President Donald Trump offered another conflicting justification for talk show host Jimmy Kimmel's indefinite suspension, and CNN's Kaitlan Collins highlighted a question he hasn't yet been asked on the matter.
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr threatened Wednesday to revoke the licenses of ABC affiliates over Kimmel's comments about Charlie Kirk's alleged assassin, and parent company Disney pulled him off the airwaves later that night, and Trump praised his suspension during a press conference in Great Britain.
"He said a horrible thing about a great gentleman known as Charlie Kirk, and Jimmy Kimmel is not a talented person," Trump told reporters. “He had very bad ratings, and they should have fired him a long time ago. So, you know, you can call that free speech or not. He was fired for lack of talent.”
CNN's Wolf Blitzer found those comments "significant," saying the president had not commented on Kimmel's remarks – which Carr said Thursday were an attempt to "directly mislead the American public" about Kirk's assassination – and Collins agreed.
"Those were the issues he listed first," Collins said. "He did bring up Charlie Kirk after that, saying that he said bad things about Charlie Kirk. That's what that he said, 'bad things about Charlie Kirk.' That's what invoked the British prime minister then paying tribute to Charlie Kirk's legacy and to how horrible his assassination was and how he thought of President Trump immediately, knowing how they were close."
Collins noted that Trump has been targeting late-night talk show hosts and Kimmel, in particular, for months.
"But on the aspect itself, when it comes to Jimmy Kimmel, I mean, it's not that ABC just fired him out of the blue, ended his show out of the blue," Collins said. "This came after we heard hours before that yesterday from Brendan Carr, the chair of the FCC, in an interview with a Trump ally, saying that, essentially, ABC needed to to pay attention. He was saying that they could do this, and there was a quote he said, 'the hard way or we can do it the easy way.'"
"Obviously they're implying with that pressure on ABC was going to look like," Collins added. "The president's own comments long before these Charlie Kirk comments came from Jimmy Kimmel, the president said after [CBS] canceled the Stephen Colbert Show that he believed Jimmy Kimmel was next. He repeated that again in August from the Oval Office, and so that was obviously a key issue here."
Collins zoomed in on one question she would like the president to address.
"Key questions about whether or not the president knew about this pressure that the FCC chair was putting on ABC when it came to Jimmy Kimmel's program," Collins said. "But unfortunately, that is not something that the president was asked about at any great length in that press conference just now."
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