At their convention five years ago, President Donald Trump and his Republican Party rallied their supporters fervently against an idea they characterized as a rot on society: cancel culture.
Too many people, they argued one by one in prime-time speeches, were being publicly ostracized — in some cases losing their jobs — for exercising their constitutional right to free speech.
“To the voiceless, shamed, censored and canceled, my father will fight for you,” Eric Trump pledged then.
But the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, who was among the speakers at that 2020 convention, seems to have rapidly shifted how Trump and other Republicans see the boundaries of free speech and the rules of engagement for a once-loathed cancel culture.
Previously a voice for the canceled, they are now the ones canceling.
The debate — feeding on rage and grief from a White House where many, including Vice President JD Vance, were close friends with Kirk — escalated Wednesday with the shelving of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” Disney-owned ABC pulled the late-night talk show hours after Brendan Carr, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, threatened to “take action” against the company over Kimmel’s criticism of how Republicans reacted to Kirk’s death.
“The MAGA gang [is] 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,” Kimmel said during his Monday monologue.
Tyler Robinson, who is accused of fatally shooting Kirk, came from a conservative family but, according to his mother, had “started to lean more to the left” politically over the last year, court documents said. Text messages from Robinson released by authorities said he targeted Kirk because he “had enough of his hatred.”
Kimmel’s indefinite pre-emption, which has raised concerns about state-sanctioned censorship, came during a week when Trump and other administration officials have vowed to target left-wing organizations and people they believe foment political violence. Attorney General Pam Bondi has raised the possibility of cracking down on “hate speech.” And Vance has encouraged people to call out and push for the firings of those “celebrating” Kirk’s death.
Trump, who celebrated the Kimmel news on social media, was asked about its ramifications for free speech Thursday during a joint news conference with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
“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,” Trump responded. “Jimmy Kimmel is not a talented person. He had very bad ratings, and they should have fired him a long time ago. So you can call that free speech or not. He was fired for lack of talent.”
Trump, speaking with reporters later on Air Force One, suggested that television broadcasters he deems unfriendly could lose their FCC licenses.
Vance has been one of the administration’s loudest champions of free speech and, more recently, one of its loudest voices calling for those disparaging Kirk in death to be punished.
“The First Amendment protects a lot of very ugly speech, but if you celebrate Charlie Kirk’s death, you should not be protected from being fired for being a disgusting person,” Vance said in an interview that aired Wednesday night on Fox News.
In February, Vance advocated for the rehiring of a federal employee who had resigned over social media posts supporting racism and eugenics — “stupid social media activity,” Vance argued then, should not “ruin a kid’s life.” Vance also has accused European allies of undermining the spirit of free speech, specifically targeting Germany for isolating the AfD, a political party with Nazi echoes.
“It’s one thing to say that a particular set of views is gross … or somehow outside the Overton window, outside the bounds of reasonable discourse,” Vance said in an interview in May. “I think that it is very, very dangerous to use the neutral institutions of state — the military, the police forces … the intel services — to try to delegitimize another competing political party.”
He added that while he was a “pretty big believer in free speech … I think where I draw the line is encouraging violence against political opponents.”
Vance has yet to comment on Kimmel’s cancellation, other than to joke on social media that Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who already doubles as Trump’s national security adviser, would be “the new host of ABC’s late night show.”
During President Joe Biden’s administration, conservatives complained that officials used tactics — similar to those the Trump administration is accused of adopting — to stifle conservative speech, with the threat of adverse consequences if the requests were not honored, a practice known as “jawboning.”
One key allegation often cited is pressure that Biden officials put on social media companies to remove content, especially as it related to anti-vaccine sentiment.
That narrative suffered a setback last year when the Supreme Court, in a 6-3 ruling written by conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett, said various Republican states and individual social media users had failed to adequately allege that the government officials’ requests directly affected social media companies’ content moderation decisions.
Mindful of how animating a cause cancel culture has been for Republicans in the Trump era, some Democrats are weighing in with alarm.
“There is no such thing as free speech under Donald Trump’s reign,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom, seen as a top presidential prospect in 2028, posted Wednesday night on X.
Newsom also called attention to an old post from Stephen Miller, now a deputy White House chief of staff, who, along with Vance and Bondi, has led the Trump administration’s public posturing since Kirk’s death.
“If the idea of free speech enrages you — the cornerstone of democratic self-government — [then] I regret to inform you that you are a fascist,” Miller wrote in 2022.
Former President Barack Obama, who comments sparingly on hot-button issues of the day, also accused Republicans of inconsistency.
“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 posted Thursday on X.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., sidestepped questions about the Kimmel issue when he spoke to reporters Thursday.
“I don’t know anything about that,” Johnson said. “What I do know is that ABC is a private company, and they can make their own choices on who they want to wear their brand, so to speak. So this is a matter of ABC’s leadership. It doesn’t have anything to do with Congress or anything we’re doing.”
Others inside and close to the Trump administration have rejected suggestions of hypocrisy by insisting that what they are engaging in does not amount to cancel culture.
“Welcome to Consequence Culture,” Taylor Budowich, another deputy White House chief of staff, posted Wednesday night on X. “Normal, common sense Americans are no longer taking the bulls— and companies like ABC are finally willing to do the right and reasonable thing.”
Budowich also shot back at Newsom: “Free speech is alive & well. Kimmel can head down to Sunset Blvd & maybe even attract a bigger audience than his show did. Bad jokes & bad TV are bad for biz. ABC is no longer paralyzed in fear by the woke mob.”
The “consequence culture” argument, which is also being advanced by Donald Trump Jr. and Barstool Sports founder and right-leaning influencer Dave Portnoy, calls back to an idea progressives raised in response to earlier cancel culture debates. The argument, essentially, is that poor decisions and mistakes result in consequences, whatever they may be.
The shifting of the free speech goalposts has met with backlash from others on the right.
Conservative commentator Guy Benson, reacting Wednesday night to the Kimmel news, posted that “the overt government meddling in all of this remains very concerning.”
And Tucker Carlson, a staunch Trump and Vance ally, has criticized Bondi, who has since retreated from her hate speech position and clarified that the Justice Department will go after only speech that leads to violence.
“You hope that Charlie Kirk’s death won’t be used by a group we now call bad actors to create a society that was the opposite of the one he worked to build,” Carlson said on his podcast Tuesday. “You hope that a year from now, the turmoil we’re seeing in the aftermath of his murder won’t be leveraged to bring hate speech laws to this country. And trust me, if it is, if that does happen, there is never a more justified moment for civil disobedience than that, ever, and there never will be.”