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September 18, 2025

By Stephen Collinson

President Donald Trump attends the Ceremonial Welcome during his state visit at Windsor Castle on September 17, 2025. (Zak Hussein/Pool/Mark Cuthbert/UK PressGetty Images)

The king was in the castle 

King George III is mostly now remembered for being a volatile and unpredictable ruler whose arrogance drove his American subjects to revolt.

“Farmer George” also loved Windsor, making several modifications to the largest and oldest constantly occupied castle in the world. 

So it was ironic that America’s own wannabe king, Donald Trump, chose the night of his own stay beneath the Windsor battlements this week to take a fresh swing at the constitutional bedrocks born from his country’s break with the Brits.

The Founding Fathers believed free speech, which they were denied under the British, was a pillar of sound governance. “When this support is taken away, the constitution of a free society is dissolved and tyranny is erected on its ruins,” wrote Benjamin Franklin.

But Trump only favors free speech if it’s speech that he favors. From the royal guest suite in Windsor, he celebrated his administration’s success in getting the late-night ABC talk show of Jimmy Kimmel suspended. Then he said he would declare Antifa — an umbrella group of left-wing activists — a major terrorist organization. This would likely violate freedom of expression and the First Amendment. But who’s going to stop him? Not the groveling Republican Congress. 

Trump’s latest assault on the Constitution follows the assassination last week of Charlie Kirk, the MAGA influencer — who in another irony, built his brand on free speech and debating political opponents.

Republicans argue that Democrats, by calling Trump a threat to democracy and a “fascist,” created a culture that led to two attempts to kill the president last year and motivated Kirk’s alleged shooter. While authorities have said that the suspect in last week’s horror had recently turned to leftist ideologies, there’s no evidence he had any links to Democrats. But Trump has run with the narrative that he and conservatives are being targeted by liberals, and he ignores other recent political violence that killed or injured Democrats. 

Kimmel had been on late night for more than 20 years. He got into trouble because he suggested this week that Trump’s MAGA fans spent last weekend seeking to prove that the shooter was anything but one of them. He might have been smarter to avoid the entire subject entirely in a comedy monologue. 

Late-night talk show hosts like the late Johnny Carson were once the kings of light entertainment. But in a fractured media age, they are much diminished. That’s why they make an easy target for Trump. The president might have a point that late-night hosts single him out for the most scorn. But it comes with the job. Just ask Bill Clinton how much he enjoyed being the butt of every joke for years during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. 

That said, smug late-night screeds by highly paid liberal hosts might be past their time. Perhaps New York and California TV executives might have twigged before now that a business model that insults half the country was a long-term loser. 

But the issue here is not whether Kimmel was funny or boring. It’s that Trump’s government seems to have used government power in an act of censorship.

Trump’s hard-charging head of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, implicitly warned ABC stations throughout the country that they could lose their broadcast licenses if they failed to dump Kimmel. 

And there’s a money trail. Nexstar, a group of affiliate TV stations that threatened to pull Kimmel’s show, wants to merge with another firm, with millions of dollars at stake. 

Guess who gets to approve the deal? Yep, Carr and the FCC.

Already this year, Paramount, which needed government support to pull off its own mega-merger, announced the cancellation of its late-night CBS show, hosted by Stephen Colbert, another anti-Trump comic. Now Trump wants to eject NBC’s late-night crew, Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers.

It’s clear that the president wants to wipe out any media sources that don’t parrot the fawning propaganda of the pro-Trump hacks who got to ask questions at his press conference with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Thursday. This week alone, he’s had stand-up rows with two reporters on camera and sued the New York Times for $15 billion. 

This is why the lavish welcome laid on for Trump this week by the British royals and Starmer’s government struck some as jarring. For the price of military pageants and a sumptuous banquet, Britain got a multimillion-dollar AI investment from Trump’s new friends in the US tech industry. Starmer got a brief break from the multiple political disasters plaguing his reeling administration. 

And behind the walls of the British monarchy’s pile, America’s own volatile and unpredictable king slugged away at freedoms his forebears won 250 years ago.

'Can we have our base back?' 

No one saw this one coming.

Trump, who spent much of the 2024 campaign lambasting President Joe Biden’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, now wants back in.

He said Thursday that he wants to take back the vast Bagram air field north of Kabul. His reasoning is that a US presence would make it easier to monitor China’s nuclear program and to export rare earth minerals in Afghanistan.

Trump — who did the original deal with the Taliban to end America’s longest war, a fact he never mentions in his attacks on Biden — thinks he has leverage with the militia, but it's not clear whether talks are underway. “We’re trying to get it back because (the Taliban) need things from us,” Trump told reporters in England. “We want that base back.”

Here’s the problem. Standing up a US operation at Bagram again — perhaps also to go after ISIS — would require a large influx of US troops to secure the perimeter and to make sure US service personnel were safe. 

The politics of Trump sending Americans back to Afghanistan seem impossible, especially since he won a second term boasting that he ends wars and doesn't start new foreign adventures.

This may be one of those Trump pipe dreams, like making Canada the 51st state, that never happen.

People hold candles during a memorial of Charlie Kirk at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, on September 14, 2025. (Rod Lamkey/AP)

What to Watch 

On Sunday, the MAGA movement will descend on Arizona for Kirk’s funeral. This will be a deeply moving memorial for those who loved the man who helped deliver an influential seam of younger voters to Trump in last year’s election.

It will also be a galvanizing moment for Trump’s base, as activists will recommit themselves to the Make America Great Again faith in Kirk’s name. The service may also give fresh political impetus to Trump’s crackdown on left-wing groups and the media that he has used the killing to justify.

Trump is planning to load up Air Force One with Kirk's friends. 

But keep an eye especially on Vice President JD Vance, who may have lost the most politically from the murder. Kirk was a key player in the former Ohio senator’s selection to be Trump’s running mate. And he would have been a major player in Vance's expected campaign for the Republican nomination in 2028.