President Donald Trump doubled down on his threats to silence his critics Thursday, telling reporters aboard Air Force One that outlets that give him “bad press” may have their broadcast licenses taken away.
The threat came just one day after his Federal Communications Commission (FCC) director, Brendan Carr, successfully pressuredABC into pulling Jimmy Kimmel’s show from the air by threatening the broadcast licenses of its affiliates over a comment the comedian made about the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk.
“I read someplace that the networks were 97% against me,” Trump told the press gaggle. “I get 97% negative, and yet I won it easily. I won all seven swing states, popular vote, I won everything. And they’re 97% against, they give me wholly bad publicity... I mean, they’re getting a license, I would think maybe their license should be taken away.”
“When you have a network and you have evening shows and all they do is hit Trump, that’s all they do,” the president continued. “If you go back, I guess they haven’t had a conservative on in years or something, somebody said, but when you go back and take a look, all they do is hit Trump. They’re licensed. They’re not allowed to do that.”
He said that the decision would be left up to Carr, who has threatened to take away licenses from networks that air what he called “distorted” content.
It is unclear where Trump’s statistic that networks have been “97% against” him originates, nor the claim that mainstream news networks “haven’t had a conservative on in years.”
But even if it were true, FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez says “the FCC doesn’t have the authority, the ability, or the constitutional right to revoke a license because of content.”
In comments made to Axios Thursday, Gomez—the lone Democrat on the five-member panel—said that the Trump administration was “weaponizing its licensing authority in order to bring broadcasters to heel,” as part of a “campaign of censorship and control.”
National news networks like ABC, CBS, and NBC do not have broadcasting licenses approved by the FCC, nor do cable networks like CNN, MSNBC, or Fox News. The licenses threatened by Carr are for local affiliates, which—despite having the branding of the big networks—are owned by less well-known companies like Nexstar Media Group and the Sinclair Broadcasting Group, both of which pushed in favor of ABC’s decision to ax Kimmel.
Gomez said that with Trump’s intimidation of broadcasters, the “threat is the point.”
“It is a very hard standard to meet to revoke a license, which is why it’s so rarely done, but broadcast license to the broadcasters are extremely valuable,” she said. “And so they don’t want to be dragged before the FCC either in order to answer to an enforcement complaint of some kind or under the threat of possible revocation.”