Trump suffered a major defeat on free speech – the resistance has begun

On Tuesday night this week, I went into central London to see Patrick Marber’s brilliant new production of the musical The Producers, complete with the most bad-taste song in musical theatre, “Springtime for Hitler”. In this joyous telling of the story, the Führer is rotund and as camp as a row of tents.

One can only imagine the shock of audiences when Mel Brooks’s original film with Gene Wilder and Zero Mostel opened just 20 years after the end of the Second World War. A comedy about Hitler? Swastikas everywhere? Farce and absurdity mixed with a dusting of satire? But an interview Brooks gave in 2001 explained the rationale:

“If you stand on a soapbox and trade rhetoric with a dictator, you never win... That’s what they do so well: they seduce people. But if you ridicule them, bring them down with laughter, they can’t win. You show how crazy they are.”

This quote from Brooks I found in the show’s programme. Last Tuesday evening when I went to see the production was, coincidentally, the same night that Jimmy Kimmel was returning to America’s TV screens after ABC and its parent company, Disney, had been bullied into removing Kimmel’s late night comedy show from the air because of the ridicule that he had heaped upon Donald Trump in the wake of the dreadful murder of Charlie Kirk.

Now the president of the United States isn’t a dictator, but – ummm – he has tendencies in that direction. And reading that 2001 quote from Mel Brooks had never seemed more apposite.

For all that America has its First Amendment protecting and enshrining free speech, and for all that the vice-president JD Vance lectured us in Europe about how we had let it be eroded, Donald Trump has shown himself rather indifferent about its importance, particularly when he is the butt of the joke.

With Trump’s 100 per cent approval, the man he appointed to run the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, went after ABC, demanding that Kimmel be removed from the air – or else. The “or else” being the suggestion that ABC would lose its broadcast licence. That so alarmed the parent company, Disney, that the capitulation was immediate. Kimmel’s show would be canned indefinitely.

Trump crowed. It was now played two, won two. He’d also been successful in getting CBS to can Stephen Colbert’s late-night show. And if you combine that with his assaults on law firms, academia, museums, the press, civil society and corporate boardrooms, there was no resistance anywhere. Congress is in a crouch position and the Supreme Court is in acquiescence mode.

But the canning of Kimmel proved to be a bridge too far. Subscriptions were being cancelled. The board of Disney was in the firing line. Actors were saying they would no longer work with Disney. Brendan Carr’s mafiosi-style threat to Disney – literally saying “we can do this the easy way or the hard way” – split the Maga universe. Senator Ted Cruz condemned this egregious assault on free speech, and many other conservative voices piled in as well. Disney de-capitulated (if such a word exists) and rediscovered a backbone. Kimmel would return.

His opening monologue was a tour de force. Kimmel said cancelling comedians was fundamentally un-American. He talked about the need to end division and the stoking of hatreds. And turning to Trump’s victory lap when the show was axed, Kimmel accused the president of revelling in hundreds of staff losing their livelihoods because he couldn’t take a joke.

It is too soon to talk of turning points, but this is a massive victory for Kimmel and – arguably – Trump’s biggest domestic defeat since returning to office.

Will it embolden the once mighty titans of corporate America who’ve become timorous wee beasties? We shall see. Whatever happens, this feels like a moment.

One can say that with some confidence when you look at the furious incandescence of Trump on Truth Social after this humiliation. “I can’t believe ABC Fake News gave Jimmy Kimmel his job back. The White House was told by ABC that his Show was cancelled! Something happened between then and now because his audience is GONE, and his ‘talent’ was never there.”

What happened was resistance. What happened was a big chunk of the population – including Trump supporters – saying enough, and no further. What happened was the power of “we, the people”.

This is not over. Look at what is happening at the Pentagon, where the defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, is saying journalists who want accreditation there must undertake not to use “unofficial” sources. In other words, don’t go near any whistleblowers; you can only print what we tell you to publish. George Orwell’s famous comment that “news is what they don’t want you to print; all the rest is public relations” comes to mind.

Look too at the harum-scarum stuff that is coming out of the justice department. The vindictive threat of indictments against those who have opposed Donald Trump tells you that we have not snapped back to normal. James Comey – the former director of the FBI and long-term critic of Trump – knows this only too well. He is now facing accusations of lying to Congress, just days after the president called for his political adversaries to be pursued in the courts. Comey has denied any wrongdoing.

But in the battle for free speech, a comedian has succeeded where the political establishment has failed. Maybe laughter is the best weapon right now to show how crazy things have become. Mel Brooks: political savant. Who knew?