ABC and Disney Went on the Offensive Against Trump's FCC — Suing in Federal Court and Alleging the Agency Waged a "Retaliatory Campaign" Against the Network, Ordering an Early Review of All Eight of Its Station Licenses Years Ahead of Schedule, to Punish It for Jimmy Kimmel's Jokes, "The View," and Its News Coverage

For months the Trump administration's pressure on ABC ran one direction: the government leaning on the network, and the network absorbing it. On August 18, 2026, that reversed. Disney and ABC stopped flinching and sued — dragging into a federal courtroom the question of whether a president's regulators can punish a broadcaster because the president does not like its jokes.

The lawsuit

The Walt Disney Company, ABC, and the eight ABC-owned television stations whose licenses are in play filed suit in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, alleging the Federal Communications Commission violated their First Amendment rights. The core allegation is a single sentence:

The FCC "has waged a retaliatory campaign against ABC for a single reason: it disapproves of what ABC broadcasts."

The suit asks the court to halt the FCC proceeding at the center of the fight.

What the FCC did

In April 2026, the FCC — chaired by Brendan Carr, a close Trump ally — ordered an "early" review of the licenses for all eight ABC-owned stations, years before those licenses are set to expire. The stated rationale was the company's diversity, equity, and inclusion practices. But the timing and the target tell the real story: the review landed amid the network's fight over Jimmy Kimmel, whose jokes had drawn Trump's fury, and the suit ties the FCC's campaign directly to ABC's content — its news coverage, its daytime talk show "The View," and Kimmel's late-night mockery of the president.

The evidence ABC points to is, conveniently, in the president's own hand. The lawsuit cites Trump's own social-media posts condemning ABC's news, "The View," and Kimmel, and his repeated public demands that the network be stripped of its licenses. When the man the regulator serves has publicly said, over and over, that a broadcaster should lose its licenses because of what it airs, and the regulator then moves against that broadcaster's licenses, the "diversity" pretext does not survive contact with the timeline.

Why this is a First Amendment case

Broadcast licenses are the pressure point, and that is precisely the danger. Television stations need FCC licenses to operate; the threat of losing one, or of a costly, premature renewal fight, is an existential weapon. The First Amendment exists to keep the government from using exactly that kind of leverage to control what the press says. A regulator may not wield its licensing power to punish or coerce a broadcaster because officials dislike its viewpoint — its satire, its news judgment, its opinion programming. Doing so is textbook content-based retaliation, and it is unconstitutional whether the speech in question is a hard-hitting news report or a comedian's monologue. Kimmel's jokes are protected speech. "The View's" opinions are protected speech. ABC's news is protected speech. Using the machinery of the FCC to make a network pay for any of it is the government doing the one thing the First Amendment most squarely forbids.

Why a media company suing the FCC is so unusual

The most telling fact about this lawsuit is that it exists at all. Media companies almost never sue the FCC. They are perpetually dependent on the agency — for license renewals, for approval of mergers and acquisitions, for spectrum, for a steady stream of routine decisions that can make or break their business. Antagonizing the regulator you must keep going back to is, under normal conditions, considered corporate self-harm. That is precisely why broadcasters have historically absorbed FCC pressure quietly, lobbied in private, and settled rather than sued.

And Disney is not a scrappy outfit with nothing to lose. It is one of the largest media companies on Earth, with an enormous portfolio of business pending before, or subject to, the FCC. For a company like that to take its own regulator to federal court is an act of near-desperation by the standards of the industry — a signal that means one of two things, both damning for the administration:

• The retaliation was so blatant and existential — a threat to the licenses the entire broadcast business depends on — that fighting became less risky than capitulating; or
• Disney concluded that capitulation would not buy safety anyway — that a regulator willing to weaponize licensing over a comedian's jokes could not be appeased, only stopped.

Either way, the suit is the exception that proves the rule: it took a genuinely extraordinary abuse to make a risk-averse media giant decide that suing the FCC was the safer course. The contrast is instructive. Other companies chose the other road — Paramount's reported settlement in the CBS/Colbert episode, documented elsewhere in this archive, is the model of a media parent buying peace. Disney looked at that path and refused it, which tells you how far it judged the FCC had gone.

Two points worth stating plainly

Because the headlines compress it, two things are worth being precise about:

• ABC is suing the FCC, not Trump personally. The defendant is the agency — Carr's FCC — though the suit's theory is that the FCC acted to appease Trump, who has demanded ABC lose its licenses. It is a case about the government's conduct, powered by the president's stated wishes
• No one has won a court case. This is a newly filed lawsuit; there is no ruling yet. The "win" that preceded it was Jimmy Kimmel's reinstatement — his return to the air after he was pushed off it under FCC pressure, documented separately in this archive. What is new is that ABC, having gotten Kimmel back, has now gone on offense

The pattern it fights

This suit is one front in a broader war on the press that this archive has tracked across many entries: Kimmel forced off the air under FCC threat, then reinstated; the pressure on CBS and Paramount around Colbert; the DOJ's grand-jury subpoenas of New York Times reporters over the Air Force One story, and of Post and Journal reporters; the Pentagon's eviction of the press corps. The through-line is a government that treats critical coverage and comedy as offenses to be punished through whatever lever is at hand — a license, a subpoena, a threat.

What makes the ABC suit notable is that a major media company decided not to settle, not to fold, but to sue — to make the administration defend, under oath and on the record, the proposition that it can revoke a broadcaster's livelihood because the president was mocked. That proposition is the opposite of the First Amendment. A government confident in its own conduct does not need to punish the people who report on it or joke about it. This one has spent months trying, and has now been hauled into court to explain why the network that aired Jimmy Kimmel should lose the licenses it needs to broadcast at all.