President Donald Trump tried to cancel talk show host and comedian Jimmy Kimmel last year, in an effort that boomeranged so badly on him that it helped Kimmel's ratings and even rallied some conservatives against him. Now a political scientist is observing that Trump, apparently learning nothing, may have drawn attention to Kimmel's recent interview with Texas Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico — and, in the process, helped that interview outperform Trump's own midterms convention.
"This is a profile in boomeranging," Jason Johnson, an associate professor of communication and journalism at Morgan State University, told MS NOW's Ari Melber on Wednesday. "The effort to censor the interview we have Kimmel here has actually enhanced it only because they chose to fight. By putting it on YouTube, that puts it out to the world and, oh my gosh, we are way over the normal audience. And the intrigue — I mean, I'll tell folks, they titled it the interview the FCC doesn't want you to see. Americans don't like being told what to watch or what to think, Jason, including by right-wing overlords, even in Texas."
Later in the interview Johnson described how former talk show host and comedian, Stephen Colbert, symbolically passed the torch to Kimmel during a recent appearance on the latter's show. Colbert was recently cancelled by CBS in a move that critics allege was a cave to pressure from the network's pro-Trump management.
"This actually makes me somewhat emotional," Johnson told Melber. "This is such a huge deal because throughout his career, Stephen Colbert has been very supportive, not just of free speech rights, not just of labor and everything else like that. And so for Marvel to say, 'We're going to give you a replica shield of Captain America,' was significant. He's always had it in the background of his shows. For him to give it to Jimmy Kimmel is basically like when Steve Rogers gave his shield to Sam Wilson at the end of the Avengers series ['Avengers: Endgame']. And I can also say this, Steve Rogers' catchphrase, Captain America's catchphrase, is always, 'I can do this all day.' He fought bullies. That's what he did. He was a small-town kid who got superpowers and he fought against bullies. That's basically what Colbert is saying: 'I'm gonna let you continue this fight that I can't fight anymore against the bullies that other people can't push up against.'"
Kimmel claims that Trump's FCC pressured him to not air his recent interview with Talarico, forcing him to instead upload it to YouTube. While there it received more than 11 million viewers (at the time of this writing), nearly quadruple the 3 million people who tuned in to Trump's midterm convention. The convention didn't even win its week in ratings, as the NFL's opening game between the New England Patriots and Seattle Seahawks (a rematch of the most recent Super Bowl) drew more than octuple the convention at 25 million.
Trump's convention also suffered from low attendance, with the president urging attendees to not go to the bathroom lest it leave large empty patches that could be picked up by the cameras.
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