U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a dinner with the leaders of the C5+1Central Asian countries in the East Room of the White House. (REUTERS)
Even as late-night comedian and critic Stephen Colbert prepares to end his show this week, President Donald Trump is raging that his administration hasn’t managed to kill even more late-night shows.
“Trump’s effort to destroy late-night comedians underscores the depths to which he and the modern-day GOP will sink to vindictively pull the levers of state power, and they’ve had some success so far. They haven’t won the war yet,” said Zeteo writer Asawin Suebsaeng.
Suebsaeng added that sources inside the White House say Trump is furious at the lack of progress.
“[I]n recent months, according to two sources who have discussed the matter directly with Trump, the president has expressed billowing frustration that his administration is spending too much time threatening to pull federal TV licenses, and not enough time actually ‘doing it,’ as one of the people specifically recalls Trump saying in a meeting.
Trump sealed his ongoing determination to exert government control over the media in early 2018, according to a then-senior White House official who met in the Oval Office to meet Trump and other close advisers.
“This official – who relayed this anecdote to Zeteo on the condition of anonymity – had a prescheduled meeting to discuss, among other things, the state of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s federal investigation, which had become a target of Trump’s ire. But as soon as this official sat down at the Resolute Desk, the president of the United States announced his war against comedians.
“Trump was brandishing a piece of paper that included copy-and-pasted headlines and social media posts about how Stormy Daniels – the former pornographic film star whose alleged sexual encounter with Trump would later become central to his criminal conviction in a New York hush money case – had recently sat for a Jan. 30, 2018 interview on ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live.’”
This, reports Zeteo, was the same night of Trump’s State of the Union address that year. And he was “definitely not happy” according to the source.
But already, Zeteo reports “there are signs that sustained, grassroots pressure and resistance to Trump’s agenda and censorship ambitions do, in fact, work – and can force major institutions to not immediately cave to the White House’s clampdown bluster.”
“Billionaires, and the right-wing political operatives they own as servants, hate comedy and despise comedy because it’s a great threat to their power,” ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live’ comedian James Adomian told Zeteo. “They have tried over the past decade to crack down on it, to suppress it, to replace it with their artificial bot-net publicity version of it – but they’re still not funny and they still lose in comedy.”