Mickey Mouse, Welcome to the Resistance

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The fight against the Trump administration’s media crackdowns just leveled up a notch. On Tuesday morning, Disney, ABC, and the network’s eight affiliate stations collectively filed a federal lawsuit against the Federal Communications Commission, arguing that the agency is violating the broadcaster’s First Amendment rights—and requesting that the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia halt the FCC’s ongoing regulatory actions against ABC.

“The Administration has waged a retaliatory campaign against ABC for a single reason: it disapproves of what ABC broadcasts,” the complaint reads up top.

It’s rare for any TV news outfit to call out its own regulators in such an unabashed manner. But, as Disney’s lawyers make clear, this was a long time coming. The filing keeps a diligent record of public statements made by President Donald Trump and FCC Chair Brendan Carr over the past two years, as they repeatedly excoriated ABC’s political coverage while threatening to revoke the licenses that allow it to operate over the public airwaves.

More recently, Carr made a move toward realizing this power grab in April, when he formally asked that Disney submit early renewal applications for ABC’s eight licensed regional affiliates—even though all those stations’ contracts remain in effect until 2028 or later. The FCC had framed this historically unprecedented order as part of a long-running investigation into Disney’s diversity, equity, and inclusion policies. The agency’s request also landed immediately after the president had, once again, excoriated ABC’s political coverage, aiming special ire at the Trump-critical hosts of The View and Jimmy Kimmel Live!

In the months since the FCC’s initial letter, the alarming threat it presented to ABC’s press freedoms only became more apparent. Disney was willing to submit the premature renewal applications, and a flood of more than 150,000 comments to the FCC, from a swath of cross-partisan advocates, demonstrated overwhelming public support for ABC. Last month, however, leaks from the FCC indicated that Carr was ready to make binding rulings that would change The View’s programming structure and bring ABC’s broadcast licenses closer to total revocation. Hence, Disney writes, it had “no choice” but to take legal action against this “existential threat.” The message is clear: Disney is ready for battle, and it is waging this war not just on its own behalf, but for the sake of American journalism as a whole.

“If the Administration gets its way, the message to every media company in the country will be unmistakable: tell only the stories the Administration deems favorable, or face the coercive machinery of the federal government,” the lawsuit states.

It’s a remarkable, bold stance for Disney to take at this moment, just two years after it settled a weak personal lawsuit from Trump over host George Stephanopoulos’ technically true utterance that the then candidate had been found “liable for rape” in a federal case filed by E. Jean Carroll. (Not that ABC News was the only media outlet that has attempted to appease Trump.) But this year, the vibe once again seems to have shifted—this time away from supplicating the reelected president.

Trump’s approval is at record lows these days, and his attacks on the press aren’t helping him regain any momentum. Disney also came to understand the sheer scale of American liberals’ anger when it ill-advisedly suspended Jimmy Kimmel from the air last September. To recap: In response to a factually shaky quip the late-night host had made on air about Charlie Kirk’s alleged assassin, broadcast giants Nexstar and Sinclair blocked Kimmel’s show from their ABC affiliate channels (with Carr’s vocal encouragement), leading Disney executives to temporarily, suddenly halt production on Jimmy Kimmel Live! altogether. Trump celebrated the decision, but the broader backlash was immediate and immense, with Disney adults taking to the streets in protest and pledging to boycott the corporation’s theme parks and streaming services. Kimmel was then quickly reinstated.

Still, the government again pursued Kimmel in April, after a wannabe presidential assassin breached the White House Correspondents’ dinner. Melania Trump pointed to a pre-dinner Jimmy Kimmel Live! sketch in which the host joked about the first lady having “a glow like an expectant widow”—a nod to the president’s flailing health that his wife reframed, ludicrously, as incitement of violence. By that point, however, some things had changed at Disney: It had a new CEO, and it had gotten thousands of supportive comments from the public when Carr began probing The View over its choices of political guests. Plus, the House of Mouse was already changing up its rhetorical tack to mount an abundant self-defense on free speech and free press grounds. Even as ABC played ball by submitting license renewals on the FCC’s hastened timeline, it claimed to do so “under protest in response to an unlawful, arbitrary, and unconstitutional order.” The broadcaster additionally cited Americans’ continuous deluges of supportive comments when it asked the regulatory agency, in June, to drop its license order. And it further defied the administration when it refused to broadcast Trump’s election-denying July 16 address, a slight that Carr claimed would be factored into his decision.

The belligerent, blatant nature of Trump and Carr’s anti-ABC vendetta is a motif of the new lawsuit, which quotes various interviews, social media posts, and documents in making the case that 1) the president has consistently called for ABC to lose its licenses on no other pretense than his perception of bias, and 2) Carr is less an independent government regulator than a Trump lackey who makes his censorious desires rather open, as in a March tweet threatening that broadcasters covering the Iran invasion would “lose their licenses” if they didn’t “correct course.”

Disney’s counsel likewise points out that this top-down crusade is already having a chilling effect on the type of guests shows like The View might invite on. “Since the Bureau’s inquiry began, ABC must now evaluate any invitation to a political candidate for its potential consequences, including whether it might later be cited by the Commission as a basis for non-renewal,” they write. As such, The View has for now stopped booking any candidates for office as guests and is not airing certain clips that may even depict a politician of whom Trump disapproves.

Disney’s legal team warns too that whatever happens to ABC will not be limited to that particular newsroom: “Other news organizations throughout the country are also watching and waiting to see the extent to which ABC and the Stations will be punished, as promised, for coverage that the Administration has deemed unfavorable—because if it happens to ABC, they could be next.” After all, most media properties are nowhere near as well resourced and lucrative as Disney. With this lawsuit, the corporation is sending a message: It’s ready to deploy those resources to fight this thing as long as it takes, with the hope that federal judges will heed all the evidence of Trump and Carr’s censorious intent and stop this crusade. Because if they don’t recognize the constitutional stakes here, every media company in America will be a target.