Will Trump’s Attacks on Comedians — and Their Bosses — Send a Chill Through Late Night? | Analysis

Do late night comedians — and more pointedly, their studio bosses — need to fear reprisals and retaliation for jokes they tell about Donald Trump? Such a threat might sound remote, but the prospect could have a chilling effect on one of the country’s leading forms of political commentary: late night comedy.

Despite legal guardrails protecting free speech, the question becomes whether a Trump administration can use the Federal Communications Commission’s oversight of broadcasting to create headaches for these companies, and by extension, the hosts.

The latest shot across the bow, directed at NBC’s Seth Meyers on Tuesday, came days after Bill Maher, the host of HBO’s “Real Time,” suggested that anything is possible in terms of the president-elect seeking to take action against his critics. Trump seemed to reinforce the point by using his Truth Social account to put Meyers, and his bosses’ bosses at NBCUniversal parent Comcast, on notice, saying: “Got stuck watching Marble Mouth Meyers the other night.” He called the host a “moron” and “dumb and untalented.” It was posted at 1:24 a.m. ET, near the end of Meyers’ show.

Trump then took aim at Comcast, which owns NBC and MSNBC. “These are not shows or entertainment, they are simply political hits, 100% of the time, to me and the Republican Party,” he wrote. “Comcast should pay a BIG price for this!”

Trump proceeded to call Meyers’ material “in kind’ contributions” to the Democratic Party.

The president-elect has frequently chafed at being an object of ridicule by comics, which included publicly leveling criticism at Jimmy Kimmel during last year’s Oscars telecast. Kimmel replied by reading the post aloud and responding on air.
Trump somewhat inexplicably renewed his attack on Kimmel in October, calling him a “dope,” before lumping him in with Maher and “the two clowns on CBS and NBC!”

Kimmel responded by thanking Trump for “again reminding America that everyone laughed at you at the Oscars,” adding that he looked forward to “visiting you often in jail.”

Meyers opened his show the day after the post with several Trump-related jokes, but he didn’t directly address his Truth Social post. NBC declined to comment.

Unlike his last run-in with Kimmel, Trump’s latest direct assault on late night comes as he prepares to be sworn in for a second term, this time with a designated Federal Communications Commission chairman, Brendan Carr, who has spoken about being more proactive about public-interest obligations on broadcasters that are a condition of maintaining their licenses. In November, Carr posted on X that broadcasters are “required by law to operate in the public interest” and the FCC would “enforce” those provisions.

More broadly, concern lingers that Trump will seek retribution against those he perceives as political enemies, prompting some to question if even comedians and satirists will join journalists and find themselves in those crosshairs.

“It’s bone chilling to think that an incoming president is leveling these threats against late night hosts and anchors who seem at all critical of the incoming administration, or Trump specifically,” Tom Nunan, a former network executive, independent producer and co-head of the producers program at the UCLA School of Theater, Film & Television, told TheWrap.

“It’s reminding Comcast, ‘If you ever want anything from me, you better straighten up and fly right.’”

In recent months, Trump has already targeted the networks’ news divisions, pursuing lawsuits against “60 Minutes” and ABC News, the latter culminating in a controversial $15 million donation to settle a defamation suit against the network.
Legal scholars have cited the limits on curtailing protected speech, but the question is how far the new administration might go to test those boundaries. The reference to “in-kind contributions,” for example, appears to argue that bashing Trump, even in a comedy format, amounts to providing a form of financial support for Democrats.

A more pressing issue for employers is whether the new Trump administration might punitively use its regulatory authority to try to coerce and intimidate them. During his first term, that included a 2019 report in The New Yorker that Trump “pressured” former National Economic Council director Gary Cohn to tell the Justice Department to block AT&T’s pending acquisition of Time Warner, the owner of CNN, motivated by Trump’s displeasure over how the network covered him.

Similarly, Rolling Stone reported that White House officials made calls to Disney in 2018 to ask that ABC take action regarding Kimmel due to his regular parade of jokes at the then-president’s expense.

The implicit threat to the companies involved, Nunan said, is, “You better be careful, because I can make your lives very difficult as businesses. It’s his style.”

Networks generally give their hosts wide creative latitude, but the economics of late night have grown less hospitable. In June, Meyers was forced to eliminate his live band as part of budget cuts imposed by NBC.

Asked by CNN’s Jake Tapper whether he thought Trump could seek to utilize the levers of government against him, Maher said, “Do I think he’s going to start arresting comedians? I don’t, but it’s possible. Look, anything’s possible with this guy. I’ll put it this way: When George Bush was in the White House, it never even entered my mind, never entered my mind that I couldn’t say whatever I wanted to say without repercussions.”

Maher added that he wouldn’t let the possibility “affect what I do,” and concluded, “The day I feel like I can’t say what I want without going to Guantanamo Bay, I’ll just leave.”

Indeed, comedians are generally resistant to restrictions on what they can say. For the studios, however — including Comcast, Disney, Paramount and HBO parent Warner Bros. Discovery — “just leaving” isn’t an option. And with all these companies looking at potential spinoffs, sales and other structural maneuvers to navigate these treacherous media times, the issue is to what extent they will prioritize standing behind their talent over such bottom-line considerations.

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