Democrats to Trump: Stop Jawboning, That’s Our Job!

In last week’s newsletter, I focused on the Trump administration’s obvious jawboning hypocrisy when it comes to Jimmy Kimmel: Trump folks railed against the Biden administration for pressuring social media companies to censor conservatives, yet are now engaged in a variation of the exact same thing.

There’s plenty of hypocrisy to go around, however. Indeed, in their responses to this whole kerfuffle, Democrats have revealed that their solution is not a solution at all, but a threat to up the ante the second they regain power.

To recap, Kimmel’s removal from the airwaves has alarmed many defenders of free speech—not because Kimmel has the right to a stage, a show, and an audience, but because the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) involved itself in a decision that should be made by private entities. By threatening to take regulatory action against media companies that platform Kimmel, FCC chair Brendan Carr earned a rare rebuke from several members of his own party, including Republican Sens. Ted Cruz (Texas), Rand Paul (Ky.), and Dave McCormick (Pa.).

When a government actor tries to extort a private actor into taking some action, it’s called jawboning. In this case, the desired action was the silencing of Kimmel, who used his show’s opening monologue last week to imply that the alleged killer of Charlie Kirk, Tyler Robinson, was part of the “MAGA gang,” i.e., that the shooter was identified with the right. This was neither funny nor true. Kimmel can and should suffer the market consequences of his claims: His viewers can desert him, his bosses can punish him, and companies that broadcast him can find something else to air in the 11 p.m. hour. The government shouldn’t force him off television, however, and the FCC shouldn’t imply that it will makes things very difficult for his corporate masters unless they muzzle him.

Like I said last week, there’s absolutely nothing unprecedented about what’s going on here. Carr’s directly threatening language—address the Kimmel situation “the easy way or the hard way”—was perhaps a less subtle example of jawboning, but it’s well in keeping with the previous administration’s actions on disfavored speech. Biden White House Digital Strategy Director Rob Flaherty, for instance, repeatedly pressed social media companies to take down content that was contrary to Biden’s interest.

So perhaps it should come as no surprise that Democrats are not responding to the Kimmel situation by demanding some new limit on the FCC’s ability to regulate speech. They are not vowing that a future Democratic administration would respect the sacrosanct First Amendment rights of private speech. On the contrary, they are promising to punish the victims of the jawboning—the private companies.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D–Conn.) made this explicit during a recent interview on MSNBC.

Murphy: “The second remedy is for the Democratic Party to make clear that if you give us power, we’re gonna break up these corporate monopolies, and in particular these media monopolies … if we want to be credible as a critic of Trump’s slide to totalitarianism, then we have to… pic.twitter.com/cjIHBcF0IP

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 25, 2025

Murphy said that if the Democrats regained control of the presidency and Congress, they would move swiftly to regulate and break up large media companies—and presumably, Big Tech companies—that kowtowed to Trump. If you think about it, what he’s basically saying is kowtow to us, not the GOP, or else!

One can’t help but feel a little sympathetic to the owners of the companies, who really just want to be left alone, make profit-maximizing decisions, and avoid punitive regulation. But they’re damned if they do—MAGA will hurt them—and damned if they don’t—Democrats will hurt them.

As long as Democrats remain the party that is more inclined to favor sweeping regulatory action aimed at breaking up the largest and most successful tech and media companies in the U.S.—in other words, the party of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders—the Republican Party might seem like the more welcoming team, even if Trump is as bad a jawboner (heh) as anyone else.

YouTube has announced that everyone kicked off the platform for violating pandemic-era content rules is now welcome back, following an investigation by House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R–Ohio) into the Biden administration’s jawboning of parent company Alphabet. Reason‘s Elizabeth Nolan Brown had an excellent write-up of this decision in her own newsletter, so I won’t dwell on it in too much detail.

I am particularly satisfied by this outcome, however, since my show, Rising, was unjustly suppressed by YouTube in 2022. The platform suspended us for a week, ostensibly because we violated an election integrity policy: denying the validity of the 2020 election. But of course, no one on the show made any such claim—rather, we played a news clip of Trump making the claim. In any case, it’s always nice to get some recognition that the moderation policies of that era were heavy-handed and motivated by government malfeasance.

Here was my commentary on Thursday’s episode of Rising, discussing YouTube’s change of heart.

I’m joined by Amber Duke to discuss Kamala Harris’s revenge tour, and much else. Also, I’m currently recording an episode with Andrew Heaton, which will debut later this week!

I just finished two things I’ve been working on: The second season of Netflix’s Wednesday, and the Cormac McCarthy novel Blood Meridian. One is a timeless meditation on man’s inherent capacity for violence and the savage roots of the American experiment, and the other is about cowboys.