In November 2015, five months after he launched his controversial presidential campaign, former NBC reality TV star Donald Trump hosted Saturday Night Live.
During his monologue, he claimed not to hold grudges against, for example, Rosie O'Donnell. He got heckled by Larry David who shouted from the audience: "You're a racist."
Joined on stage by two of the shows most famous Trump impersonators, Trump said:
Part of the reason I'm here is that I know how to take a joke. They've done so much to ridicule me over the years. This show has been a disaster for me.
SNL staff members later spoke about the "shame and anger" they felt for helping sanitize candidate Trump. In 2017 Taran Killam, one of the former Trump impersonators, said the episode, "grows more embarrassing and shameful as time goes on.”
In September 2016, Trump appeared on NBC again, sitting for an interview with Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show.
As The New York Times wrote in 2017, the segment "was widely criticized for its fawning, forgiving tone" and Fallon faced online backlash after "he concluded the segment by playfully running his fingers through Mr. Trump’s hair."
After Trump was elected, we found out he had lied to us: He cannot take a joke
Throughout his first term, Trump ramped up his attacks on the media in general and late-night comedians in particular.
By October 2017, he was tweeting that late-night hosts were "very 'unfunny' & repetitive" and "always anti-Trump!"
By 2018, Trump was telling Jimmy Fallon to "be a man" and "stop whimpering" about that 2016 interview. He attacked Stephen Colbert as a "lowlife" who "has no talent."
After SNL parodied him in its 2018 Christmas episode, Trump was calling the show "a Democrat spin machine" and suggesting the treatment he was getting could be illegal.
During the Biden years, Republicans insisted they cared about free speech
After Trump left office in shame in January 2021, Republicans spent four years positioning themselves as champions of free speech — and opponents of any efforts to curtail hate speech and misinformation, which they labeled "cancel culture."
In April 2022, current White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller tweeted:
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.
In May 2022, current FCC chairman Brendan Carr tweeted:
President Biden is right.
Political satire is one of the oldest and most important forms of free speech.
It challenges those in power while using humor to draw more people in to the discussion.
That’s why people in influential positions have always targeted it for censorship.
During the Biden years, Elon Musk followed the Trump playbook for achieving pop-culture dominance — hosting SNL, using his growing Twitter platform "to attack his critics, amplify the alt-right, and harass women with offensive, sexist tweets," before buying Twitter outright in October 2022.
Musk quickly moved to establish his credentials as a "free-speech absolutist" by welcoming back dangerous extremists who had been banned for TOS violations, launching a new program to help monetize hate speech and then announcing his intention to fight "a battle to the death with the anti-civilizational woke-mind virus."
Following Trump's re-election, Musk tweeted in December 2024 that "cancel culture has been canceled."
Spoiler alert: Cancel culture has not been canceled
In January 2025, Donald Trump signed an Executive Order titled "Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship." In it, he proclaimed:
The First Amendment to the United States Constitution, an amendment essential to the success of our Republic, enshrines the right of the American people to speak freely in the public square without Government interference.
In February 2025, Elon Musk, speaking at the CPAC conference in Maryland, said "the left wanted to make comedy illegal" and lamented that "you can't make fun of anything," before shouting:
Legalize comedy!
But they didn't really mean any of that.
Republicans have been lying to us about their commitment to free speech
Also in February 2025 — the very month comedy became legal again! — Politico's Eugene Daniels, the current president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, announced that this year's WHCA dinner would be hosted by Amber Ruffin, a comedian he praised for her:
Ability to walk the line between blistering commentary and humor all while provoking her audience to think about the important issues of the day.
In March 2025, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Taylor Budowich tweeted:
This year’s WHCA dinner will be hosted by a 2nd rate comedian who is previewing the event by calling this administration 'murderers' who want to 'feel like human beings, but they shouldn’t get to feel that way, because you’re not.' What kind of responsible, sensible journalist would attend something like this? More importantly, what kind of company would sponsor such a hate-filled and violence-inspiring event?
