‘We, the People, deserve better’: Kamala Harris joins chorus condemning Trump pressure to suspend Jimmel Kimmel

The former vice president and Trump’s 2024 presidential opponent called the administration’s pressure campaign on ABC an “assault on free speech.”

Former Vice President Kamala Harris joined a chorus of elected officials and political figures condemning the Trump administration for pressuring media conglomerates to suspend Jimmy Kimmel from his decades-long late-night television show.

“What we are witnessing is an outright abuse of power,” said Harris in a public statement released Thursday. The former 2024 presidential opponent to now-President Donald Trump continued, “This administration is attacking critics and using fear as a weapon to silence anyone who would speak out.”

The former California district attorney slammed media corporations, including TV networks and newspapers, for “capitulating to these threats.”

As previously reported by theGrio, Kimmel was suspended on Wednesday for remarks he made about the shooting death of conservative activist Charlie Kirk on ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” after pressure from Brendan Carr, the Trump-appointed chairman of the Federal Communications Commission.

The FCC is notably responsible for licensing ABC’s local stations. Critics have suggested that media conglomerates that own several ABC affiliates gave in to pressure because of pending merger deals that the Trump administration must approve. For example, Nexstar Media Group, which owns 28 ABC affiliates, seeks to acquire Tegna for $6.2 billion, which would make it the largest owner of local TV stations in the country.

Other prominent voices in politics spoke out against the Trump administration, including former President Barack Obama, who similarly wrote on X, “This is precisely the kind of government coercion that the First Amendment was designed to prevent — and media companies need to start standing up rather than capitulating to it.”

In addition to the latest political pressure that resulted in Kimmel’s suspension, Trump has filed lawsuits against media corporations like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal over stories published about him. In July, Paramount settled a lawsuit filed by Trump for $16 billion over an edited CBS interview with Harris during the 2024 election. Trump claimed the interview was deceptively edited and accused CBS of false advertising and unfair competition.

The Trump administration was also embroiled in a lawsuit against the Associated Press after its reporters were barred from White House access. The president took issue with the global news wire’s reporting about the Gulf of Mexico, which Trump renamed in January as the “Gulf of America.”

“We cannot dare to be silent or complacent in the face of this frontal assault on free speech,” Harris said in her statement Thursday. “We, the People, deserve better.”