destroy the network in one move. The goal is to make the executives do the math. To make them wonder whether the next joke is worth the legal bills. To make them manage the risk by managing the comedian. Specifically, firing Jimmy Kimmel.
Even here, on American soil, we have done this before. Charlie Chaplin made “The Great Dictator” in 1940, a direct satire of Hitler and fascism. Rather than being celebrated as a patriot, he was hounded by a weaponized FBI, suspected of communism, and eventually driven into exile. We used our own government to silence a man for mocking a dictator, and we called it national security.
There is a reason authoritarians go after the comedians before almost anyone else. A chart can be rebutted, and speech can be argued against. A legal brief can be buried in procedure. But a joke that makes the strongman look ridiculous cannot be refuted. It punctures the myth of power, and it puts the great and terrible leader on the same level as everyone else in the room. And once people are laughing at him, genuinely laughing, the entire premise of the regime begins to crack. Former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul put it directly: “It’s parody, it’s satire that gets under his skin. It exposes a sign of weakness.”
And then today, the same day the FCC letter arrived, James Comey was indicted. Again. And although these are different departments, they are acting under the same blueprint. Both carry the same singular purpose: punish dissent. Threaten and scare those who speak out, and ruin the lives of those on Trump’s personal vendetta list.
This is the second time James Comey has been indicted. The first indictment, on unrelated charges, was thrown out by a federal judge who found the prosecutor had been unlawfully appointed. So they built a new case. Found a new grand jury. And came back.
The charge this time was surrounding the “crime” of posting a photo of seashells. Last May, Comey went for a walk on a beach in North Carolina. He came across shells arranged to form the numbers 86 and 47. He took a photo. Posted it to Instagram with the caption: “Cool shell formation on my beach walk.” Then he deleted it the same day, writing that he hadn’t realized the numbers were associated with violence and that he opposed violence of any kind.
“86” is one of the oldest pieces of American slang in the language. It dates to 1930s soda-fountain shorthand, where it meant an item was sold out or a customer was no longer welcome on the premises. Merriam-Webster defines it plainly: to get rid of, to refuse service to, to throw out. It is the kind of word anyone who has ever worked in a restaurant or bar knows instinctively. It is not a call to violence. It is the word you use when you cut someone off at the bar or pull a dish from the menu. Jesse Sheidlower, formerly editor-at-large for the Oxford English Dictionary, noted it when this controversy first erupted: the violent interpretation “is not nearly as widespread” as the common meaning, which is simply to jettison something no longer wanted. And yet that was enough for an arrest warrant.
Under normal circumstances, I would not find myself on “Team Comey.” I have never fully stood behind his decisions, particularly the choices he made in the final days of the 2016 election that I believe had real consequences for this country. That history has not disappeared. But this is not about whether I agree with James Comey. This is about the rule of law and our First Amendment right to political speech, and a president weaponizing the Department of Justice to silence and punish his enemies. On that, I stand with Comey completely. Because if they can indict a former FBI director for a beach photo he deleted the same day he posted it, they can come for any of us, for any reason, real or made up. That is exactly the point, and that is exactly the intention.
And today, a grand jury indicted him on two counts: making a threat against the president, and transmitting a threat in interstate commerce. Maximum sentence: ten years on each count. And the grand jury issued a warrant for his arrest. An indictment does not mean guilt. It does not mean the evidence is strong. It means a prosecutor presented one side of a story to a room of regular citizens who heard only what the government chose to show them, with no defense, no cross-examination, and no rebuttal. There is a reason lawyers have said for decades that a grand jury could indict a ham sandwich. The phrase was coined in 1985 by Sol Wachtler, then Chief Judge of the New York Court of Appeals, who argued that prosecutors have so much influence over grand juries that the process had become essentially a rubber stamp. The standard is not proof beyond a reasonable doubt. It is probable cause, a bar so low that a skilled prosecutor can clear it with almost anything they choose to present. That is how this works. That is the system being weaponized against James Comey right now.
What an indictment does mean, even when it leads to nothing, is that your life is effectively derailed. Legal fees. Depositions. Court dates. The public weight of having federal charges attached to your name. The stress of defending yourself against the full resources of the United States government. Even if every charge is eventually dismissed, which the first round of charges against Comey already were, you have spent months or years and potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars proving your innocence. That is not a side effect of this strategy. That is the strategy. Make it expensive. Make it exhausting. Make the next person think twice before they post anything, say anything, or step out of line.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, Trump’s former personal attorney, announced the charges at a press conference: “Threatening the life of the president of the United States will never be tolerated by the Department of Justice.” This is how they plan to pervert reality to fit their narrative. They do not need it to be true. They need it to be frightening.