One day, later, Daniels announced that, "The WHCA board has unanimously decided we are no longer featuring a comedic performance this year."
The New Cancel Culture
The right has done what Elon Musk accused the left of doing: They’ve made comedy illegal.
Richard Hine
A "New Cancel Culture" was born.
Trump and MAGA World have declared war on free speech
While the canceling of Amber Ruffin (best known as a writer with her own recurring segment on Late Night with Seth Meyers), created minimal uproar, the next major cancellation did.
The July 2025 announcement that CBS was canceling late night's top-rated program, The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, set off a firestorm of outrage.
One of the most angry reactions came on CBS's sister network Comedy Central, where Jon Stewart of The Daily Show said it was time for corporations and advertisers to "sack up."
On the same network, just one day after its creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone signed a massive $1.5 billion, five-year deal with parent company Paramount Global, South Park came out swinging, depicting Trump in bed with Satan.
Back at the White House, Trump responded to the news of Colbert's cancellation by saying that none of the major late night hosts had any talent and adding, ominously, that Kimmel and Fallon would be next.
Meanwhile, he made clear that he's still holding onto his grudge against Rosie O'Donnell.
Now Kimmel has been canceled too. And Trump is targeting Fallon and Meyers next
On Monday September 15, on the Disney-owned ABC network, Jimmy Kimmel made a fairly innocuous comment about the MAGA reaction to the murder of Charlie Kirk.
On Wednesday September 17, former free-speech warrior Brendan Carr, now FCC commissioner, told a Russia-friendly right-wing podcaster that:
This is a very, very serious issue right now for Disney. We can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to take action on Kimmel, or there is going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.
Later the same day, ABC announced it was “indefinitely” suspending Jimmy Kimmel Live!
Trump called the announcement "Great News for America" and immediately signaled that his crackdown on free speech is only getting started, calling for NBC to cancel both Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers in a post that ended: "Do It NBC!"
We're on the road to totalitarianism
While Trump, Elon Musk and many more MAGA free-speech hypocrites celebrated the Trump Administration's success in canceling Kimmel, those who support the First Amendment even when the President is a Republican were appalled.
FIRE said that Brendan Carr, "is once again abusing his position to try to assert government control over public discourse... (and) to selectively target speech the government dislikes."
PEN America said, "This marks a dark new level of capitulation and censorship of speech more redolent of autocracies than democracies."
In The Atlantic, Adam Serwer wrote: "What happened to Jimmy Kimmel is not about one comedian.... The Trump administration and its enforcers want to control your speech, your behavior, even your public expressions of mourning.... This is the road to totalitarianism, and it does not end with one man losing his television show."
The current regime is canceling comedians and, in the process, shredding the Constitution.
They wouldn't need to be doing that if the Trump economy were doing well, if his policies were popular, if grocery and electricity prices were coming down, if Trump's "concepts of a plan" for healthcare hadn't turned into 75% increases for ACA premiums in 2026 — and 17 million Americans losing healthcare entirely.
It's precisely because Trump is failing the majority of Americans so badly that his regime wants — and needs — to silence the comedians who come into your home each night. Because theirs are the voices that connect the dots — who show you the connection between Trump's policies and the enshittification of your daily life.
Yes, the Trump regime wants to stifle dissent. It wants to dishearten and demoralize you anyway it can.
But we mustn't let the bastards grind us down.
If it helps, remember what a buffoon Dear Leader is:
He's a poor man's idea of a rich man, a weak man's idea of a strong man, and a stupid man's idea of a smart man.
There's no point arguing with his supporters. But laugh in their faces whenever you can. Remind them that the whole world thinks their leader is a joke. A big baby. A laughingstock.
Because laughter — like hope, like courage — is contagious.
And fascists don't like it when you laugh at them.
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