The Nation

05/01/2026

Even as President Donald Trump’s hold over the electorate wanes, his administration’s naked authoritarian tendencies intensify. If you can tell a man’s mettle by how he behaves under pressure, Trump—mired in a ludicrous standoff of his own making with Iran and cratering in the polls—is putting on a display of raw narcissism and petty cruelty unparalleled among modern democracies.

When Robert Mueller died in March, Trump went onto social media to post a note explaining that he was glad that Mueller was dead. This was after he had declared that the murder of Rob Reiner and his wife by their mentally ill son was a result of “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” Yet, when late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel made a mildly off-color joke about Melania Trump looking like an “expectant widow”—this was before the shooting and possible assassination attempt at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner—Trump responded first by demanding, again, that ABC fire Kimmel and then by siccing Brendan Carr’s pliant FCC onto the broadcaster, initiating an unprecedented review of many of the network’s local licenses.

The idea of the FCC head serving as a “hatchet man” is “really something,” Jessie Walker, books editor at Reason Magazine and author of Rebels on the Air: An Alternative History of Radio in America, told me. “They’re not being subtle about what they are doing at all.”

The FCC has argued that the scrutiny being accorded ABC licenses is solely to do with an investigation into its diversity policies (since, clearly, according to the white supremacist mores of the administration any efforts to present a diverse face to US viewers are somehow, inherently, illegitimate). Yet the timing of this makes it all too clear that in reality it is spiteful, vengeance politics, designed to pressure ABC into ditching Kimmel.

In all likelihood, the efforts to pull ABC affiliates from the air will go nowhere; after all, the broadcaster’s parent company, Disney, has pretty deep pockets, and its lawyers aren’t going to let the company go quietly into the night. But the mere fact that the Trump administration is attempting to pull this trick shows just how far from democratic norms it has strayed and just how much it is willing to lean into the playbook used to such great effect over the past two decades by authoritarian leaders such as Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, and Tayyip Erdoğan. “If they get away with it, you have to ask what is the next step they would take?” Walker said.