OPINION: President Donald Trump seems determined to use the full force of the White House to force Disney and ABC to cancel Jimmy Kimmel’s talk show over jokes he told days before the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. In this morning’s missive, Trump warned action better be taken soon, this after the FCC triggered a review of ABC station licenses over Kimmel.
One has to wonder, then, what kind of scrutiny will be directed toward Jeff Bezos’ Amazon if the Wall Street Journal’s scoop on Wednesday night is accurate that it wants to revive The Apprentice with Donald Trump Jr as host?
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Kimmel, whose nightly monologues have focused almost exclusively on berating the president, has found himself on the receiving end of MAGA scorn twice now. The first came after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, and the latest is over comments Kimmel made days before this latest shooting incident, that Melania Trump bore the “glow of an expectant widow.”
These seemingly pale in comparison to the barbed social media and television appearances attributed to Don Jr., who was part of the NBC reality show The Apprentice when his father hosted. The one that keeps flashing in my mind in the current call to ratchet down the incendiary rhetoric was Don Jr’s reaction to the near-fatal 2022 home invasion attack on Paul Pelosi, husband of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA). A deranged intruder, bent on harming the Speaker, instead attacked Paul Pelosi in their San Francisco home, and fractured his skull with a hammer.
Don Jr.’s social media post depicted a pair of underwear and a hammer, expressing that Trump Jr had found his Paul Pelosi Halloween costume (the 82-year-old Pelosi happened to be in his underwear when he heard and confronted the assailant in the wee hours of the morning).
On separate occasions, Trump Jr. has compared transgender people to terrorists and made other polarizing comments. Will it matter?
There is precedent for TV personalities having to answer for boorish comments made on social media and on television. Longtime Jeopardy! producer Mike Richards was fired as host only one day after being named as permanent replacement for the late Alex Trebek, after podcast remarks he made nearly a decade earlier resurfaced. Richards had made disparaging comments about women’s bodies and out-of-bounds discourse on Jewish and Asian people as well as little people and the mentally disabled.
Amazon has not confirmed the WSJ report about exploratory talks to revive The Apprentice and make Trump Jr host, and it is not clear if Trump Jr is even in the loop. But a cordial relationship with owner Bezos and the Trump White House continues to evolve that might make a skeptic wonder if it would make any difference.
If the WSJ report is accurate, it would be a test of the cordial relationship between Amazon’s Bezos and the Trump Clan. Bezos and his wife were among those who just attended the State Dinner for King Charles. This after Bezos reportedly killed a planned endorsement of Trump’s opponent Kamala Harris in the Washington Post and after Amazon paid a reported $40 million for the documentary Melania. In its report Wednesday night, the WSJ said 70% of that movie money went directly to the first lady. Stay tuned.
Here is how SNL‘s “Weekend Update” covered Trump’s Pelosi post:
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