Brendan Carr Bricks His Jimmy Kimmel Bank Shot

Earlier this week, the Trumps called for ABC, and its corporate parent Disney, to fire Jimmy Kimmel after the late-night host made a joke at their expense.

Kimmel’s joke about the first couple’s age difference was delivered on air two days before last Saturday’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, which was canceled after a gunman attempted to enter the venue. 

Trump lackey and FCC Chairman Brendan Carr promptly jumped in to back the Trumps’ demands, issuing an order to initiate early license reviews of ABC’s eight broadcast station licenses. 

The Carr FCC claimed this had nothing to do with Kimmel, pointing to the three paragraph order where his Media Bureau exercised enough discipline to refrain from mentioning the late-night host.

But the timing was no coincidence. Carr’s move is clearly unconstitutional retribution for a joke a thin-skinned Donald Trump didn’t like. Nobody who is serious believes Carr’s bullshit, especially given his penchant for using his government perch to suppress speech the president dislikes and violating his oath to uphold the First Amendment.

Notably, FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez, who isn’t known for hyperbole, called the move “the FCC’s most egregious attack on the First Amendment to date.”

No one is buying Carr’s latest head fake

Indeed, since becoming chairman, Carr has threatened multiple actions against the network, including opening at least three dubious investigations following instances in which ABC news and entertainment programming upset Trump.

In September 2025, Disney infamously suspended Kimmel after Carr threatened action in response to a joke told during the comedian’s late-night monologue. To say this didn’t end well for Carr is an understatement. ABC reinstated Kimmel after an intense public backlash. Carr was roundly criticized by Republicans and Democrats alike, and the butt of jokes by late-night comedians and South Park. Even the Republican Chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, Ted Cruz, called Carr’s behavior “dangerous as hell” and hauled him before the committee for an oversight hearing.

Carr mistakenly believes he can avoid another round of criticism by dressing up this latest ABC attack as a legitimate FCC procedure, even as his motivations are clear: using his position of power to silence any dissent the president doesn’t like. This extraordinary and unconstitutional attack on the media is nothing more than another favor to the most fragile president in U.S. history. 

Carr’s head fake is hiding his real motivations for going after Kimmel behind bogus claims that ABC’s diversity, equity and inclusion policies are somehow discriminatory. But the Trump FCC censorship playbook is so overexposed that nobody is falling for it anymore.

Early FCC broadcast license reviews are incredibly unusual

The FCC has authority to review station licenses every eight years — and the next ABC license renewals weren’t supposed to happen until 2028. Usually this is more or less a rubber-stamp process, and the bar to revoke licenses is extremely high. While not technically unprecedented, it is highly unusual for the FCC to pursue early license renewals. In my two decades as an attorney and FCC nerd, I have never seen it happen.

Just how unusual is this maneuver? The only other time in recent memory that the FCC has initiated an early license review is … wait for it … the day before yesterday, when Carr issued a similarly scant order against Bridge News, LLC for an unauthorized broadcast license transfer. If that charge were true, that would be an actual violation of the Communications Act, unlike Carr’s unspecified “discrimination” claims and his own unlawful censorship urges. 

If this strikes you as a flimsy crutch to justify Carr’s politically motivated attack on ABC for failing to muzzle Kimmel, then you’re on to something.

Of course, it’s possible that I’ve missed things. So I did a late-night dive and found only one proceeding where the FCC even mentioned its authority to initiate early renewal proceedings. In that 1980 case, In Re Applications of RKO General Inc., the FCC declined to initiate early renewals of all RKO licenses, despite having revoked some of RKO’s licenses due to the company’s engagement in a host of corrupt and illegal activities. These included “reciprocal trade practices which were anticompetitive and possibly illegal,” knowingly lying to and withholding relevant information from the FCC, and other misconduct like “improper domestic political contributions, schemes which defrauded its affiliates, improper foreign payments and improper secret accounts designed to avoid foreign tax and currency exchange laws.” Yikes.

When in doubt, blame it on diversity

Carr’s order claims that expediting license reviews is necessary to aid the agency’s diversity, equity and inclusion investigation, but fails to assert any instances of ABC engaging in unlawful discrimination despite having actively investigated the network for more than a year now. 

This investigation amounts to nothing more than an attempt to legitimize and obscure discrimination against women, people of color, disabled people and LGBTQIA+ people. It is morally and legally wrong. Congress created the FCC to regulate communications without discriminating on the basis of one’s protected status, not to weaponize anti-discrimination laws to silence free expression.

So even Carr’s proffered justification is bad policy. It’s immoral, and not based on any actual claim of ABC wrongdoing. But Carr can kill two birds with one stone in Trump’s incessant culture wars: attacking programs designed to remedy racism and discrimination while also going after critics and comedians for their speech.  

Protect free speech, impeach Carr

Carr’s dangerous assault on free speech won’t stand up to First Amendment scrutiny. As Gomez said in her statement, this is nothing more than a political stunt and it won’t stick so long as ABC actually stands up for itself.

But making it stick isn’t really the point. The threats are the point. Carr and Trump understand that when broadcasters are under editorial scrutiny by the government, they will self-censor and pull punches when reporting on the president’s lawless and corrupt behavior. That’s what the First Amendment is meant to protect us from.

ABC and Disney leadership must stand strong on behalf of their First Amendment right to air content without government intrusion and censorship. Buckling in advance to pressure from this administration and its obsequious FCC chairman didn’t work when the company suspended Kimmel last year. Bullies like Trump just always come back for more. It would be a grave mistake today to fold against these latest chilling government threats from Trump’s censorship czar.

How many more times will we let Carr get away with violating his oath to uphold the Constitution? 

If we had a stronger, less consolidated and more independent media system, we wouldn’t be so vulnerable to attack. If Congress were doing its job, it would impeach Brendan Carr. Enough already.