President Trump puts television networks on notice and Stok's fears that he's using the government to silence his critics after ABC abruptly suspends Jimmy Kimmel.

Maybe license should be taken, but Kimmel's punishment set off a wave of alarm.

These threats are leading to these corporate parents capitulating to this administration's desire and outrage, and you can't go around firing somebody because you ' re fearful or trying to suck up to an authoritarian criminal administrations.

That's just not how this works.

Tonight, a deep dive into the fierce debate over free speech in the United States.

Next.

Good evening and welcome to Washington Week.

I'm Vivian Salama in tonight for Jeffrey Goldberg.

President Trump this week put his television critics on notice.

When you have a network, then you have evening shows and all they do is hit Trump.

They're licensed.

They're not allowed to do that.

And underscoring his message, the chairman of the perhaps now formerly independent Federal Communications Commission.

We can do this the easy way or the hard way.

These companies can find ways to change conduct or, you know, there's going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.

And just like that, shortly after Carr's interview, ABC announced Jimmy Kimmel's indefinite suspension for comments he made about Charlie Kirk's assassination.

But the message from the FCC is clear.

The rules of engagement are changing, and it's issued an ultimatum to media companies.

Comply or else.

It's also clear that the fundamentals of the First Amendment are being put to the test, and Kimmel's forced hiatus is fueling fears that President Trump is wielding the federal government to crack down on dissent.

There's a lot to sort through and joining me at the table tonight, Leanne Caldwell is the chief Washington correspondent at Puck.

Zolan Kao Yang's, a White House correspondent at The New York Times, and Asma Khalid, a co-host of the Global Story podcast on BBC News.

Thank you all so much for joining me.

Asma, I want to start with you.

Just remind our viewers, um, what it is exactly that Jimmy Kimmel said that sparked a lot of this controversy and why it was so offensive to so many.

Yes, well, I mean, controversy is the right word, and I will say I heard the controversy first and then I went back to actually see what indeed Jimmy Kimmel had said, and essentially he said that the Maga gang had been desperate to accuse the suspected murderer of killing who killed Charlie Kirk of anything other than one of them, and he said that the MAGA rite was essentially trying to score political points from Charlie Kirk's murder.

He did in the eyes of many, I would say, not go as explicitly maybe or as offensively as you would deemed given the sort of suspension and punishment we saw from him, but those were the comments that elicited all this controversy.

Yeah, Zolan, you know, you had an excellent piece today in which you looked beyond Trump's comments about potentially revoking the licenses of the networks, um, that air negative coverage of him, and you wrote that quote, using the threat of the power of the American government to silence criticism or dissent following the assassination of Char Charlie Kirk.

Um, who else is under this microscope that we're talking about because we know um that they've gone after a number of networks, not, not just, not just Jimmy Kimmel's show.

That's right, yeah, you can't see this in isolation here.

Um, what, what is going on with Jimmy Kimmel and the FCC, uh, really since the assassination of Charlie Kirk, what we've seen is a much broader crackdown from this administration on what they have described as a far left network of groups without providing evidence, but really what First Amendment advocates and Democrats and other critics would just say is a crackdown on views that you oppose, dissent, as you noted in your intro, and they've pulled in all lovers of the federal government to do this.

You've had the vice president say that indicate that they could go after the tax exempt status of certain democratic NGOs.

You've had Attorney General Pam Bondi say that they could investigate hate speech before walking it back after widespread backlash.

The State Department has enhanced vetting of potential immigrants to see if they've criticized the or or expressed uh view celebration of this assassination, as well.

Um, really, you have seen a widespread crackdown here, and also impacting other media organizations as well.

This example was just the latest example of that.

When you had the FCC chair, essentially issue an ultimatum to these local television affiliates, saying, you take action here, or the FCC could get involved, and the FCC has a lot of influence over these local TV affiliates, especially when it has the power to revoke that broadcasting license that you heard the president talking about and even beyond all of this, just the fact that they've cracked down on universities and law firms that have shown any sort of dissent, but going back to the media landscape of this, Leanne, I, I want, I wanna, uh, I want you to listen to something that the chairman of the FCC Chairman Brendan Carr that told CNBC earlier this week.

We're in the midst of a massive shift in dynamics in the media ecosystem for lots of reasons, again, including the permission structure that President Trump's election has provided and I would simply say we're not done yet we're seeing the consequences of that shift.

I mean, it's worth noting that car has already launched investigations and so almost all the broadcast outlets.

So who is Brendan Carr and you know, what are the potential consequences that he just alluded to?

Yeah, investigations into all the outlets except for Fox News for Fox News.

So Brendan Carr was a member of the FCC commission during Trump's first term and he was someone who was a big defender of free speech.

