President Donald Trump said Thursday that late-night host Jimmy Kimmel was taken off the air because of “bad ratings” and a “lack of talent,” remarks he delivered at a joint press conference with U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer in England.
The comments came a day after a Disney spokesperson said “Jimmy Kimmel Live” would be preempted indefinitely amid a backlash over Kimmel’s on-air comments about the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
Trump’s charge and the politics behind it
Standing beside Starmer, Trump asserted that Kimmel “was fired ’cause he had bad ratings” and had “said a horrible thing about a great gentleman known as Charlie Kirk.” He added, “He was fired for lack of talent.”
The president also celebrated the development on his social platform, calling the show “cancelled” and urging other broadcasters to follow suit with competing programs.
Trump’s attack on Kimmel fits a pattern for a president who has long framed late-night television as hostile to conservatives. He has frequently criticized monologues he sees as partisan and has argued that network comedy has become an extension of Democratic messaging.
The Kimmel controversy, coupled with the White House’s aggressive posture toward media institutions, offered a fresh flashpoint in this culture-war trench.
Why the show was preempted
A Disney spokesperson said the program would be “preempted indefinitely,” language that stops short of a permanent cancellation but signals a sustained pause.
Two of the country’s largest station groups moved quickly in tandem. Nexstar Media Group told affiliates it would preempt “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” “for the foreseeable future,” and Sinclair, Inc. said partner stations in 30 ABC markets would stop airing the show until further notice.
Those decisions effectively blacked out the program across wide swaths of the country, even before Disney announced its network-level preemption.
Behind the decisions were remarks Kimmel made on Monday’s episode suggesting that the shooter accused of assassinating Charlie Kirk was a Trump supporter. He said members of the “MAGA gang” were trying to cast the suspect as “anything other than one of them” to score political points. Critics called the comments incendiary and inaccurate, and conservative media amplified the pushback.
The FCC angle and mounting pressure
Adding to the pressure, FCC Chair Brendan Carr criticized Kimmel’s remarks during an interview, calling them among “the sickest conduct possible.” He warned that companies could “take action” on their own or face “additional work” from the agency.
The FCC does not pre-approve or script programming, but station licenses and indecency rules give the regulator oversight levers that station groups take seriously. Even the suggestion of heightened scrutiny can be enough to prompt corporate risk officers to move first.
Broadcast lawyers note that the FCC’s authority is not limitless, especially where political speech is concerned. Any formal sanction would invite a First Amendment fight.
For now, the pressure is informal but unmistakable: Kimmel’s carriage has been curtailed by decisions from two major station owners and by Disney’s network-level preemption.
