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It took just about a week to achieve Total Kimmel Victory. Jimmy was back on the air, Sinclair and Nextar had abandoned their boycotts, and Trump was left seething in impotent rage. Far from being a watershed moment in Trump’s fascist assault on the First Amendment and free expression, it turned into a humiliation for everyone involved except for Kimmel, who stood his ground and came out victorious. There’s a lot to learn here.
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It has been deeply depressing watching seemingly every major institution in the United States — universities, museums, legal firms, corporations— meekly surrender to Trump’s threats at the first sign of trouble. Worse, some even surrendered preemptively. And yet all it took was a coordinated burst of public backlash and one comedian refusing to give in for the whole thing to come crashing down.
Which makes us want to shout at everyone who had previously caved to Trump, “See, that wasn’t so fucking hard, was it?” Kimmel correctly called their bluff, refused to do any of the preposterous things that they wanted him to do (formally apologize, donate to a Kirk fund, etc), and just waited it out. Disney gave in almost immediately. It does help that he’s an incredibly famous, high-profile comedian with a huge army of fans, but the public backlash was loud, it was fast, and it worked.
Disney decided it was in their best interests to piss off the president instead of the public, which is exactly the calculation every institution needs to be making. Our voices and our buying power are our greatest weapons to resist Trump and his goons until next November. We need to make it clear to everyone and everything that capitulation will NOT be tolerated. It will be punished with boycotts, angry letters, and public awareness campaigns naming and shaming the cowards who bend the knee.
While Trump has certainly been able to achieve an alarmingly large portion of Project 2025 through the levers of government, he has been stymied in several key spots by those willing to stand up to him: judges, legislators, state officials, Kimmels, and brave citizens who put themselves at risk of an ICE pepper ball to the face.
Kimmel’s victory reminds us that Trump largely operates on the perception of his uncontestable power. But he’s not all-powerful, and there ARE still those of us willing to push back, and every victory like this is a crack in the facade of Trump’s invincibility. Let’s keep pushing until it shatters.
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