How Donald Trump is killing free speech in America – one late-night TV host at a time

Remember Will McAvoy’s three-minute rant to the sorority girl when he was asked about why America is considered the greatest country in the world?For those who are unversed with that rant, here is the transcript of the central part:Spoiler alert: Will didn’t think America was the greatest country in the world anymore! But in his own words:

“We sure used to be. We stood up for what was right! We fought for moral reasons, we passed and struck down laws for moral reasons.

We waged wars on poverty, not poor people. We sacrificed, we cared about our neighbors, we put our money where our mouths were, and we never beat our chest.

We built great big things, made ungodly technological advances, explored the universe, cured diseases, and cultivated the world's greatest artists and the world's greatest economy. We reached for the stars, and we acted like men. We aspired to intelligence; we didn't belittle it; it didn't make us feel inferior.

We didn't identify ourselves by who we voted for in the last election, and we didn't scare so easy. And we were able to be all these things and do all these things because we were informed. By great men, men who were revered. The first step in solving any problem is recognizing there is one – America is not the greatest country in the world anymore.”In case you want to get hold of the whole rant, you have to check out Newsroom before it gets taken down from streaming platforms, citing that the tone of the show is “not in the public interest” anymore.

Because that’s what America is all about now.It thrives on censoring free speech and legitimizes the legacy of dictatorship in the guise of “Making America Great Again.”

The road to censorship

American late-night television has held the long-standing tradition of a cultural barometer: combative, witty, occasionally outrageous, always pushing back. It has been the place where power, politics, and personality intersect. The punchline-rich monologue, the scathing parody, the satirical dig – all have served not merely to entertain, but to provoke thought, to crack open narratives, to act as a counterweight to official rhetoric.For decades, hosts like Johnny Carson, David Letterman, Jon Stewart, and others have made late-night stages one of the few spaces where dissent, mockery, and critique have come together under the same roof – on the same platform, in the lighthearted repackaging of comedy. These shows don’t just entertain: they question, provoke, and in doing so, preserve something essential in a democracy – the right to challenge power.But in recent months, that space seems to be shrinking.There might still be some Will McAvoy left, but there’s hardly any sign of a Charlie Skinner, or a Leona Lansing, or even a Reese Lansing.Something has shifted, and the landslide is underway.Over the past year, under US President Donald Trump’s administration, the late-night arena has begun to resemble a minefield. Shows are being cancelled, hosts suspended, and corporate networks are skittish.

What was once a golden era of free-speaking hosts has begun to look like a battleground, where corporate interests, political pressure, regulatory threats, and nervy station owners conspire to pull the plug on free speech.Authorities are citing “financial reasons” despite the show’s relative and well-documented success. But when the cameras stop rolling and the official statements end, these “reasons” appear as the glaring signs of “that” time.The temporary arrangement to appease the commander-in-chief can be understood – even though it can’t be accepted. But the bigger question looms: what happens when the guardians of dissent get silenced, even if subtly, even if through “business decisions”? What becomes of free speech when satire becomes too risky? Because, how it seems now, it’s not just about late-night shows going off air – it’s about a shrinking space for critical, comedic, political speech in what was once claimed to be the greatest country of free speech.

From Colbert to Kimmel: The chronology of censorship

First came Colbert, then came Kimmel. What triggered the domino effect? New mergers, hush-hush settlements, and a nervous media ecosystem.The story begins in boardrooms as much as in writers’ rooms. In mid-2025, several major media companies quietly chose settlements and concessions that could be argued as the starter pack for setting the conditions for later editorial restrictions. We’ve got a list.Paramount agreed to a multimillion-dollar settlement with President Donald Trump; around the same time, ABC/Disney reached its own settlement in a high-profile legal dispute.

Not so surprisingly, these settlements came while the companies were pursuing billion-dollar mergers and regulatory approvals that required a cooperative signal from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

It doesn’t take rocket science to understand that the timing and optics were damning: when companies are courting federal goodwill, editorial independence can feel like an expensive and almost unattainable luxury. That atmosphere of fragility helps explain why a network might choose the pragmatic path of paying legal sums or trimming risk when political heat mounts. But the bill comes due. The downstream effect is obvious. When corporate risk-management becomes the ceiling on what late-night hosts can say, the room for satire shrinks not because audiences lost interest, but because commerce redefines the boundaries of permissible critique.

