Former White House adviser Ben Rhodes didn’t mince words Wednesday night on MSNBC. He argued that the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel Live wasn’t just another programming decision but a dangerous sign of how much influence Donald Trump and his allies now hold over the media.
Speaking with Chris Hayes on All In, Rhodes described ABC’s move to pull Kimmel’s show after his monologue on the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk as the latest in a string of troubling examples. Kimmel had mocked the way certain outlets bent their coverage to fit pro-Trump narratives about Kirk’s death. Within days, his show was taken off the air “indefinitely.”
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Hayes put the moment into sharp perspective. “I said this when Colbert was fired, that it’s not too much of an overstatement to say, the test of a free society is whether you live in a place where late-night comedians can be on TV making fun of the leader,” he said. “And I still feel that way, and today feels pretty bad on that score.”
Rhodes agreed. “No, it feels terrible,” he said, adding that his own recent book goes into detail about what he calls media “takeovers” that echo patterns seen abroad. “Some people see this and they think, well, you know, it’s just one TV show. It’s just Stephen Colbert. It’s just Jimmy Kimmel. It’s just late-night. What you have to see, it is a part of a concerted strategy where not only do you have pro-Trump oligarchs consolidating control of the media, and frankly, that’s what they are. I mean … if we were talking about Russia, we’re talking about Hungary, if we’re talking about Turkey, you’re talking about government-associated oligarchs, wealthy people with interests before the government buying up the media, because that’s one way to retain favor with the leader.”
For Rhodes, the bigger danger is the chilling effect. “It’s not just about what Jimmy Kimmel or Stephen Colbert said. It’s the fact that they basically got axed for their speech that is a message to every other broadcaster on every other medium in this country, that if you say something the leader doesn’t like, you’re probably at risk of getting axed.”
That, he argued, is the real strategy at play. “They want, Chris, people like you and me to be sitting here right now and have another voice in our head every time we open our mouths, that if we say the wrong thing, that might be it for us too, right?”
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Rhodes pushed back against the idea that this is just “cancel culture.” In his view, it’s much bigger. “It’s trying to enforce, essentially, an ideological test on the broad-based news media that reaches the vast majority of Americans, so that the only content they’re seeing is, essentially, ideologically aligned with whatever Trump and his FCC director and a small group of people around him think that’s what’s happening.”
The suspension of Jimmy Kimmel Live is still technically temporary. But Rhodes’s warning is that even if the show returns, the precedent has already been set—and the message has already been delivered.