Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took aim at Donald Trump during an appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe Wednesday, casting the former president as a threat to free expression in the United States.
In her conversation with co-host Willie Geist, Clinton specifically pointed to the suspension of late-night host Jimmy Kimmel, who had been briefly taken off the air by ABC. Notably, the decision came from the network and not the White House, yet Clinton used the incident as evidence that Trump is undermining free speech. Critics were quick to note the omission of any acknowledgment that conservatives have faced years of documented censorship from tech companies and media institutions.
Clinton accused Trump of deploying what she called “the authoritarian playbook” in response to Kimmel, who was sidelined after falsely characterizing the political leanings of Charlie Kirk’s assassin.
“I view [taking Jimmy Kimmel off the air] as very dangerous,” Clinton said. “It is right out of the authoritarian playbook, Willie. I mean, this is, you know, on this was point four of the authoritarian playbook: Silence your opponents, cripple the media that doesn’t give you the slavish attention and agreement that, uh, you desire. Use the power of the government to go after corporations and individuals.”
The former Democratic presidential nominee also praised Kimmel for his emotional monologue Tuesday night, when the late-night comedian returned from his six-day ABC-imposed suspension and appeared tearful as he addressed the controversy on air.
Reflecting on Kimmel’s televised return, Clinton praised the comedian’s emotional candor. “I thought, you know, Jimmy Kimmel did an excellent job last night in, you know, being very emotional, actually, about that moment for him and how he felt misunderstood,” she said. Clinton added that Kimmel’s intentions were not malicious: “And he certainly didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, but on the other hand, you know, standing up for free speech. I’ve said a million times, I mean, good lord, the things that have been said about me, of the lies that have been propagated.”
Clinton then attempted humor, joking about using federal regulators to muzzle her critics. “If I had only known, I could call up the FCC chair and say, ‘Take this person off the air, get that person out of my sight, off with his head,’” she quipped.
Yet her remarks—framing Kimmel as a kind of free speech martyr—came under immediate scrutiny. Critics accused Clinton of hypocrisy, noting her failure to address mounting evidence of government-linked censorship targeting conservatives. Just a day earlier, Google acknowledged in a letter to House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan that YouTube had, for years, removed lawful speech at the direction of the Biden administration. According to the company’s admission, this enforcement extended even to content that did not violate YouTube’s own stated policies, fueling allegations of partisan suppression of political expression.
For many, Clinton’s performance on MSNBC highlighted what they see as a striking disconnect: while warning against the supposed authoritarian tendencies of her former rival, she ignored revelations that members of her own party had leaned on tech giants to police the speech of ordinary Americans.
In its letter to House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, Google acknowledged that its subsidiary YouTube had enforced policies at the behest of the Biden administration, including the removal of content that did not violate the platform’s own rules.
“Reflecting the company’s commitment to free expression, YouTube will provide an opportunity for all creators to rejoin the platform if the company terminated their channels for repeated violations of COVID-19 and elections integrity policies that are no longer in effect,” a Google attorney wrote.
The company admitted that the political pressure exerted by the administration created a climate of censorship, describing those demands as “unacceptable and wrong.”
Meanwhile, critics noted that the same networks Clinton defended—ABC and its parent company Disney—were the ones responsible for Kimmel’s suspension, not Trump. Yet on MSNBC, Clinton cast herself as a defender of free speech, warning of authoritarian dangers while ignoring her party’s record of pressuring Big Tech to suppress dissenting voices.
For observers, the contrast was stark: while Clinton sounded alarms about Trump’s supposed authoritarianism, her own party has repeatedly leaned on corporations to silence its critics. Her outrage, they argued, is selective, her claims misleading, and her warnings ring hollow against the backdrop of Democrats’ track record on censorship.