Stephen Colbert: a cultural institution walked to the curb

In July this year, when CBS announced that The Late Show with Stephen Colbert would end, the reaction was visceral.The Emmy-winning host broke the shocking news himself, on-air, saying, "I want to let you know something I found out just last night,” adding, “Next year will be our last season. The network will be ending our show in May. It’s the end of ‘The Late Show’ on CBS.”Colbert’s program had become one of the few daily televised platforms where sustained, biting critique of public officials — especially President Trump and his circle — was a staple.

The cancellation arrived days after Colbert publicly criticized his employer’s parent company for a settlement with Trump, which only fed speculation that the network’s commercial calculus and regulatory concerns had trumped editorial independence.

For many in the media, the decision looked less like routine belt-tightening and more like a capitulation.

And Colbert’s exit mattered a great deal because he occupied a particular civic function: he translated power’s gestures into mockery and clarified them for millions.

Take that function away, and the channel between the public and the powerful acquires a new kind of static.

The Kimmel crisis: how a single monologue revealed systemic pressure

The Kimmel episode made that static audible, and the ripple effects are still echoing. On a September Monday evening, Jimmy Kimmel made remarks about a killing that quickly drew conservative outrage.During his opening monologue, Kimmel accused those in “MAGA-land” of trying to “capitalize on the murder of Charlie Kirk.”

He said they were attempting to frame the accused shooter, Tyler Robinson, as something other than “one of them” and using the tragedy for political leverage.

His monologue? Read for your own:“We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.”What else did Kimmel do? He also criticized the reaction of President Donald Trump and others, saying, Trump’s response was “not how an adult grieves the murder of someone he called a friend.” He added, “This is how a 4-year-old mourns a goldfish, OK?”AND Kimmel called out Vice President J.D. Vance for blaming “the left” for Kirk’s death.AND – I promise you, this is the final bit – he also mocked the way some figures handled the investigation, saying it was like “a kid who didn’t read the book, BS’ing his way through an oral report.”Within hours, a cascade began: some large station groups — most notably Nexstar and Sinclair — announced they would not air the episode; the FCC chair, Brendan Carr, publicly criticized the remarks and implied regulatory consequences; and ABC, owned by Disney, placed Jimmy Kimmel Live! on “indefinite suspension.” The sequence raised immediate alarms because the pressure looked less like an organic advertiser response and more like coordinated jawboning from both political and corporate actors.

Kimmel’s suspension became a Rorschach test for US institutions: of inkblots, imprints, and narrative building.To his defenders, it was blatant censorship: a government-adjacent regulator threatening punitive action, private broadcasters allowing the same, and a corporate parent preferring short-term calm over the cost of defending an artist’s free speech.To supporters of the decision, it was ‘accountability’, something that only makes sense to them when their fragile sentiments are in fire.But treating these possibilities as equal masks the power imbalance — regulators can impose, corporations can cut, and creators lose work.

Enter the FCC: Catalyzing the erosion of the wall between politics and regulation

Talk about “jawboning,” and the FCC stands ever-present!A central actor in the unfolding drama is the FCC – in extension, its chair, Brendan Carr. In recent weeks, Carr’s public statements — including threats of punitive regulatory action if certain broadcasters did not respond to complaints — were widely interpreted as acts of making use of his power to press the stressor buttons, where the state’s regulatory authority is used to intimidate private media decisions.And it doesn’t need much pointing out that this is an extremely dangerous precedent to set in a democracy. If a regulatory body begins to discipline speech indirectly by threatening business consequences, the structural protections that make a robust press possible begin to crumble.And what’s more striking is that this – isn’t abstract anymore; several senators across party lines publicly raised concerns about the FCC’s role, and dozens of affiliated stations moved quickly to avoid a fight the regulator seemed prepared to escalate. Historically, the First Amendment protects against government suppression of speech. When a regulatory agency uses the weight of licensing and merger approvals to shape editorial outcomes, the effect is chilling even if no courtroom ruling occurs. The more common path in a free society is debate and rebuttal — not the threat of lost licenses or delayed mergers as leverage.The corporate calculation: why companies fold faster than backbones succumbNow comes the most critical question: Why did Disney and CBS act the way they did?The short answer is simple: incentives.

