What horrifies you thrills many of his supporters — and he wants to make sure they give him the credit for it, not themselves.

Last night Stephen Colbert opened The Late Show by announcing “we are all Jimmy Kimmel,” immediately getting it wrong. I don’t have a late night television show, for one thing, and neither do you. Stephen Colbert only has one for the next few months, himself. Jimmy Kimmel, meanwhile, has only been suspended from boring an audience of less than 2 million senior citizens on ABC every night with his talk show Jimmy Kimmel Live! He probably won’t be officially terminated, they’ll just keep him off the air while they let his contract run out. (Distinctions matter — Colbert got better treatment, all things considered.)

On the one hand, it’s tempting to feel only smug satisfaction at this turn of events. Kimmel really will not be missed; he has been more than merely unfunny for over 20 years now, he has used his increasingly unwatched show (once envisioned as a “bro-friendly” youth-oriented alternative to the Tonight Show or CBS’s Late Show) as a daily-nightly deployer of the Democratic Party’s political message of the moment. His monologues are now almost exclusively political, and are delivered with all of the comedic timing of 1st-generation AI.

So when he joined in the obscene gaslighting about what motivated the killer of Charlie Kirk — motives at that time well knowable to anyone following the news — it was almost certainly in service to a message of disinformation being floated around among left-wing political circles: “The MAGA gang is desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them,” he blurted forth in his opening monologue.

I have seen a number of people currently rushing to the defense of Kimmel call this a “joke,” or some sort of light-hearted jape. But I can read. No, it was a blunt statement of a lie, and done in the typical style Kimmel (or his writers) typically employs to get enormous lies across in his monologues — as indirection, something mentioned in passing to set up a nominal joke — the fact-based premise you’re supposed to take seriously, not the punchline. The inference he wants you to draw from his phrasing is clear: “Obviously the killer was a MAGA freak, and now these liars are trying to pretend it was anyone but them.”

This is obvious from context, too. Have you seen the entire monologue, as opposed to the brief one-minute clip circulating on social media? (Given Kimmel’s current ratings, my firm bet is “no.”) Click and watch, and then you will understand that what immediately preceded it was Kimmel ranting about JD Vance’s assertion — made while guest-hosting Charlie Kirk’s show — that statistically speaking a disproportionate amount of “spectacular public violence” (mass shootings, assassinations, etc.) comes from killers either inspired or deranged by left-coded causes.

You and I both know that Vance was on to something with this, and that’s why Kimmel (or his staffers) really spit the bit: It is the left’s fear of seeing their ideological chickens finally coming home to roost that has quietly motivated this entire (only semi-organic) campaign to cast Charlie Kirk’s killer as a Groyper rather than the trans-addled, online radicalized, vacant-eyed killer that he is. With his carefully bland untruth, Kimmel — long after many of his internet-savvy peers had given up the ghost — was attempting to subtly inject the idea that Kirk was killed by his “his own team” into the minds of an audience that is notably less up-to-speed on current events, because they are older and disengaged.

So I want to simply wipe my hands of this entire affair and say good riddance to Jimmy Kimmel. ABC/Disney had every reason and right to suspend his show, given not only his conduct but the genuine outrage it triggered. In fact, according to the Wall Street Journal’s reporting from last night, Kimmel was prepared to go out on Wednesday and deliver a “follow-up” monologue that would have doubled down, accusing the MAGA movement of “purposefully twist[ing]” his words. If Kimmel was about to make things infinitely worse for his network by digging in, I’m actually not sure what ABC was supposed to do except yank him. They aren’t required to allow him to enrage half of America on their airwaves, especially if they’ve been tipped that it’s coming in advance.

Seen from the perspective of ABC/Disney, this looks like a business decision rather than a “free speech” issue: Kimmel, already losing money for the network, already on borrowed time, was now setting their reputation on fire. (It’s already been one battle after another in the Wokeness Wars for the Disney/Lucasfilm/Marvel component of this massive media conglomerate; now that all is relatively quiet on the western front, they don’t need a new fight they didn’t even choose.)

Or rather, it would have looked like a business decision were it not for Donald Trump. For months now — long before Kirk’s assassination, Trump has been making plain threats in the open to revoke the broadcasting licenses of ABC, NBC, or any other network that won’t stop criticizing him. He makes no bones about his reasons for this: “All they do is hit Trump. They’re licensed. They’re not allowed to do that.” He has been joined in this most recently by his own FCC commissioner, Brendan Carr — who, seeking to please his boss, went on various podcasts and cable news appearances to mimic his language, and in recent days specifically upbraided ABC for Kimmel’s monologue. (“We can do this the easy way or we can do this the hard way,” said Carr, sounding not the slightest bit like a mafia underboss brandishing a hammer while eyeing your right kneecap.)

This is why the public threats and jawboning are so toxic — because if the reporting on this is to be trusted, then ABC was likely to have yanked Kimmel off the air anyway. Had Trump and Carr said nothing, instead of engaging in over a month’s worth of prior idle threats to revoke ABC’s broadcast license, Kimmel would have been canned or severely disciplined regardless. (The network’s affiliates would have seen to that.) Instead, the waters are now hopelessly muddied: Kimmel and the left have a semi-plausible martyr narrative, with Trump cast as the Big Bad Bully who beat him down.

My one real insight into this entire mess is that this is precisely the way Trump wants it. He wants to be seen as the reason for this. He likes being the bully, but more importantly than that, he has a desperate need to occupy the center spotlight — to be the main character of the story, the first mover in all things, the ringleader of the Carnival of Fools. (This subject alone would make for a fantastic in-depth article, which is why you’re lucky that my newest piece for the magazine was published yesterday.)

It’s not new; when Stephen Colbert was canceled, Trump took to Truth Social to proudly crow that he hoped he was the reason why — not falling ratings, or unsustainable overheads, or unfunniness, but Trump’s threats. Good classical liberals gasp when they hear Trump say things like this — “doesn’t he know how contemptuous of freedom of speech that sounds?” — and I think it’s well past time to acknowledge that the reason Trump sounds like he doesn’t care about the First Amendment is because he doesn’t really care about the First Amendment. (The even scarier insight is that many of his supporters don’t care either — or at least are willing to sublimate their previous commitments when Trump demands it.)

There is more to be said in the future about the dizzying reality that, for the first time in my living memory, media organizations are visibly and cravenly acting under pressure from the MAGA right to censor and shape their cultural output, rather than pressure from the cultural left. (The left, of course, has been cancelling entertainers for well over a decade now, as if it had taken up the practice like seasonal slash-and-burn agriculture.) The fact that this would be happening independent of Trump’s threats is precisely the reason he has decided to thrust himself into the position of leading the parade. What horrifies you thrills many of his supporters — and he wants to make sure they give him the credit for it, not themselves.