Late-Night TV Reacts to Kimmel Return, Agree with Ted Cruz -- But Not His Mob Impression

The Texas Senator was one of just a handful of Republicans to speak out publicly against FCC chair Brendan Carr's apparent heavy-handed pressure on ABC parent company Disney, and local ABC affiliates when he said last Wednesday that "we can do this the easy way or the hard way" about Kimmel while speaking on a conservative podcast.

It's notable that the FCC does not hand licenses out to broadcast networks like ABC, but it does manage them for local television stations, i.e., the aforementioned affiliates. So if anyone would have been feeling intimidated by Carr's words, it would have been ABC affiliate owners.

Within hours of Carr's podcast appearance last Wednesday, the two largest ABC affiliate owners, Nexstar and Sinclair, told ABC they would not be airing Kimmel anymore. And within hours of that, ABC pulled the plug on his show. Now, Disney has reversed course, though it looks like Sinclair is planning to maintain its stance and not air Kimmel's ABC return tonight, per TMZ.

Instead, Sinclair said in a press release they would air news programming, but left the door open for Kimmel to make his way back to their airwaves eventually. "Discussions with ABC are ongoing as we evaluate the show’s potential return," the company stated.

Nevertheless, Kimmel will be back on the air for most of the country, and his fellow late-night hosts were ecstatic about Disney's relatively quick turnaround, with "indefinitely" turning out to be just under a week.

With anticipation high for how Kimmel will handle his return tonight, Stephen Colbert could not be happier for his "dear friend" -- and for himself. During his Monday monologue, The Late Show host said that with the news about Kimmel's return he was finally able to enjoy his Emmy win.

"Once more, I am the only martyr in late night," referring to CBS's surprise cancellation of his long-running show. He then looked hopefully toward one camera, "Wait, unless-- CBS, you wanna announce anything? Ah, ah, ah? Still no? Right, 'cause the money thing, I forgot, yeah."

Colbert then started to read Disney's statement announcing Kimmel's return, before dumping the corporate speak to get to the nitty gritty. "Here's why Disney folded," he explained. "After Kimmel was suspended, Google searches for 'cancel Disney Plus' and 'cancel Hulu' spiked, which explains why the other trending search was 'how to entertain feral child without Bluey?' So Disney put Kimmel back on because you, the American people, were upset."

On The Daily Show, Jon Stewart echoed the praise, saying, "That campaign that you all launched pretending that you were going to cancel Hulu while secretly racing through four seasons of Only Murders in the Building, that really worked."

He then aired clips of Lara Trump on Fox News denying that there was any pressure from the FCC or the Trump administration behind Disney's decision before going into a deep dive into President Trump's statements about how much he's a proponent of free speech -- as long as it's not negative about him.

"I'm a very strong person for free speech," the president said in a clip, before going into some complicated math about how many counties he won in the election versus what he perceives as 97 percent negative coverage. "So they gave me 97 [percent]. They'll take a great story and they'll make it bad," Trump continued. "See, I think that's really illegal, personally."

"Boom! Let me explain something. Free speech has always been a ratio," Stewart explained. "If the county vote were more equal, you could take a good story and make it bad without being jailed. But as our founders stated in the Constitution, when the delta of the sigma of counties divided by factorials of negativity are greater than pi, your inalienable rights turn into more of an expired Groupon. I'm sorry, that's just how it goes. I didn't make the rules."

Seth Meyers also weighed in on the president's ongoing ire at TV coverage of him, and late-night constantly cracking jokes at his expense. The Late Night also had a ratio of sorts to explain why it seems Trump gets talked about more than other public figures. First, he said that it's simply because the president is " the most powerful, most famous person on the planet."

But there's more to it than just that. "We make jokes about politicians and people in the news, including Joe Biden. It was just harder with Joe Biden because he didn't say much," Meyers said directly to the president. "You, on the other hand, talk all the time. You never stop talking. You didn't stop talking when he was president. You've talked more than all the other presidents combined, ever."

What's more, when Trump says "97 percent" negative coverage about him is "no longer free speech," Meyers said he's got it totally backwards. "No, that is free speech. That's like the whole point of free speech, that it's protected even when you don't like it," he explained.

"You think I liked it when I hosted the White House Correspondents Dinner back in 2011 and one reviewer said of my performance, 'He had marbles in his mouth,'" he added. "And that reviewer turned out to be Donald Trump."

It's not just late-night television hosts and news pundits speaking out about Trump's comments on free speech perhaps being illegal if it's "97 percent" negative about him, it's now members of his own party, like Ted Cruz, which led to some of the most uncomfortable late-night moments on Monday's shows -- as they had to admit they agreed with him.

"Cruz has supported this president through insults to his own wife's looks and to his own father's loyalties and yet Cruz still manages to maintain a modicum of self-respect when it comes to this president trampling all over our constitution," Stewart said, playing footage of the senator saying that this move by Carr "is dangerous as hell."

Stewart had "no notes" for that comment. "Fantastic. Fantastic. Senator Ted Cruz boldly stating that the FCC chairman threatening the licenses of networks is dangerous and Senator Cruz, I would just say, maybe you should stop there."

Unfortunately, Cruz did not stop there, instead going on to compare Carr telling ABC and Disney "We can do this the easy way or the hard way" to mob enforcers like Goodfellas leaning on business owners: "That's right out of a mafioso coming into a bar, going, ‘Nice bar you have here, it would be a shame if something happened to it.'"

And he did it with what he saw as a mob voice, which was the greatest offense to the late-night comics.

"The f--k? The hahd way? What kind of mobster have you ever heard?" Stewart asked him. "That's not The Godfather, that's Lenny from Of Mice and Men."

Colbert was also "shocked" that he agreed with Cruz, joking he was "even more shocked that he somehow got Robert De Niro to come on the podcast." Meyers marveled that he agreed with Cruz, too, saying, "I feel pretty sure there won't be another occasion to say it."

But the Late Night host also had words of commiseration for the politician. "As someone who has spent a lot of time working on impressions and not always had it work out well, I just want to say, Ted, keep workshopping that one because I empathize," he said. "That does not sound like a mobster. That sounds like a Russian spy posing as a mobster."

Stewart wants other conservatives to take a note from Cruz, who stood up for what's right in the face of a president at the height of his power. "You don't have to bend over backwards trying to make Trump's authoritarian power grabs seem like the rule of law," he told them. "He does not give a f--k anymore. He's saying it straight up."

"Trump is saying, the people like dictators. Trump is saying, I hate my opponents and I want them punished. And Trump is saying, I'll use all the levers of government at my disposal to accomplish that goal," he continued.

"So you can get on board with that and say, I'm with that, or you can join the rest of us and fight like hell for this constitutional republic," he concluded his plea. "Because let me tell you something, it is a form of representational government worth preserving and defending."