To explain a bit more, media conglomerates operate with a matrix of shareholder pressures, advertising dependencies, and long-term strategic deals — including mergers requiring regulatory consent. So when a conflict threatens those lines, risk officers and general counsels start drawing red lines. Paying a settlement, suspending a show, or canceling programming may be cheaper, in their calculus, than risking a protracted legal or regulatory battle.

That calculus may be rational on a balance sheet, but it carries a civic (and more often than sometimes, moral) cost: a contraction of spaces where power is examined without asking permission.And what weighs heavier than just the immediate repercussion is that if we only measure media health by subscriber numbers and EBITDA (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization), we’re slated to miss the intangible public goods that satire and independent critique supply.

In simpler terms: we’re on our way to dumb-land.

The civic sense: what’s been the saving grace

Thankfully, the people have somehow started to get the greater picture.So the response from the entertainment community was swift and unified.Colleagues from the fraternity also came forward. Prominent hosts and comedians, like Jimmy Fallon, Seth Meyers, and the most hilarious, Jon Stewart, publicly criticized the suspensions and cancellations, staging monologues that were loaded with sharp wit, not-held-back satire, and earnest statements about what was at stake.

Unions representing actors, writers, and musicians — including SAG-AFTRA and the Writers Guild of America — condemned ABC’s decision to pull Kimmel’s show. They even took one step further, calling it the suppression of free speech and a threat to the livelihoods of thousands of media workers whose jobs depend on editorial risk-taking.Here, the unions’ involvement matters because it shifts the argument from personalities to livelihoods.

It stands for the ground-level reality: when the cost of political critique includes lost employment for hundreds of writers, producers, and crew, censorship becomes a structural problem with tangible human consequences.The resistance from common people has also been unfolding in a stunning way. What started as a call to boycott Disney after Kimmel’s indefinite suspension has reportedly led to a loss of almost $4 billion for the company.

From catering humor to shaping conscience: what we lose when the space of satire shrinks

Late-night is not sacred because it is funny; it is sacred because it plays a civic function. A nation that tolerates the removal of institutional critics because of short-term corporate convenience or political muscle is a nation that will, in time, perish and will have fewer institutions willing to speak truth to power. Moreover, late-night has never been merely entertainment to wind down with. Or just a background score that provides punchlines from time to time.

From Lenny Bruce to Jon Stewart, stand-up and monologue have operated as a pressure valve — airing outrage, untangling hypocrisies, and sometimes even setting the agenda for the next day’s news cycle.When that valve is narrowed, the pressure doesn’t vanish; it moves elsewhere, often onto less visible, less popular, and less accountable platforms. The result is a less informed electorate and a public conversation more easily manipulated by concentrated interests.Worse, the retreat of mainstream satire into smaller, less regulated venues reinforces political silos. Cable and streaming can shelter more aggressive voices — but for many Americans, network-led late-night was the shared cultural ritual that taught basic facts about power over well-packaged jokes and genuine laughs.Without it, that common ground shrinks.It’s like what Jon Stewart said when he accepted the award for the 2022 Mark Twain Prize.

“We talk sh*t for a living, you talk sh*t back, and we just gotta be better than you. And we’ve gotta find a way to entertain you. But the threat to comedy, comedy doesn’t change the world, but it’s a bellwether. We’re the banana peel in the coal mine. When a society is under threat, comedians are the ones who get sent away first. It’s just a reminder to people that democracy is under threat.Authoritarians are the threat to comedy, to art, to music, to thought, to poetry, to progress, to all those things.

All that sh*t is a red herring. It ain’t the pronoun police, it’s the secret police. It always has been, and it always will be. And this man’s decapitated visage is a reminder to all of us that what we have is fragile and precious.”The Colbert and Kimmel stories are alarm bells ringing for the same reason: they show how quickly commerce and regulation can extinguish forums that once helped citizens make sense of authority.

Comedy’s job is not always to be right; its job is to provoke, to discomfort, to point – and to trigger – mostly a conversation that can gain momentum over time and transform into a mass movement.If the country that once prided itself on protecting dissent allows regulators and conglomerates to pick which satirists live and which die, the cost will be counted not in ratings but in the dimming of public reason.After all, what stays when the lights are out – if not our collective conscience?If the curtains fall over that, the inevitable doom isn’t far away.