Here’s the truth about Trump and cancel culture

Before there was cultural cancellation, there was individual cancellation. As far back as 1981, there was the song by Nile Rodgers, Your Love is Cancelled, comparing his first and only date with a woman to the cancellation of a TV show.

A decade later, in the 1991 filmNew Jack City, screenwriter Barry Cooper included a reference to individual Black women being cancelled, a connection to the African-American vernacular and community. Boosted years later on Black Twitter, by the end of the second year of Donald Trump’s first administration “cancellation” had gone from aBlack cultural punchline to a white grievance watchword, on behalf of both rightwing Christian nationalists and outright Nazis, all complaining while themselves wishing to do away with the separation of church and state – a true cancellation of American culture, should it be achieved.

By then, as the New York Times reporter Jonah E. Bromwich pointed out, “Almost everyone worth knowing [was being] cancelled by someone” — among them celebrities such as Roseanne Barr, Bill Gates, soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo, Gwen Stefani, and Kanye West.

Crucially, though, none of these individuals was cancelled by the government or the Supreme Court, or whatever form Big Brother might take.

This week, while it only took a few days for Disney to bow to artistic, public, and political pressure before returning late-night host Jimmy Kimmel to our screens on Tuesday, conservative media companies like Nexstar or Sinclair simply carried on cancelling, substituting news programming for Kimmel on ABC affiliates, well on their way to monopolizing rightwing disinformation on local stations not unlike Fox News.

The original societal cancellation of individuals by ostracizing, boycotting, shunning, or firing, by withdrawing support or sanctioning “banishment” for harmful, obscene, or discriminatory behavior, has morphed into “cancel culture” by executive order or state-sanctioned social control, as a means of targeting larger groups or classes of people.

Think of the160 UC Berkeley professors and students being investigated by the Trump administration for pro-Palestinian activism. Think of the president’s crackdown oninternational students andacademic freedom in the name of — wait, wait, don’t laugh — the First Amendment.

Think of the government prying into the faculty business of those who conduct research and report their findings on gender, equity, and inclusion, on science and the environment. Think of the government censoring some of those 97 percent of late-night comedians who, according to Trump, are telling negative stories about him.

Finally, think of the cancellation of those members of Trump’s Department of Justice who are resisting or refusing to participate in the president’s corrupt and targeted criminal investigations of people like New York Attorney General Letitia James or former FBI director James Comey, or for refusing to support bogus non-prosecutions, like those of New York Mayor Eric Adams, for alleged bribery and campaign financial fraud, or Tom Homan, who was caught on videotape by undercover FBI agents taking $50,000 in a brown paper bag, just weeks before Trump appointed him border czar.

Individual v cultural cancellation

The “woke” or “politically correct” so-called radical left has absolutely nothing to do with cancel culture. On the contrary, so-called non-governmental or private cancellations have everything to do with philosophical values and legal practices that have over the past 60 years become socially and culturally sacrosanct.

But on the right, canceling individuals for repudiating post “separate but unequal” racist, sexist, homophobic, nativist, or pre-scientific laws, policies, or customs of the ancien regime, or for simply rejecting a return to the “good old days” of oppression and the pre-civil rights era, is consistent with the MAGA project to deny others the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

For the right under Trump, cancelling contemporary culture is about returning to an earlier, crueler, and darker age of white supremacy and Christian patriarchy.

The president’s contemporary top-down cultural suppression of other people’s human rights or basic dignity is fully rooted in his authoritarian regime — in the repression of some 300 Republican congressional eunuchs, in the cancellation of the right to democratic representation, or in the liar-in-chief’s failure to uphold his oath to the U.S. Constitution.

Donald Trump, who complained about cancel culture, has become our Canceller-in-Chief.

Still need persuading?

First, return to a speech by Trump at a conference held by Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA on June 23, 2020.

Following the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, on May 25, and in the wake of the largest protests in US history — against police brutality — Trump repeatedly referred to the “radical left.”

He began by giving a big “shout out“ to the audience for refusing “to kneel to the radical left,” which he said demanded “absolute conformity from every professor, researcher, reporter, journalist, corporation, entertainer, politician, campus speaker, and private citizen.”

He further maintained that the “radical left” was “waging war on the timeless American values like freedom of speech” and that anyone “who dares to speak truth is canceled, censored, de-platformed, fired, expelled, harassed, abused, boycotted, deprived of a livelihood, or even physically assaulted.”

And then, if you can stomach it, return here — to listen to Trump’s delusional remarks at the United Nations General Assembly in New York on Tuesday. Listen to his speech as both an irrational case for cancelling the UN, and a very lucid one for cancelling himself as well as MAGA.

Yet again, the president, a sociopathic leader and treasonous villain, has been busy lying about cancel culture, and emulating “the pot calling the kettle black.”

• Gregg Barak is an emeritus professor of criminology and criminal justice at Eastern Michigan University and the author of several award-winning books, includingCriminology on Trump (2022) and its sequel, Indicting the 45th President: Boss Trump, the GOP, and What We Can Do About the Threat to American Democracy (2024). The third book in Barak’s trilogy, Regime Change, Authoritarian Treason, and the Outlaw-in-Chief: President Donald Trump’s Struggle to Kill U.S. Democracy & Realign American Global Power, will be published after the 2026 midterm election.