President Donald Trump and his administration may have tried to get Jimmy Kimmel off the air, but all signs point to thinks backfiring on the White House. ABC reinstated Jimmy Kimmel Live! after just a week, and audiences have responded in record numbers.
A strong case can be made that ABC caved to pressure from the FCC when it decided to suspend Kimmel over comments he made about Charlie Kirk's death. President Trump did little to disabuse anyone of that notion when he threatened Jimmy Kimmel Live! just hours after it was set to return to ABC airwaves.
Instead, millions of viewers tuned into ABC to see Kimmel's first monologue back on the air. Tuesday night's episode earned 6.26 million viewers, per early live + same-day Nielsen data. That is nearly 5 million more viewers than the show averaged during the second quarter of 2025. In the coveted adults 18-49 demographic, Kimmel's return pulled in a 0.87 rating. That number represents the highest rating for a regularly scheduled episode over the past decade.
Kimmel could have pulled in even more viewers if his show wasn't held back by Nexstar and Sinclair. The two broadcast companies refused to air Jimmy Kimmel Live!, keeping the late-night show dark in 23% of U.S. households in major markets across the country.
Online, Kimmel's monologue is doing massive numbers. It saw 14 million views in the first 15 hours it went live on the official Jimmy Kimmel Live! YouTube channel. By Thursday night, that number topped 21 million views. The monologue has another 8 million views on the show's Instagram account.
Those numbers make it Kimmel's most watched monologue since the show's YouTube channel began in 2006. While the clip needs to quadruple its view count to reach the top, it's still an impressive number after just two days.
The ratings bump rivaled some of Kimmel’s biggest moments, proving that attempts to quiet his platform may have inadvertently amplified it. Rather than silencing the comedian, the controversy gave Kimmel new relevance beyond just late-night as fans and celebrities rallied to see how he would handle the situation. For ABC, the gamble of suspending him ended in a surge of viewership, but the network still may have some unhappy employees on its hands.
And for Trump's FCC, it's an embarrassing turn of events. What was intended as a show of power against a late-night critic instead reinforced the very platform the White House sought to erase. Kimmel’s suspension became the story, and his return turned into a cultural and political event, reminding us why he remains one of television’s most important voices. If the goal was to silence him, the numbers prove he's louder than ever.