He said that he would always uphold the First Amendment, that that was ins tru ment al as his job as an FCC commissioner, and then in Trump's second term during that transition period after Trump's election, he really started to really cozy up to the president by what he was saying.

He made a lot of appearances on Fox News.

I was told by sources that he got, he made his way into Mar a Lago, and he made sure that he was very clear with Trump that he was willing to do what needed to be done if he was chairman of the FCC And so since then, it was well known, I should say before.

It was well known that to be a member of the Trump administration, whether in an um an efficient like official position like in a cabinet official or an independent commission or within the Trump administration that loyalty and doing what the president wanted to do was what was most important, and Brendan C Carr has made that absolutely clear, and he is he is just um doing exactly what the president has said he wants to.

At the risk of an agency that is notoriously been independent.

Yeah, well, notoriously been independent except the Supreme Court is saying that there are some there is breaking down that independence between some of these independent commissions and the administration.

I want to look at some of, uh, I mean stepping back here, President Trump himself has made pretty incendiary remarks over the years, uh, you know, the remarks that were arguably protected by the First Amendment.

And when he came to office, he said that he would want to protect free speech, although he also is one of his first promises.

Absolutely one of his first promises.

And so, you know, here we have a situation where now he is, he is really trying to crack down on um individuals who criticize him.

I mean, is that, is that where he draws the line here, Asma?

Is it about criticism or is it about free speech?

I mean, there's certainly a number of Americans who would see this and the behavior from the Trump administration, Trump world allies over the last, not just, I would say past week, but the last several months is seeming to be hypocritical.

In major part because the president promised that the era of censorship was over.

You saw Republicans really, really critique the era of what they viewed as cancel culture.

They thought that there had been limitations on free speech.

Um, you know, I did an episode on our podcast just this week looking at the fact that Republicans have really seen the UK and what they perceive as a lack of free speech in Britain as kind of a dystopia of what the US could come to be like.

They have been on this mission of believing that that free speech has been limited, not just here in the US, but also by liberals they would say in other countries.

And now we're seeing, you know, the president had this, I would say not just what we saw after Charlie Kirk, but a crackdown on, on, you know, universities.

To me, honestly, there's a rather clear through line from the era of crackdown of speech on campus as it relates to pro-Palestinian protesters.

I mean, we saw and we've seen people picked up by plain clothes people off the streets after writing an op ed, say at Tufts University.

We have seen a sort of systematic crackdown for the last several months.

This, I think, is just sort of the latest example of that and it's a reversing of roles, right?

I mean, the the script has been flipped in a way.

What you were just saying, Republicans very much built political momentum, including President Trump, off of framing Democrats as the party that was cracking down on free speech, that was policing language, that was perpetuating a certain cancel culture.

What we're seeing here is completely different here.

We're talking about now that party that framed itself as the defender of free speech.

Now using the levers of the federal government, not just to pressure you socially, um, not just to encourage people to call their employers on you, which they're doing, but also to potentially investigate these groups as well.

I wanted to show something that President, former President Obama wrote on Twitter where he said after years of complaining about cancel culture, the current administration has taken it to a new and dangerous level by routinely threatening regulatory action against media companies unless they muzzle or fire reporters and commentators it doesn't like.

And so, you know, it it's becoming very much an us versus them, which we've seen in the in the wake of Charlie Kirk's murder.

Um, this, this, this notion of sort of flipping the Republican argument on its head.

Is it seeping in?

I mean, is anyone kind of listening and saying guys, we gotta, we gotta dial it down You have seen some conservatives that have, you know, expressed some, uh, uh, that have kind of urged caution here.

Um, even conservative advocates that have long, I mean, we've reported on that have met with the White House for months and have wanted the White House to pursue these kind of actions.

One person that we talked to described it as a conservative activist as a Pandora's box here.

One Democrats could come back into power, and you could see this retaliation.

Also, you saw Tucker Carlson respond to the attorney General's comments about investigating hate speech and have critical comments, you know, I was happy that you actually brought that up, um, you know, Attorney General Pam Bondi kind of trying to distinguish between hate speech and free speech earlier this week got a lot of pushback.

But what's interesting is that Charlie Kirk himself, um, advocated for any kind of speech being free speech, you know, we have something that he wrote just last year on Xs where he wrote hate speech does not exist legally in America.

There's ugly speech, there's gross speech, there's evil speech and all of it is protected by the First Amendment.

Keep America free.

I mean, he's correct though by according to decisions at the Supreme Court has made over time.

There is no legal definition of hate speech in the United States, and that's what I think made the Attorney General's general's comments so striking and confusing to folks across the political spectrum, and even Senator Ted Cruz from Texas, who is normally quite the advocate for this administration, really spoke out this week.

