Trump’s Ouster of Jimmy Kimmel Is Much Worse Than You Think It Is

“That makes it even more egregious and more clear,” First Amendment lawyer Ken White tells me. White notes that to win a First Amendment case here, it would be necessary to show that Carr threatened private actors—in this case, Disney and ABC—to coerce them to censor Kimmel.

“There’s a clear, obvious violation here,” White says. “Kimmel could sue Carr and other government actors to get an order telling them to stop it, though it’s doubtful they’d obey.”

“This is an unprecedented abuse of the FCC’s power,” adds Caitlin Vogus, senior adviser of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. “The ‘public interest’ standard was never meant to be used as a cudgel for the government to pressure broadcasters into only saying what the president wants them to say.”