gilbertdunkley

Jimmy Kimmel’s comeback

I applaud the Walt Disney Company’s decision to reinstate “Jimmy Kimmel Live!,” starting on Tuesday, after Disney-0wned ABC suspended it indefinitely last week because of uncharitable remarks that Kimmel made about the Sept. 10 assassination of the conservative lightning rod Charlie Kirk.

Disney had issued the suspension in response to a conservative backlash that included ABC-affiliated Sinclair and Nexstar declaring that they would no longer carry Kimmel’s show on their many stations around the country. Behind much of everything, of course, lies money: These large television and entertainment companies almost always have business underway that needs federal government approval, and they have to be careful to present the correct posture before the highly vindictive Trump administration. It was almost natural, therefore, that Disney and its affiliates would do a bit of virtue signaling by dropping the hammer on Kimmel.

To be clear, the argument over Kimmel’s show is not a First Amendment matter. Disney is a private entity, not a government agency, so it cannot be accused of violating Kimmel’s constitutional right to free speech, because Kimmel has no such claim in respect of a private corporation. Disney is at liberty to terminate any presenter’s contract over speech that Disney does not like. But the public that pays Disney for the entertainment it provides also is entitled to withdraw its money from Disney products and spend it elsewhere, or just sit on it, if it does not like Disney’s decisions.

Disney immediately faced a different backlash for benching Kimmel. This one came broadly from the left in the form of loud and harsh criticism of the Kimmel suspension as corporate cowardice in the face of a Trump administration that is demonstrably committed to quashing criticism of federal government policy as well as of the font of federal policy, the stable genius that is President Donald Trump himself.

And the new backlash also took the important form of canceled subscriptions; Disney was frightened about losing money. After all, money rules. So the corporation again adjusted its calculations and decided that it was better that Kimmel and his program be restored.

Or, if I am to be charitable and optimistic in my outlook, it could be that the powers atop Disney genuinely decided that it was more important that media corporations begin to grow some backbone under the repressive pressure the federal government is exerting.

Whatever its real motivations, Disney did a good thing today in restoring Kimmel’s show. And I will now renew the Disney subscription that I canceled over the Kimmel suspension.

Video: White House protests

These two videos, which contain loud profanity, were recorded on the pedestrian plaza north of the White House in Washington, D.C., on Saturday, Sept. 20, 2025.

Photos: White House protest

Most of the images in this gallery depict the scene at the north fence of the White House on Saturday, Sept. 20, 2025. A layer of barrier had been opened, allowing tourists and protesters to get very close to the fence. Photos by Gilbert Dunkley

Protesters still occupy the spot from which Trump had removed a ramshackle tent housing a decades-old peace encampment near White House north fence, Saturday, Sept. 20, 2025.

Kirk’s death and the continuing struggle

The assassination of Charlie Kirk is a dreadful crime, and the killer is likely to be executed for what he has done. But no one who opposes President Donald Trump for his anti-democratic excesses should ease up for even a moment in the campaign to spotlight and denounce those transgressions.

If you are pointing out dangerous actions and behaviors in reasonable words and are not encouraging the use of violence, you should consider yourself to be in the clear and should press on with speaking truth to this corrupt power.

Keep challenging Trump’s overreach and the GOP-led Congress’s cowardly dereliction of its duty to be a check on the executive branch. Continue telling that same Congress that we are watching for it to rouse itself and hypocritically rediscover its voice when the next Democratic president takes office and tries to effect his or her agenda. Keep telling Congress that the executive excesses on which it is silent today are establishing precedents that tomorrow’s presidents — Republican and Democrat — will be able employ to constrain disapproving voices, throttle the courts and to stifle the inconvenient rights of the sovereign people.

Keep pointing out that under Trump, the executive branch is, more than ever, a center of power pursuing the interests of the occupant of the Oval Office to the detriment of the common good.

Trump’s supporters seem to have calculated that they will be safe because Trump is their man and they are his people, that he will forever focus on the enemy. But who is enemy and who friend in Trump’s eyes, and for how long? Supporters of aspiring authoritarians have erred fatally in this calculation repeatedly throughout history, failing to recognize that the dictator is a pathological personality who views even his supporters and allies as tools and will turn on them the moment this becomes convenient for him.

Suddenly, they, who were the heroic people in the authoritarian’s telling yesterday, become the enemies of the people. This pattern is already plain to see in Trump’s behavior since his first term. Who can count the number of people he has embraced as the finest to serve him in government and elsewhere, only to turn on them and attack them as villainous and incompetent, even treasonous, because they have indulged in independent thinking? Who can forget his attacks on his own supporters for wanting greater transparency in the Jeffrey Epstein sex crimes case, a matter on which Trump has exhibited an interesting level of touchiness?

All those immigrant groups that supported him in the election? They fancied themselves to be among the elect. They were wrong. They found out in his immigration enforcement sweeps.

Let us deplore the killing of Charlie Kirk and commiserate with his wife and children and the wider community that loved him. But let us not be diverted from our principal purpose by noises such as Trump’s linking of Kirk’s assassination to violent rhetoric on the left. Absolutely no one in American public political discourse of the past decade has unleashed more violent and incendiary rhetoric than Donald Trump has from his perch on the extreme right of American politics.

