Donald Trump’s flailing performance at Tuesday night’s debate triggered a multiday right-wing freakout at the ABC News moderators, punctuated by calls from the former president and his allies to target the network and its parent company with a regulatory crackdown, congressional investigation, and even prosecutions. It’s a dark preview of the authoritarian tactics they could use if Trump returns to the White House and carries out his stated desire to retaliate against news outlets whose coverage displeases him.

Trump used Tuesday’s opportunity to address a massive national audience at the debate to spew nonsense incomprehensible to people who aren’t familiar with the deep lore of the right-wing fever swamps and repeatedly take the bait offered by Vice President Kamala Harris. The result was such a disaster for Trump’s campaign that he quickly called off future debates.

Trump’s right-wing media allies reacted to his disastrous performance in real time by lashing out at ABC News moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis, who fact-checked the former president on a handful of occasions. While debate moderators typically come in for criticism from pundits who take issue with how they handled the high-profile job, it is difficult to blame Muir or Davis for a candidate picking up a racist and false fourthhand internet rumor about Haitian immigrants in Ohio and declaring, “They’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”

Moreover, the right’s discussion quickly blew past mere critiques of ABC’s performance to far-reaching conspiracy theories about its purportedly corrupt behavior and calls for government retribution against the network.

“Remove ABC’s broadcast license and criminally charge the moderators and executives for campaign finance fraud,” Sean Davis, CEO of the right-wing digital outlet The Federalist, declared on X the night of the debate.

Trump himself began calling for the stripping of ABC’s broadcast license the following morning.

“ABC took a big hit last night,” he said in an interview on Fox News’ Fox & Friends. “I mean, to be honest, they're a news organization. They have to be licensed to do it. They ought to take away their license for the way they did that.”

Trump’s remarks drew cheers from MAGA figures like Laura Loomer, who posted that “ABC News deserves to be INVESTIGATED.”

Trump reiterated his demand for retaliation in a Thursday night Truth Social post, claiming that “people are saying that Comrade Kamala Harris had the questions from Fake News ABC” and that if “an investigation” determines that that is the case, “ABC’s license should be TERMINATED.”

The former president then reposted a claim that an “ABC whistleblower allegedly will release an affidavit” showing that “the Harris campaign was given sample questions.” That claim originates with a random X poster — whose profile states, “Black Insurrectionist--I FOLLOW BACK TRUE PATRIOTS” — who claimed earlier that day to have received the purported document, which he promised to release ”before the weekend is out.”

Trump’s call for retribution has support from some Republican legislators. Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS) said he would demand from ABC News and the Harris campaign “all correspondence, records, and potential coordination between the two parties ahead of Tuesday’s presidential debate,” while Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) is threatening to “re-examine the laws” he claims allow “the left’s near-complete domination of broadcast TV”

Meanwhile, Trumpists like Eric Metaxas and Hugh Hewitt are floating boycotts of ABC parent company Disney, and Mark Penn wants an independent review of ABC’s internal communications to assess whether the network was “rigging the outcome of this debate.”

The credibility of Trump’s call to strip ABC’s license is unclear. The Federal Communications Commission does not license broadcast networks — but it does license individual broadcast stations, including the eight owned and operated directly by ABC and the hundreds of additional affiliates. FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel, a Biden appointee, responded to Trump’s call by suggesting it runs afoul of the First Amendment, and Ajit Pai, her Trump-appointed predecessor, offered a similar response when Trump called for retaliation against NBC as president. That said, one of the goals of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 is to ensure future Trump appointees are willing to prioritize his personal whims.

Moreover, Trump’s eagerness to use such tactics to halt critical coverage — and the right’s support for them — is a dire sign for the future, even if the specific deployment of retaliatory FCC licensing decisions doesn’t work out.

The New Republic’s Greg Sargent has a cover story in its latest issue detailing the possibility that a second Trump administration could be characterized by “slow-burn authoritarianism,” which Sargent describes as “lower-profile” efforts to use state power to create hardships for Trump’s critics and benefits for his allies. 

Trump’s attack on the media is likely to follow such a pattern if he returns to the White House, as I told Sargent on The Daily Blast podcast earlier this week. Rather than the high-profile action of stripping broadcast licenses, Trump’s allies could use the threat of adverse regulation or congressional investigations to more quietly encourage corporate owners to clamp down on critical coverage or sell their networks to someone who will.

Indeed, the Trump administration pursued that strategy, albeit largely unsuccessfully, during his presidency. Trump-controlled agencies issued unfavorable regulatory decisions to the corporate owners of disfavored outlets like CNN and The Washington Post, and favorable ones to the Trump-aligned owners of Fox News and Sinclair Broadcast Group. 

The owners of CNN and The Washington Post held out against this pressure before but it’s unclear how they would respond to a second Trump term, particularly if the coercion becomes more intense. Nor is it clear what ABC’s Disney ownership — with sprawling business interests that produce numerous bureaucratic pressure points — would do if Trump moved it to the top of the target list.