Former President Barack Obama has entered the fray over Jimmy Kimmel’s indefinite suspension — and his response reveals just how politically charged the late-night host’s downfall has become.
On Thursday, Obama blasted President Trump for celebrating the removal of Kimmel’s show, framing the decision not as a network-level business call but as evidence of government strong-arming.
“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,” Obama wrote on X.
The timing of Obama’s post was no accident. Just hours earlier, ABC announced Kimmel’s program would be “pre-empted indefinitely,” while Nexstar Media Group confirmed its local affiliates would forgo future airings “for the foreseeable future.”
The trigger was Kimmel’s Wednesday monologue, in which he accused the MAGA movement of trying to “score political points” after Charlie Kirk’s assassination and mocked Trump’s grief as resembling “a 4-year-old mourning a goldfish.”
This commentary offers a clear, powerful statement of why freedom of speech is at the heart of democracy and must be defended, whether the speaker is Charlie Kirk or Jimmy Kimmel, MAGA supporters or MAGA opponents.
— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) September 19, 2025
Obama amplified a Vox op-ed by Zack Beauchamp that accused the Trump administration of “weaponizing the regulatory powers of the federal government to punish speech it doesn’t like.” Beauchamp argued that targeting Kimmel marked a dangerous “qualitative escalation,” even beyond previous censorship-like acts such as deportation proceedings against the author of a pro-Palestine op-ed. “This is a favored weapon of modern autocrats,” the piece claimed, warning the U.S. is sliding down an authoritarian path.
The rhetoric is familiar. Obama has repeatedly cautioned in recent months that the country is “dangerously close” to losing its democratic character. In June, he warned that the current political climate was “consistent with autocracies,” saying, “We’re not there yet completely, but I think that we are dangerously close to normalizing behavior like that.”
The former president has also criticized the Trump administration for federalizing local police forces and deploying military assets in U.S. cities, framing such steps as precursors to authoritarian governance.
But Obama’s intervention raises deeper questions. Was Kimmel pulled because of political pressure, as Obama suggests? Or was it because of collapsing ratings, furious affiliates like Sinclair and Nexstar demanding accountability, and a host who chose to double down on inflammatory rhetoric in the wake of a national tragedy?
