Trump’s big boasts backfire in his court battle with ABC

U.S. President Donald Trump sits in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., March 7, 2025. REUTERS/Leah Millis

President Donald Trump has been after the ABC network as part of his ongoing feuds with late-night host Jimmy Kimmel and the co-hosts of "The View." Now, it appears Trump's own vainglorious boasts have put the whole thing in jeopardy.

Chatting with Greg Sargent for his morning podcast for The New Republic, law school professor Leah Litman walked through why Trump has completely undermined his own case.

Sargent explained that Trump's own social media posts have become exhibits in ABC's case, which argues that he's using the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to go after his political foes. Leading the FCC is who Sargent called Trump's "slavishly devoted accomplice," Brendan Carr.

"This captures something really essential about Trump's open corruption and whether our institutions are capable of constraining it," said Sargent.

Litman said that it's all part of Trump's inability to hear bad news about himself and that often it inspires him to threaten to remove FCC licenses from affiliates. In other incidents, Trump has threatened to weaponize the FCC for investigations into the networks that he doesn't like.

The largest example came when Trump tried to get Kimmel kicked off the air, only for ABC parent company Disney to lose anywhere from $3.5 billion to $4.99 billion in market value as well as nearly 3 million subscribers, Fox Business reported at the time. Kimmel later joked that the same tactic couldn't be used for Stephen Colbert because so few people use the Paramount subscription service.

"If they don't rent licenses, that's the end of the company," Litman explained.

ABC's response to the Trump administration filing is "scathing," said Sargent, reading a line from the court filing.

"The retaliation against ABC is a signal to every media company in the country: accommodate the administration's view of what news coverage should look like or pay the price," the filing says.

Litman said it's a clear message from the administration: "to stand down, do our bidding or face the penalty." It's being seen across the board to universities, James Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James, Jack Smith and Dr. Anthony Fauci.

The part that Sargent found the most amusing is that ABC cites one of Trump's own social media posts to allege they're being targeted for political purposes.

"Why is it that ABC and NBC Fake News, two of the worst and most biased networks, aren't paying millions of dollars a year in license fees? They should lose their licenses for their unfair coverage of Republicans," Trump said.

Litman said arguments like ABC's have been effective in the past, but the larger question is whether the Supreme Court will be willing to get involved.

"Right now I think there's a disparity in lower courts saying, 'The president said what he said. We can't ignore that.' And the Supreme Court saying, 'No, actually we can and we will and we'll just pretend it didn't happen," Litman said.

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