Comey’s lawyer said they would contest the charges and looked forward to “vindicating Mr. Comey and the First Amendment.” And Comey himself posted a video to his Substack, titled simply “Seashells.” He opened by saying: “Well, they’re back. This time about a picture of seashells on a North Carolina beach a year ago. And this won’t be the end of it.” Then: “But nothing has changed with me. I’m still innocent. I’m still not afraid. And I still believe in the independent federal judiciary. So let’s go.” He closed with this: “It’s really important that all of us remember that this is not who we are as a country. This is not how the Department of Justice is supposed to be. And the good news is we get closer every day to restoring those values. Keep the faith.”
This is why the midterms matter so much. A quieted press. A silenced late-night comedy show. A weaponized DOJ. All of it is infrastructure for what comes next. He does not want us talking. He does not want us laughing. He does not want us reaching the people who haven’t yet understood what is happening. If we go quiet now, he wins the information war before the votes are even cast.
But he forgets who we are and what we are fighting for. Our country. And we are not going quiet. Remember the promise I made at the beginning of all this? That every time Trump attacks the First Amendment, the free press, or the right to speak, I would name it. I would call it out. Tonight is one of those nights, and I am calling it out. Normally, there is at least a small break in his attacks. Not today. He is getting more desperate by the day, and the attacks are coming faster. Which means we need to use the same momentum he has, to make sure the truth is faster than his propaganda and lies. The support you have shown me through paid memberships has been beyond anything I could imagine, and it’s the reason all of my posts, videos, and reporting are free for everyone. Thank you for supporting me. But please don’t stop at just my paid memberships. Support as many voices that are standing up to this as you can comfortably afford. Think about who is bringing you the news you need to know, and see if they have a paid option, too. This is how we make sure the support is there for us to keep this work going in the lead-up to the midterms.
And then take it a step further and go to Jimmy Kimmel’s social media pages. Find his personal accounts and the Jimmy Kimmel Live show page, on Facebook, on Instagram, on X, whatever platforms you use, and leave a comment. Thank him. Tell him you see what he is doing and why it matters. Tell him you stand with him and with everyone who works on his show.
This matters for three reasons. First, it is a direct message to Kimmel himself. We see you. We appreciate you. Keep going. Second, it is a message to everyone else who reads those comments. You are not alone in this. There is safety in numbers. It is okay to feel what you are feeling and to want to resist. Third, it is a message to ABC and to the Trump administration. This is not a single battle they can quietly win. They are not pressuring one comedian. They are pressuring all of us. And all of us are showing up.
That is what courage looks like right now. Not the absence of fear. Just the refusal to let fear win. These are two men targeted by the full machinery of the federal government, and neither one is going quietly. If they can hold the line facing what they are facing, we can hold it too. That is why I still have hope for America. And you should, too.
I’ll see you tomorrow,
Heather
PS. You can make a significant difference right now by subscribing to my Substack. Your support helps me cover more ground and keep telling the truth about the lies and destruction unfolding in this country.
This commentary represents my personal opinions and analysis of matters of public concern, informed by publicly available information. Any references to individuals constitute opinion and commentary protected under the First Amendment.
Picture of the day: We are back to our birdwatching ways in Central Park.
Sources:
https://www.npr.org/2026/04/28/nx-s1-5802997/fcc-abc-license-renewal-melania-trump-jimmy-kimmel
https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/27/politics/melania-trump-kimmel-whcd-shooting
https://fortune.com/2025/07/18/why-was-stephen-colbert-canceled-by-cbs-paramount-trump/
https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/28/politics/justice-department-indicts-ex-fbi-director-james-comey-again
https://www.axios.com/2026/04/28/trump-doj-indicts-james-comey
I do not believe that Melania wrote that post nor that Donald wrote his as both are far too joined up literally.
I have enjoyed seeing Melania animated because she has had the Queen to talk to - must less wooden and mechanical.
What was fascinating is seeing VP Vance not even crack a smile while the king was talking in the senate and only standing up to clap when everyone else did. Don’t think he understood a single word being said !!
Your posts are always so clear and eloquent. I appreciate your plain speech so much in these days when words are being twisted into lies.