In the 90s, there was a late-night show on ABC called Politically Incorrect hosted by comic polemicist and smug contrarian Bill Maher. I wasn’t a regular viewer, but I did attend a live taping once because the drummer from a Canadian rock band I like was a guest. And one of the other guests that night was none other than Jay Leno, who had all but stolen The Tonight Show from David Letterman who by then had defected to CBS to create and then helm The Late Show.
With Johnny Carson now retired, the fight for late-night dominance was on. In those days before streaming and podcasts, network television was it, and the battle for viewers was called “the late-night wars.” Looking back, we have to qualify that as “Round One,” because when Conan O’Brien was handed The Tonight Show in 2010 to replace Leno who was jumping to primetime, and then essentially had it clawed back by Jay Leno when the earlier timeslot didn’t pan out for him, and Conan popped up on cable network TBS with his hugely successful, eponymous late-night talk show, that would rightly be called “Round Two.”
And it looks like we’ve entered what someday we’ll look back upon and call “Round Three.” But instead of stars with huge, one might even say “oversized,” egos fighting amongst themselves, the combatants in this present skirmish are the stars vs. the current president of the United States. And it’s not even a real battle, because the corporations who own the networks the stars work for want favors from the President, favors within his power to grant or at least facilitate, so they’ve already surrendered.
Late-night hosts have always had a sortof “understanding” with the occupant of the White House, an informal and unwritten agreement allowing for relatively harmless jokes at the President’s expense whose basic premises don’t really touch on political ideology, you know, like “Bill Clinton behaves like a sex-crazed Whippet” or “George W. Bush is really not that bright,” all under the auspices of superficial both-sides fun. I’ve watched old clips of Carson getting huge laughs from jokes about President Ford’s clumsiness in the 70s (which Chevy Chase also brilliantly parodied on Saturday Night Live).
When Bill Maher’s Politically Incorrect was yanked off the air by ABC it was because Maher expressed an unpopular 9/11-related opinion, one that offended a lot of people. 9/11 was a national trauma, and one could argue Maher had not “read the room.” But ABC’s latest move is pulling Jimmy Kimmel Live! from the airwaves, ostensibly for Kimmel disrespecting the late Charlie Kirk, a professional bigot who was horrifically murdered at a public speaking engagement. It sounds vaguely plausible, but if you engage your brain, the plausibility falls apart: Kirk was a public figure and questioning his views and the “movement” they spawned, in life or in death, is the bedrock of the First Amendment. But, Kimmel didn’t even do that! After Kirk’s death, he expressed sincere condolences on-air to the man’s family and described the murder as “senseless.” Then on a subsequent episode, he said this:
We hit some new lows over the weekend, with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anyone other than one of them, doing everything they can to score political points from it. In between the finger-pointing, there was grieving – on Friday, the White House flew the flags at half-staff, which got some criticism, but on a human level, you can see how hard the president is taking this.
That’s it! That’s what Kimmel said. That’s what all the hubbub is about! Never mind that Kimmel didn’t even mention some of the heinous bile that has oozed out of Charlie Kirk’s mouth; for a quick review of that, please see: Charlie Kirk in his own words: ‘prowling Blacks’ and ‘the great replacement strategy’. No, just describing something Trump and others did is enough to fire up the Right’s outrage machine and get Kimmel accused of cruel insensitivity. Sinclair Broadcast Group, a corporation that owns hundreds of individual TV stations around the country and has mergers and acquisitions before the Trump administration to think about, announced they would pull Kimmel from their ABC affiliates, and the network at large followed suit, overriding, it is reported, many of their executives who failed to see anything line-crossing about what Kimmel said.
Politically Incorrect’s Maher was canceled for arguing that the 9/11 hijackers weren’t necessarily “cowards,” as we define that word. Controversial opinions delivered with a flame-thrower were and are today Maher’s brand. But Kimmel, with his laid-back and decidedly non-incendiary liberal views, has been all-but-canceled for the mere suggestion that the Right wing is attempting to score points off of a man’s death. And while the Right blames and demonizes the Left for what is an inexcusable act of violence, they ignore equally inexcusable acts of violence perpetrated by foot soldiers on their side against the Left, like the attack on Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi, or the two Minnesota lawmakers targeted in a series of politically-motivated shootings last June, Melissa Hortman, who was killed, and John Hoffman, who was wounded.
It didn’t stop at Colbert, and it won’t stop at Kimmel. And if you’ve any doubt that the thin-skinned, petulant, crybaby-in-chief of the United States who has long had it in for the entire late-night host lineup is behind all this, Trump took to Truth Social late Wednesday, in the middle of a State Visit to the United Kingdom, to goad NBC to axe the last two men standing in this iteration of the late-night wars: Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers.
Great News for America: The ratings challenged Jimmy Kimmel Show is CANCELLED. Congratulations to ABC for finally having the courage to do what had to be done. Kimmel has ZERO talent, and worse ratings than even Colbert, if that’s possible. That leaves Jimmy and Seth, two total losers, on Fake News NBC. Their ratings are also horrible. Do it NBC!!! President DJT.
Then, during a press conference yesterday, Trump said:
Jimmy Kimmel was fired because he had bad ratings, more than anything else, and he said a horrible thing about a great gentleman known as Charlie Kirk. Jimmy Kimmel is not a talented person. He had very bad ratings, and they should have fired him a long time ago… You can call that free speech or not. He was fired for lack of talent.
It is worth noting that Kimmel’s show is in second place among viewers overall in late-night in 2025 and first place among the 18-49 age group. But when has Trump ever let something as silly as easily verifiable facts get in the way of his grievances and score-settling?
I’ll point out that I don’t watch Jimmy Kimmel Live! though I’ve been known to catch his monologues on YouTube. My concern is not the loss of a show I don’t watch, though I do worry about the hundreds of people who work on his show losing their jobs in a tough economic landscape for the entertainment industry at present.
My fear is that unless we, all of us, push back on this, we will find ourselves in the not-too-distant future watching state TV, our “entertainment” nothing more than propaganda fashioned in the image of The Orange Führer, the Mussolini of Mar-a-Lago, himself.