Jimmy Kimmel Live! is back on air and Donald Trump, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, and hordes of conservative hypocrites are likely throwing a temper tantrum that free speech prevailed. Kimmel’s late night talk show wasn’t off the air long before ABC caved for the second time in just a matter of days. The TV network didn’t even attempt to fight back against Trump’s FCC when they first decided to can Kimmel. Then, following a $4 billion loss in Disney’s (ABC parent company) market valuation, ABC caved again when they made the bet that the financial penalty would be far greater than any threat the FCC or Trump’s administration could follow through on. As the saying goes, money talks and bullish!t runs a marathon.
While Donald whined and complained about Kimmel’s jokes and his lack of ratings, that same childish bellyaching might have just given the comedian his best ratings in years. According to Economic Times, Kimmel’s show was averaging about 1.77 million viewers, but early prognostications suggest that last night’s return episode will surge well past that mark. It will be very interesting to see what the final number is, and we have no doubt that Trump will take credit for the bump.
Kimmel hit the stage to a rapturous studio audience who was no doubt eager to hear what he said in the aftermath of the controversy, and based on their reactions, they were not disappointed. Kimmel wasted no time clapping back at Donald for falsely celebrating his “firing” (he was never fired) and indirectly celebrating the loss of hundreds of American jobs: “Our leader celebrates Americans losing their livelihoods because he can’t take a joke.”
Kimmel also continued to hammer home the point about the hypocrisy of this behavior, considering that Trump, MAGA, and conservatives en masse have howled about “putting America first” for years now.
Via CNN:
“They know how lucky we are here,” Kimmel said. “Our freedom to speak is what they admire most about this country, and that’s something I’m embarrassed to say I took for granted until they pulled my friend Stephen off the air,” a reference to CBS host Stephen Colbert, “and tried to coerce the affiliates who run our show in the cities that you live in to take my show off the air. That’s not legal. That’s not American. That is un-American.”
Jimmy wasn’t about to let Brendan Carr off the hook for putting his thumb on the scale when he told conservative podcaster Benny Johnson that “[ABC] can do this the easy way or the hard way” while explicitly expressing his desire for punishment for Kimmel’s benign joke about Trump’s reaction to Charlie Kirk’s murder.
Oh, but there was more! Kimmel invited Robert De Niro on to do a live sketch mocking Carr and the FCC for their obsequiousness toward Trump and the MAGA agenda. It was glorious.
Good job, Jimmy. Welcome back.
