By Bobby Sample
“Making jokes about the president in America shouldn’t win you a prize,” said Jimmy Kimmel last Sunday at the Peabody Awards. In the same speech, he delivered no less than 14 hilarious alternate names for that same president. (Watch the video!)
Let’s talk about name-calling.
Of course, regular people hate Donald John Trump. People also hate disease-carrying rats during a plague.
But most of us would help up this person — the enfeebled old man himself, who just happened to get elected into our highest office — if he tripped over his cankles and fell down in front of us. That’s just a reasonable guess. For most of us progressives, I have faith that the word “hate” is applied in the narrowest of contexts even when MAGA — ever the projectionists — use the word as an accusation to shame us when we condemn this pestilence of a president.
Our ire is in the public interest. Our expressions of outrage toward this elite figure who entered the world as a human being, but now does enormous harm to the whole world as he wields power over us, falls into a category of trash-talking that is appropriate.
Who does the name-calling, and the reasons why, make all the difference.
In comedy, that difference is described as punching up vs. punching down. Punching up shows boldness, while punching down shows only bullying. One is all about chutzpah, while the other is all about character weakness.
That is why past presidents, by and large sharp debaters, clever orators, masters of words, men who could invent the cleverest put-downs of them all, have avoided childish name-calling much as they would avoid rolling in manure on camera. It is something a U.S. President simply cannot be caught doing in public without instantly branding themself an ass and a weakling.
But the Ass Weakling in Chief, a hopelessly spoiled bully who has never lived under the rules and obligations of other citizens nor grew up accordingly with life’s lessons, will never understand this difference as a fully-formed, responsible adult.
Instead, he fancies himself as a sort of Donald Rickles Trump, with a past-century stand-up comic’s flare for entertaining a crowd with repetitious insults. The trouble is, he does so with a cringey ignorance of how the pros make this work: through self-deprecation, selecting friendly targets who get in on the laugh, and otherwise only punching up. Every example of name-calling on the part of the Clown President — due to his office — is an act of punching down.
Donzo the Clown doesn’t restrict verbal abuse to political opponents in the ring who can take it. He’ll attack innocent citizens, the non-public and non-famous, who figure into any news that embarrasses him (election workers doing their jobs, his own fraud and sexual abuse victims, etc.). Far from taking part in a mere joke, he constantly puts others in harm’s way as a result of his irresponsible words.
The more he speaks — and speaks and speaks and speaks — the more his fears run naked. The emperor’s personal insecurities have no clothes.
Enter Jimmy Kimmel, comedian and host of ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live!, who responds to this problem four nights a week from a bully pulpit nearly as visible and as loud as that of Droning Don himself. Kimmel is only one of dozens of highly visible American comics who serve in the role of Court Jester, for whom no childish name-calling at the expense of royalty should be off-limits. But Kimmel is a rare example among them of a comic whose material — with the aid of his target’s own crippling insecurity — woke the nation up to this administration’s threat against the right of free speech.
On Sept. 17, 2025, the Walt Disney Company, the corporate parent of ABC, abruptly pulled Kimmel’s show off the air. It did so after Federal Communications Commission chairman and Trumpster Brendan Carr threatened to revoke broadcast licenses of ABC stations in retaliation for Kimmel’s commentary. This included Kimmel’s riffs on the superficial reactions of the “MAGA gang” to the murder of Charlie Kirk as well as Kimmel’s ongoing practice of dressing down the naked emperor himself.
Then, Disney answered to an outraged American public wielding their own powers of retaliation with a sizeable drop in Disney+ streaming subscriptions, and calls to boycott ABC and Disney products. Even many Republicans — even Sen. Ted Cruz, who hates Jimmy Kimmel — spoke out against this abuse of the FCC to silence a comedian for political commentary. Meanwhile, the Mouse House had to stave off the rise of cancellations for its shareholders, and had to end this story for its own PR. Thus Jimmy Kimmel Live! returned to the air five days later, to higher ratings than ever.
At the core of the First Amendment is the freedom to speak truth to power. Every protest and demonstration, every rally and speech, in order to stave off the fascist movement in the United States stands on this right. It goes without saying this function is central to Indivisible.
The George Foster Peabody Awards annually recognize “excellence in storytelling that reflects the social issues and the emerging voices of our day” in a variety of documentary and entertainment productions in television, radio, and streaming media. The prestigious awards for 2025 went to 34 honorees last Sunday selected by their Board of Jurors.
Adding Kimmel to their list as a Peabody Award recipient, on behalf of Jimmy Kimmel LIve!, was a good bit of name-calling.
Bobby Sample is a member of Dunes City Indivisible, the Oregon Coast Indivisible Alliance, and the COIN Comms Team.