Since he declared for the presidency in June 2015, he has demolished the guardrails of self-restraint and decency and has dragged this country’s political culture toward levels of physical confrontation not seen since the civil rights struggles of the post-World War II era.

A 22-year-old man may have fired the shot that killed Charlie Kirk in Utah, but when 79-year-old Trump looks in the mirror here in Washington, D.C., he will see someone who bears part of the blame for that heinous assassination. His supporters should wake up and see who is leading them, and to where.

National Guard in D.C.’s Dupont Circle

National Guard troops armed with pistols are seen at the intersection of R Street, 20th Street and Connecticut Avenue Northwest in Washington, D.C., on the morning of Friday, Sept. 5, 2025. Video by Gilbert Dunkley

People without homes and people with homes start their day near Q Street and Connecticut Avenue NW in the north Dupont Circle neighborhood of Washington, D.C., on Friday, Sept. 5, 2025. At the moment that this picture is taken, three armed National Guard troops are standing one block north at R Street and Connecticut Avenue NW. They are obscured by that tree at left in the background. This area already is highly policed, because it is home to embassies and ambassadorial residencies, and because many of Washington’s power players in politics and business have homes nearby. Even Jeff Bezos’s D.C. home (the city’s largest residential square footage) is in the neighborhood. Photo by Gilbert Dunkley

Video visit outside the White House on Labor Day 2025

Video visit to D.C.’s Union Station on Labor Day 2025

To the glory of Trump — enemy of labor

If you go to the headquarters of the U.S. Department of Labor here in Washington and stand well back across from the building in that mini park on Constitution Avenue to get a panoramic view of the edifice, you will see two enormous banners honoring American workers for the nation’s 250th anniversary next year. Each banner also bears the image of a U.S. president: on the left is Donald Trump; on the right is Theodore Roosevelt.

Roosevelt was a labor reformer even before he became governor of New York, and before he would become U.S. president. But before that, as a member of the New York State Assembly, he was at first a reliable anti-union vote. Then he had an epiphany when he began learning about ordinary people’s working conditions. His education included visiting workplaces and seeing firsthand the appalling conditions that prevailed.

Here is a description of Roosevelt’s work in labor reform, taken from a blog at the Theodore Roosevelt Center that credits a report at the Library of Congress as its ultimate source:
“As Governor of New York, Roosevelt further pushed for labor reform, especially through enforcement of existing legislation. He pushed for the passage of employers’ liability and sweatshop laws, essentially a continuation of the crusade he had picked up from his meetings with [the union leader] Samuel Gompers. Although he could not get [those] passed, he was able to sign a number of individual bills regulating tenement house manufacturing. Other bills he signed regulated the labor of women and children, as well as that of teachers and municipal employees. Finally, and perhaps most significantly, he passed and strictly enforced an eight-hour law.”

Under President Theodore Roosevelt in 1903, a Department of Commerce and Labor was formed. In 1913, under President William Howard Taft, the separate Department of Labor was formed, and the original “Commerce and Labor” entity continued as the singular Department of Commerce. The Department of Labor, to which Roosevelt could rightly claim parentage, says this about itself:
“The Department of Labor (DOL) administers federal labor laws to guarantee workers’ rights to fair, safe, and healthy working conditions, including minimum hourly wage and overtime pay, protection against employment discrimination, and unemployment insurance.”

President Theodore Roosevelt has a highly positive legacy in relation to labor. But what about Trump? What does the record show so far of his attitude to labor?

President Donald Trump is featured on a banner at the headquarters of the U.S. Department of Labor, Washington, D.C., on Friday, Aug. 29, 2025. A corresponding banner out of the frame to the right shows President Theodore Roosevelt. A Department of Commerce and Labor was established under Roosevelt in 1903. The Department of Labor was established as a separate Cabinet-level entity in 1913. Photo by Gilbert Dunkley

In a word: enmity.

It is rich that his face is plastered on a banner at the Labor Department building honoring the American worker. Trump has a bad history with labor, starting in his business life, where he was sued by individuals and by small contractors who alleged that he stiffed them by refusing to pay for work they had completed. In his first term as president, he attacked the labor unions representing federal employees and also treated those employees — essentially his own workers — as enemies of the American people. The courts helped to restrain him that time around.

In his second term, he came loaded for bear. He returned to Washington accompanied by Elon Musk as his hatchet man. Musk set about sacking tens of thousands of federal workers. There is a civilized way to reduce headcount, and the abrupt and cruel way it has been done in a matter of months this year by the Trump administration is not it. The result has been lives upended and multiple government agencies thrown into chaos, their work undercut and their remaining employees feeling terrorized.

And Trump’s tariffs are coming for the American private-sector worker. Watch what tariff-induced inflation will do to consumer demand, the profitability of companies, the cost of living, and, ultimately, the level of unemployment.

Trump is no friend of American workers. He is a fool flailing about pretending to be doing work when in fact he is causing destructive chaos. That his face appears on a banner honoring this country’s workers for the nation’s 250th anniversary is an insult to American labor.

Look for Trump’s image to continue to occupy top billing as the celebration of the nation’s 250th anniversary advances. For him, the event is not about the country’s endurance as an experiment in democracy. It is simply about the glory of Donald Trump.