David Letterman went to bat for Jimmy Kimmel on Thursday, denouncing President Donald Trump’s “authoritarian criminal administration” for cracking down on the free speech of comedians.
“This is misery,” Letterman told journalist Jeffrey Goldberg during a conversation as part of The Atlantic Festival in New York. “We see where this is all going, correct? It’s managed media. And it’s no good. It’s silly. It’s ridiculous. And you can’t go around firing somebody because you’re fearful or trying to suck up to an authoritarian criminal administration in the Oval Office. That’s just not how this works.”
Letterman, who hosted The Late Show on CBS for 22 years before Stephen Colbert took over in 2015, also went after Trump’s FCC Chair Brendan Carr, whose threats against Disney and ABC led directly to Kimmel’s removal from the air.
“This guy at the FCC said, ‘We can do things the easy way. We can do things the hard way.’” Letterman said, quoting Carr. “Who is hiring these goons? Mario Puzo?”
Carr’s threats were in response to Kimmel’s monologue jokes Monday night surrounding MAGA’s reaction to the Charlie Kirk assassination. The right has characterized Kimmel as “explicitly” painting Kirk’s killer as part of the MAGA movement.
What he actually said was, “We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.”
He then mocked Trump for seeming to care more about his new White House ballroom than his murdered friend.
Kimmel has long considered Letterman a personal and professional idol and even had a “L8 NITE” license plate as a teenager that paid tribute to the NBC franchise he created before moving to CBS.
“Not only is my first guest tonight the main reason I got into television, he is the main reason I got a television,” Kimmel said when he first had Letterman as a guest on his show in 2012.
Letterman similarly spoke out against the cancellation of his Late Show franchise and ouster of Colbert, a move he called “pure cowardice.”
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