Fighting Trump will make or break Disney’s new CEO

A week ago, newly appointed Disney CEO Josh D’Amaro was busy regaling investors with plans to turn Disney Plus into the company’s “digital centerpiece.” By last Friday, though, his attention had presumably shifted to a fight with the Trump administration over free speech.

Disney-owned ABC has now accused the administration of violating its First Amendment rights with an ongoing investigation into The View. D’Amaro — the former head of Disney’s parks division — might have wanted his legacy to be defined by corporate synergy and a souped-up version of Disney Plus. But this fight with Donald Trump and the Federal Communications Commission is likely to be the first thing that defines his tenure.

In its recent filing to the FCC, ABC claimed that the agency is threatening free speech with its ongoing investigation into whether The View violated the “equal time” rule, which requires radio and TV broadcasters to provide competing political candidates with equal access and time. Ahead of this year’s midterm elections, The View ran segments featuring James Talarico and Jasmine Crockett — two Texas Democratic candidates running for Senate seats — and the FCC seems to be taking issue with the fact that the show did not invite any Republican politicians to speak on camera.

ABC’s filing notes that The View was given an exemption from the equal time rule “more than twenty years ago” because it is a “bona fide news interview program.” The company also insisted that, by attacking The View, the FCC is taking action that will “chill core First Amendment-protected speech for years and potentially decades to come.”

“The danger is that the government will simply decide which perspectives to regulate and which to leave undisturbed,” ABC said. “In fact, while the Commission now questions The View’s decades-long exemption, it has not expressed any inclination to apply a similar interpretation of the equal opportunities rule to other broadcasters, including the many voices— conservative and liberal—on broadcast radio.”

This flavor of bullying from the FCC and Trump-appointed Chairman Brendan Carr began long before D’Amaro replaced Bob Iger. Relying on the FCC’s news distortion rule, Carr threatened to strip the broadcast licenses of any station airing Jimmy Kimmel Live! in response to the late-night show featuring a joke about Republican reactions to Charlie Kirk’s death. Those threats prompted ABC to pull the show for about a week before new episodes began airing again.

It was clear that Disney / ABC were trying to keep the Trump administration happy, but that has not stopped the president from calling for Kimmel’s firing again and creating new headaches for Disney. The FCC recently ordered Disney-owned ABC stations in eight different markets to renew their broadcast licenses by May 28th even though they weren’t originally scheduled to do so until 2028. And while the FCC is specifically targeting The View now, back in January, the organization signaled that it plans to more broadly revoke the equal time exemptions granted to other daytime and late-night talk shows.

In contrast to Disney, capitulation to the Trump administration has served Paramount very well over the past year as it negotiated an $8 billion acquisition deal with David Ellison’s Skydance. It seemed very clear that Paramount was trying to curry favor with the Trump administration when the company announced last summer that it was canceling The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Paramount said that the move was a cost-saving measure. That would have been much easier to believe if the president didn’t have a history of beefing with Colbert through the FCC and if Paramount and Skydance didn’t need the FCC’s regulatory approval to finalize their megamerger.

History has shown us that no amount of prostration from Disney will keep Trump from going after the company because he sees it as a political enemy. That might not have been readily apparent to D’Amaro’s predecessors, like Iger — who signed off on paying Trump $15 million to settle a defamation suit in 2024 — and Bob Chapek, who refused to condemn Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill even as Disney employees staged walkouts over concerns about how that legislation could harm them personally. But this reality is something that D’Amaro can’t ignore now because Trump and his allies are making it crystal clear through their actions.

In a recent letter addressed directly to D’Amaro, the FCC’s sole Democratic commissioner, Anna M. Gomez, said that by settling with Trump in 2024, Disney “told this Administration that pressure works.” Gomez laid out how all of this highlights the Trump administration’s pattern of hostile behavior, and she was frank about how the “the First Amendment does not belong to this Administration to grant or withhold.”

“It belongs to the public, to the press, and to every broadcaster willing to defend it,” Gomez wrote. “Your journalists do work that matters to millions of Americans across the country, and the viewers who rose up to defend Jimmy Kimmel are the same viewers who will stand up again if this FCC follows through with its threat.”

Gomez could not be more correct here. The Trump administration is trying to browbeat ABC and Disney into a humiliating submission under the pretense of fostering a healthy and fair media landscape. It’s obvious that the president is really only acting in his own self-interest, but that obviousness is all the more reason that Disney should feel empowered to call bullshit.

ABC’s assertion that the FCC is actively chilling free speech is reflective of a marked change for Disney, a company that spent years playing defense as conservatives attacked it for doing “woke” things like telling stories about marginalized groups of people. D’Amaro has seen that self-censorship and throwing money at the Trump administration will not stop the president from trying to harm Disney. And rather than following in his predecessors’ footsteps, it seems like D’Amaro understands that the only way forward now is to fight back against Trump with the understanding that these matters might end up being taken to the courts.

This situation could turn into an ugly, expensive, and exhausting legal battle that no CEO would want to deal with — especially during their first year on the job.. But if D’Amaro wants to be seen as a CEO who truly believes in his company and employees, he needs to put his boxing gloves on and get ready to fight no matter how long it takes.