President Trump said on Thursday that regulators should consider revoking the licenses of broadcasters that air negative coverage or commentary of him, indicating that his assault on critics’ language is motivated at least in part by personal animus.
Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One, Mr. Trump called the networks “an arm of the Democrat party” who are out to get him.
“I have read someplace that the networks were 97 percent against me, I get 97 percent negative, and yet I won and easily,” Mr. Trump said as he returned to Washington following a state visit to Britain, adding: “I would think maybe their license should be taken away.”
The comments were a remarkable escalation in a coordinated attack by Mr. Trump and his top aides, who are using the threat of the power of the American government to silence criticism or dissent following the assassination of the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk.
In the last week, White House has moved to target the tax status of liberal groups, monitor online speech, deny visas and threaten to designate certain groups as domestic terrorists. The administration has argued such measures are necessary to crack down on hate speech that could incite violence, even as Democrats and others warn that it amounts to a crackdown on opposing views.
On Wednesday, ABC pulled Jimmy Kimmel’s show “indefinitely” after pressure from the Federal Communications Commission chairman, Brendan Carr, over the late-night host’s comments about Mr. Kirk.
Mr. Trump on Thursday indicated that Mr. Carr should go even further and scrutinize the broadcast licenses of local television stations that run programming from the major networks, suggesting that both their news coverage and late-night comedy shows were unfairly tilted against him. “They give me only bad publicity,” he said.
“It will be up to Brendan Carr,” the president said, calling him “a patriot” and “a tough guy.”
A spokesman for the F.C.C. did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Mr. Trump’s remarks.
But Mr. Carr said in a Fox News interview on Thursday that ABC’s pulling the Kimmel show off air was not “the last shoe to drop.”
“This is a massive shift that’s taking place in the media ecosystem,” he said. “And I think the consequences are going to continue to flow.”
Mr. Carr told CNBC that holding a broadcast license was a privilege. “It comes with an obligation to serve the public interest,” he said.
The Federal Communications Commission can revoke a broadcast license under a rarely invoked public interest standard. If regulators were to follow Mr. Trump’s lead and pull licenses of broadcasters who air critical views about the president, the agency would surely face First Amendment challenges. But Mr. Trump and his F.C.C. head have already effectively used the agency’s oversight of licenses to wield influence over the networks, which they argue have a liberal bias that does not serve the public.
Anna M. Gomez, the lone Democrat on the F.C.C., said the commission “does not have the authority, the ability or the constitutional right to police content or punish broadcasters for speech the government dislikes.”
“We cannot allow an inexcusable act of political violence to be twisted into a justification for government censorship and control,” she said in a statement.
The pressure campaign is an about-face for Republicans and for Mr. Trump, who swept back into the White House with promises to wipe out so-called cancel culture and promised during his inauguration to “stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America,” as he said in his inaugural speech earlier this year.
But in recent days, the president and top administration officials — including Vice President JD Vance, Attorney General Pam Bondi and Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff — drastically changed their emphasis.
They have seized on those who have appeared to celebrate Mr. Kirk’s death or been critical of his positions as evidence of what they allege is a left-wing network that funds and incites violence. Mr. Trump has blamed what he called the “radical left” for political violence, dismissing concerns about extremists on the right.
Asked on Thursday about the state of free speech in America, Mr. Trump argued that Mr. Kimmel had been “fired because he had bad ratings” and “he said a horrible thing.”
“You could call that free speech or not,” Mr. Trump said.
The White House referred questions about Mr. Trump targeting of broadcasters who allow unflattering coverage or commentary about him to the F.C.C.
But Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, responded to questions about Mr. Kimmel, saying his suspension had “nothing to do with free speech.”
“A private company deciding not to give someone a TV show is incomparable to the Biden administration’s censorship regime where they pressured social media companies to prevent Americans from speaking out with opinions they didn’t like,” she said.
Republicans have accused the Biden administration of censorship over its efforts to combat what it deemed to be misinformation about the coronavirus vaccine and election fraud. The Supreme Court, however, last year rejected the Republican-led challenge over the administration’s contacts with social media companies.
Mr. Trump and his conservative allies in recent years have accused the political opposition of perpetuating a “cancel culture” that policed language and suppressed the views of conservative voices online, in U.S. politics and overseas.
Now Democrats are the ones warning about threats to the First Amendment, accusing Mr. Trump of infringing on the right to free speech.
A group of congressional Democrats said Thursday they would introduce legislation to bolster legal protections for people targeted by Mr. Trump for speaking freely.
Democratic leaders in the House called for the resignation of Mr. Carr for engaging in what they called a “corrupt abuse of power” in pressuring ABC to pull Mr. Kimmel’s late-night show from the air.
And former President Barack Obama, who said this week that the nation was in “political crisis,” accused the Trump administration of hypocrisy.
“After years of complaining about cancel culture, the current administration has taken it to a new and dangerous level by routinely threatening regulatory action against media companies unless they muzzle or fire reporters and commentators it doesn’t like,” Mr. Obama wrote in a post on social media, adding that this kind of “government coercion” was what the First Amendment was designed to prevent.
Some conservatives have said the administration’s actions are a long time coming, arguing that Democrats unfairly targeted Republicans when they were in power.
But some on the right expressed concern about the administration’s tactics.
After Ms. Bondi suggested that the Justice Department would target “hate speech” earlier this week, the conservative host Tucker Carlson said on his podcast that he hoped the “turmoil we’re seeing in the aftermath” of Mr. Kirk’s killing “won’t be leveraged to bring hate speech laws to this country.”
“If that does happen, there is never a more justified moment for civil disobedience than that,” Mr. Carlson said. “If they can tell you what to say, they’re telling you what to think, there is nothing they can’t do to you.”
It is a far cry from just months ago, when Mr. Trump and his aides said they were prepared to use the federal government to defend freedom of expression.
When Mr. Trump came into office, he said the previous administration “trampled free speech rights by censoring Americans’ speech on online platforms” in an executive order called “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship.”
Mr. Trump’s order directed his administration to ensure no federal government employee “would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen.”
“Government censorship of speech is intolerable in a free society,” according to the executive order.
Weeks later, Mr. Vance argued that a Department of Government Efficiency staff member who had resigned after being linked to racist posts about Indians he made on X under a pseudonym should be reinstated.
“I don’t think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life,” wrote Mr. Vance, whose wife, Usha Vance, is the daughter of Indian immigrants.
Mr. Vance, in particular, has framed himself as a defender of free speech for conservatives both in the United States and overseas. Earlier this year, the vice president stunned and silenced hundreds of attendees at the Munich Security Conference when he urged European leaders to end the isolation of far-right parties across the continent.
“You cannot win a democratic mandate by censoring your opponents or putting them in jail,” Mr. Vance told the gathered European leaders. “Whether that’s the leader of the opposition, a humble Christian praying in her own home or a journalist trying to report the news.”
Cecilia Kang, Annie Karni and Luke Broadwater contributed reporting.