We have comments.

We have a clip here of something he said.

I think it is unbelievably dangerous.

For government to put itself in the position of saying, we're going to decide what speech we like and what we don't, and we're going to threaten to take you off air if we don't like what you're saying.

We shouldn't be threatening government power to force him off air.

That's a real mistake.

So Leanne, you know, how, how is this, is, is Ted Crust the outlier here when he says comments like that on the Hill, or, uh, you know, are there people echoing what he's, what he's saying.

Um, for the most part, he is an outlier right now.

There are some Republican s who are concerned about this.

You have Senator Rand Paul as well.

There's a couple others who are saying some things um that this is not the right direction that the government should be going.

Um, but you have a lot of Republicans who are completely ignoring the real issue here, defending the firing of Jimmy Kimmel, saying that it was a business decision.

Jimmy Kimmel's ratings were quite bad, that he was costing the network money and so that that is why he lost his job ignoring the fact that the FCC, Brendan Carr previously had threatened to revoke a license if Jimmy Kimmel was not gone.

So, but I will say I've been talking to a lot of Republican sources over the past couple of days and everyone um privately is telling me that they are watching this very closely.

This is kind of a wait and see type of thing if this proceeds to get worse, there could be a lot more outrage that's coming.

I mean, we'll see.

People like to say things privately when it comes to the Trump administration, and they don't actually act accordingly, but people are watching this closely, and I will say, I mean, Asma, you, you talked about it, but there is still really deep feelings about how conservatives, including Republican members of Congress have felt so silenced during the Biden administration and the Obama administration that they are having, it feels very hypocritical right now, but there's a lot of pent up anger and this issue of revenge and kind of retribution is still playing into a lot of their emotions.

They're going back to 2012 when Lois Lerner was head of the IRS, and they felt like conservative groups were not getting their tax exempt status.

Back then, because they were being slow walked because they were conservative.

So this is years and years and years, and this is a big reason why I think that Trump is unleashing this retribution campaign on the media and the press to get back to what he thinks has been a silencing for so many years, so many White House officials are going to be attending Charlie Kirk's funeral and memorial service this weekend, and I'm wondering, you know, we just, we just revisited sort of his own uh words about free speech.

How can they sort of channel that legacy that Charlie Cook, although obviously some of his comments were controversial, um, how could they channel some of the, some of the the the comments he made advocating for free speech.

Well, look, why when you talk to White House officials, they, they think there's a difference here, right?

They, if I've, I've been traveled and covered Vice Vice President Vance this week when he went to Michigan.

I've been talking to White House officials, and they would say they're targeting language that incites violence.

They would say the situation with Jimmy Kimmel was solely a business decision.

Now that argument on the business decision loses a little bit of steam when the president then comes out and says, well, all these other late night hosts that are critical of me too.

Maybe you should rescind those licenses as well, right?

There's going to continue to be questions about how you square, how an administration that sent a vice president to Europe to talk about the value of free speech that has long talked about conservative viewpoints being suppressed, how you square that with the current actions now.

But at the same time, in terms of the uh funeral this weekend.

I mean, Charlie Kirk was also somebody that was instrumental in getting the president elected, right?

And mobil izing young voters to turn out for this space and to expand their voter base.

So I'm not surprised as well that many of the people that had a relationship with him are going to be going to that effect.

One of the things that's really fascinating is that we haven't talked a lot about here, but you mentioned it earlier.

Was the investigations that the Trump that Trump wants to do and leftist groups he's calling.

He's mentioning Antifa, um, JD Vance talked about the George Soros Foundation, the Ford Foundation, where the money is coming from for these left groups that go to protest and then there might be some violence at these protests.

Trump is using the pretext of Charlie Kirk's murder to say that he is saying that leftist groups are violent, that it is these leftist organizations that are causing this.

There is no evidence that Charlie Kirk's assassin, assassin had any affiliation with any leftist groups, and most of the people who have been involved in political violence on the left have been kind of lone wolves, people, people.

and so your paper in March reported that there was already plans in the works to investigate and potentially prosecute groups on the left and so this is just using being used as an excuse to kind of elevate that.

I mean, President Trump essentially indicted the left for the murder of Charlie Kirk before we even had a suspect in custody.

So he said those people when he was referring to folks on the left, and he's referred to Antifa.

Look, I mean, Vivian, I think the question of sort of like how do you take the lessons of free speech and the idea that all speech is uncomfortable as it is, should be allowed, and his historically been allowed here in the United States, I think is a really challenging question, and I'll be really candid.

It's one that has been on my mind because I can understand if you feel wronged, as many Republicans did for the last several years.

