America's slow-motion coup speeds up: Tough lessons of the Kimmel affair

America’s slow-motion coup speeds up: Tough lessons of the Kimmel affair
MAGA forces told us all along they wanted to crush free speech. Maybe we'll believe them now

By Andrew O'Hehir
Executive Editor
Published September 21, 2025 6:45AM (EDT)


(Salon) It appears that Americans required a second and even more brutal lesson than the one delivered during Donald Trump’s first term: Democracy does not come with guarantees, and requires not just the consent of the governed but also their active participation. Its so-called institutions, among them our nation’s increasingly threadbare 18th-century Constitution, are visibly crumbling, as if eaten away from within by an army of persistent termites.

Trump sat next to British Prime Minister Keir Starmer at the latter’s English country retreat on Thursday and delivered a veritable torrent of half-truths, misstatements, fantasies and flat-out lies: Inflation had been vanquished, fuel prices were down, the U.S. economy was booming, he had personally resolved seven (!) international conflicts, although those did not, sadly enough, include the ones in Ukraine and Gaza. Public opinion polls suggest it might be hard to find anyone in America who believes all that, even among Republican voters. But Trump and his minions have a plan — or concepts of a plan, we might say — to change that too.

When asked about ABC’s abrupt decision to “suspend” Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night talk show, the president tried to have it both ways in classic Trumpian fashion, strutting for his fans just a bit while also brushing off the question with obvious lies. “Jimmy Kimmel was fired because he had bad ratings” and “for lack of talent,” he said, but oh yeah, by the way, Kimmel had also “said a horrible thing about a great gentleman known as Charlie Kirk.” (Unnecessary fact check: Kimmel hadn’t said anything about Kirk, horrible or otherwise, and had offered routine social-media condolences to Kirk’s family.)

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The MAGA assault on late-night comedy — which is doubly vulnerable, as both a fading cultural institution and the veritable definition of First Amendment-protected speech — represents a kind of pincer movement, bringing together multiple overlapping fascist tendencies. On one hand, we see the consolidation of mainstream media companies, now increasingly under the oligarchic control of Big Tech and finance capital, and increasingly dependent on the corrupt Trump regime to approve their corrupt cartel-building mergers and acquisitions. On the other, we see the regime’s undisguised campaign to restrict and punish dissent, and to redefine “free speech” as a conditional benefit conferred only on its most loyal grovelers and forelock-tuggers, and subject to revocation at any time. ...............(more)

https://www.salon.com/2025/09/21/americas-slow-motion-coup-speeds-up-tough-lessons-of-the-kimmel-affair/