Trump Begged ABC To Censor Jimmy Kimmel

According to an alarming new report from Rolling Stone, Donald Trump forced his staffers (while he was President) to make calls to Disney to order them to censor Jimmy Kimmel for telling jokes about Trump. Disney is the parent company of ABC, where Kimmel's late night program airs. This is now the SECOND time that Trump's administration tried to silence his critics on mainstream media, as Farron Cousins explains.

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*This transcript was auto-generated. Please excuse any typos.

According to a new report from Rolling Stone, Donald Trump, while he was president of the United States, was apparently so angry at Jimmy Kimmel's monologues and his jokes about Donald Trump, that he would pepper into the monologues, that he actually forced his staffers to call Disney, the parent company of a b C that runs Kimmel's show and beg them to somehow silence him, maybe punish him for telling jokes about the sitting president of the United States, which has been a staple of late night television since forever. I mean, pretty much making fun of Presidents is what comedians and late Night hosts and Saturday Night, Saturday Night Live, that's what they've always done, regardless of the President's party affiliation. But Trump being the most thin-skinned human being to ever exist, forced his staffers to place at least two phone calls into Disney to demand that they do something about Jimmy Kimmel and his horrible jokes about Donald Trump.

Now, Republicans for many, many years now have accused social media of of censoring Republicans. They're violating our, our free speech. They tell us, and here we had an actual sitting president forcing his staff to call up a private company to demand that they quite literally violate the First Amendment rights of an entertainer, because that is what Jimmy Kimmel is. He is an entertainer. And now I just want you to think about that because again, the Republicans have cried foul against Facebook and Twitter and, and YouTube and all other outlets saying, they're censoring us. They're violating our First Amendment rights. Nope, that's not a violation of First Amendment rights. What Trump did, however, could easily be construed as a violation of someone's First Amendment rights because he was the government. He wasn't a private company, you know, shadow banning or whatever stupid thing Republicans want to claim that didn't actually happen.

Um, he was the government wanting somebody silenced because he didn't like what they were saying, even though they have a constitutional right to say those things. Now, if you're a regular viewer here at, uh, fair and Balanced, you've also heard me talk about Jimmy Kimmel plenty of times, actually. Just had a segment go up over the weekend talking about Jimmy Kimmel. And here's the thing, I always talk about how important it is for these late night hosts, whether it's Jimmy Kimmel or Stephen Colbert or Seth Myers, how important it is for them to talk about these political stories because they're reaching an audience that may not otherwise be consuming political news. This story validates what I have been saying for many years now, because Trump understood how damaging it was, not that

Kimmel was making fun of him, but that Kimmel was even talking about these news issues to an audience that's not tuning in for news. They're tuning in to to laugh, they're tuning in to be entertained, and they accidentally learned something as a result of it. That, as I have repeatedly said, is the power that these comics have. It's the power that, uh, John Stewart had with The Daily Show, with what he turned that program into. Let's not forget the first two years of The Daily Show, when John Stewart was not hosting it, it didn't really cover news. They, they literally were like a Saturday Night Live weekend update 30 minute program. They, they made stuff up. And it was funny, Stewart kind of changed that after a year or two, and it did become more political, still tons of jokes and mocking things, but it wasn't what it originally started out as.

And now these other late night hosts, of course, have kind of picked up on that and they tell stories in the news and they make fun of it. But you're also learning something along the way. And that is what Donald Trump was so afraid of. He was so afraid of it. In fact, that this attack on Jimmy Kimmel was not actually the first time his administration attacked a late night host. The first time came in 2017 when his FCC commissioner Oje Pie, actually threatened to investigate Stephen Colbert for making fun of Donald Trump on his late night program.