Perhaps it's human nature to want revenge and retribution, but I'd also argue like nothing works in a country if every time one group gets into power, they just try to argue how could we use the levers of power to essentially crack down on our opponents, and it just doesn't work.

It's messy, but also, you know, the law does outline, like a violation of the First Amendment, particularly when it comes to government.

Government can suggest it can pressure that a private entity aligned with their policies, but you can't go to coercion, right?

And the question here is, when you have Brendon Carr, you know, essentially issuing an ultimatum to these local television affiliates.

That, that tests the boundaries here, right?

And does it meet coercion, right?

We don't know that now, and there's not even there's some potentially even a political response too.

Um, we talked about all the anger from the right during the Biden administration, and it was a big reason that Donald Trump got elected on the campaign trail, I would talk to Uber drivers and Walmart shoppers and people at Republican events and this idea of censorship came up over and over and over again, and when Trump said on campaign speeches repeatedly about free speech, you know, this is a big reason why he got elected, and there could be political overreach from Republicans in this too.

I suspect we're going to be talking about this topic for months to come, but I do want to pivot to events in Europe today where you had, um, I reported earlier that the Pentagon was moving to block the sale of certain weapons to Europe, which it deems in short supply here in the US and all of that while the Estonia today, a NATO ally said that Russian military planes hovered over its airspace for an unprecedented 12 minutes.

Now Russia, of course, denied that that was that that was the case, and it came up a day after President Trump was in the UK on Thursday and acknowledged that Vladimir Putin, Russian President Vladimir Putin, in his words, let him down.

We have the clip right here.

The one that I thought would be easiest would be because of my relationship with President Putin, but he's let me down.

He's really let me down, you know.

War is a different thing.

Things happen that are very opposite of what you thought you thought you were going to have an easy time or a hard time, and it turns out to be the reverse.

So, take us into the White House thinking about where we go from here in terms of trying to find a resolution to this conflict.

Well, first of all, those comments are a lot different than I'm going to end the war in 24 hours from the campaign, right?

And you're seeing the president now meet something that that it seems he's realizing is quite complicated, almost self-reflection.

He's right, he thought that he could use his relationship with Vladimir Putin, and he said this to, to bring this war to an end and to bring peace, despite the warnings of members of his own party that warned that Putin could be playing his administration.

The frustration is he there's clear frustration here, right?

uh, you know, at this point, you're seeing the administration now say in terms of steps ahead that they want European nations and these NATO members to move ahead with stop purchasing Russian oil, right, and to cut off like Russians' energy supply more, and then you could see this administration move forward with a with more sanctions they've indicated.

However, we've heard that before too, right The amount of times that the president has said I'll do something in 2 weeks just to not have it happen.

It's, it's sort of been Groundhog Day.

So, uh, there's, there's definitely frustration there.

I mean, Asma, is, is peace out of reach at this point?

The president seemed so optimistic when he left that summit with Vladimir Putin in Alaska, where do we stand in terms of over the last several months when you look at the president and his comments, it feels like there's a lot of ups and downs.

This is one of the down moments it feels for him in terms of his optimism of ending the war, and it's one of the moment s in which he seems to suggest, he says in his own words, he's been let down by Putin.

But look, I would say there have been moments in the past several months where he's also called on Vladimir Putin publicly on social media to stop what he seemed disappointed, so he's, I think, mood and attitude ebbs and flows.

So in terms of whether or not there's peaceful resolution.

Look, I think that the clearest thing we can say is that this conflict is proving much, much more difficult for him to conclude that he ever thought during the campaign cycle and ever than he ever promised.

Since you're with BBC News now, in the minute we have left, just talking yeah, just talking about, um, what the alliances are perceived like now with President Trump where he kind of is hot and cold on on alliances and how he wants to work with Europe.

What are you hearing from your colleagues and I mean, look, I think that one of the things about President Trump that we've seen, we saw him in in in London just this past week, meeting with the British Prime Minister.

I think one of the interesting things I'd noticed from the Brits is that he, President Trump, and Starmer are so ideologically different, but they seem to get along decently well, as President Trump himself has said, he was very public in talking about some of their disagreements.

One big one we're going to see on display next week where the Brits are likely to announce that they will recognize a state of Palestine and the Trump administration has been very clear in their opposition to that, but I think one of the things about Trump is, you see, he likes certain people and he seems to like certain world leaders, and that helps him sort of believe that he can have these, you know, possible dialogue and disposition with them, but I think it's it's sort of TBD on Trump and how he gets along with the rest of the world.

Definitely TB D We're going to have to leave it there, but thanks to our guests for joining me and thank you at home for watching us.

For more on America's hold on weapons sales to Europe.

please visit theatlantic.com.

I'm Vivian Salama.

Goodnight from Washington.