A few days before the alleged assassination attempt on Donald Trump last weekend, one comic’s joke on his late-night show sounded routine enough, if a little edgy.

Taking a jab at the hefty age gap between Donald and Melania Trump, ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel – playing the role of guest comic at a mock White House correspondents’ dinner – described the first lady as having “a glow like an expectant widow”.

His routine was, in part, a sendup of the reality that the annual Washington event no longer takes the chance of having a comedian offend the Washington Hilton audience. Comic Michelle Wolf did just that in 2018 when she mocked everyone from Trump spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders to click-hungry journalists.

But in the hours after the real-life dinner was disrupted by a man who entered the Washington Hilton with weapons, Kimmel’s throwaway line about seemed darker.

The Trumps quickly used it as grievance fodder.

Melania Trump blasted Kimmel’s “hateful and violent rhetoric.” The president went further, calling Kimmel’s days-old quip “a despicable call to violence”.

He demanded that ABC fire Kimmel.

That didn’t happen. ABC’s parent company, Disney, apparently learned something last year when it yanked Kimmel off the air for a brief time after a similar dustup. His show was restored after bipartisan public outcry – and the cancellation of millions of Disney and Hulu subscriptions.

Americans, apparently, don’t want the government to decide what TV comics can and can’t say.

But in this case, the Trump-appointed chair of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Brendan Carr, quickly took things into his own hands.

Using what should be an impartial regulatory agency as a cudgel, he ordered license reviews of eight ABC television stations around the country, long before the normal schedule.

Carr claimed, disingenuously, that these reviews would address “unlawful discrimination”, having to do with compliance with diversity, equity and inclusion regulations.

Kimmelgate the Sequel was under way.

The TV license reviews are “the most egregious action this FCC has taken in violation of the first amendment to date”, said the agency’s only Democratic commissioner, Anna Gomez.

And Jessica Gonzalez, co-CEO of the nonpartisan speech-advocacy group Free Press, described Carr’s actions as an “extraordinary and unconstitutional attack on the media”.

She called it “nothing more than another favor to the most fragile president in US history”.

So far, it looks as though Disney will do the right thing, at least in the short term.

“ABC and its stations have a long record of operating in full compliance with FCC rules,” Disney said in a statement. The company will back that up “through the appropriate legal channels”.

Not exactly a ringing defense of the first amendment, but it does sound as though Disney won’t capitulate in advance this time. That would be an improvement, especially given the way the company chose to settle a suit brought by Trump in 2024 after on-air remarks by ABC anchor George Stephanopoulos.

Many legal experts thought that case was defensible. First amendment advocates charged that settling it was nothing short of buckling to Trump. It certainly set a bad precedent, and, thus encouraged, Trump has continued to sue news organizations for coverage or content he doesn’t like.

Carr’s actions are troubling, no matter what happens in this case.

His move means that networks and their corporate parents are under constant threat: behave yourselves, or else.

That kind of atmosphere can result in a diabolical, if hard to detect, kind of self-censorship.

Maybe comics decide to take the edge off. Maybe their corporate bosses decide not to renew a comic’s contract to avoid these problems in the future.

CBS, after all, canceled Stephen Colbert’s late-night show not long after he blasted his employers for settling a frivolous lawsuit that they could have won over the routine editing of a 60 Minutes profile of Trump’s then rival, Kamala Harris. Colbert, on his show, characterized the settlement as a “big fat bribe”.

As the FCC’s Gomez said last year, the fear of consequences is real.

“It’s the threats that are the point,” she told Politico last year for an article that reported how “in just eight months in office, Carr has used a … mix of public pressure and background leverage to push two major telecom giants, Verizon and T-Mobile, to abandon their diversity, equity and inclusion practices to win merger sign-offs”. Pressure and threats are a formidable combination, as Carr well knows.

“The goal is to get the companies to capitulate in advance, to the point where the FCC or the administration doesn’t even need to speak,” Gomez said.

And the ultimate point is to do Trump’s bidding and give him the media adulation he craves.

Disney must stand up to Carr and Trump this time – not just to save themselves from more public pushback and the loss of subscription revenue.

But because what’s at stake is nothing short of the constitutionally protected right of free speech.

• Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture