Former President Obama on Thursday condemned President Trump’s comments celebrating the removal of Jimmy Kimmel’s show from various networks after the comedian joked about the death of conservative adviser Charlie Kirk.

“After years of complaining about cancel culture, the current administration has taken it to a new and dangerous level by routinely threatening regulatory action against media companies unless they muzzle or fire reporters and commentators it doesn’t like,” Obama wrote in a statement on X.

His words came hours after ABC announced Kimmel’s show "will be pre-empted indefinitely," and Nexstar Media Group, which owns The Hill, said that local ABC-affiliated stations would forgo future air dates “for the foreseeable future.”

During his Wednesday show, Kimmel accused the MAGA movement of trying to “score political points” after Kirk’s death and said the president was experiencing the loss of the Turning Point USA co-founder like a “4-year-old mourning a gold fish.”

In Obama’s Thursday post, he shared an op-ed criticizing the Trump administration for the swift revocation of Kimmel’s platform, a move widely celebrated by the president and Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr despite allegations that the dismissal violates First Amendment rights. 

The Vox editorial penned by Zack Beauchamp and amplified by the former president says the current administration has learned to effectively “weaponize the regulatory powers of the federal government to punish speech it doesn’t like from people it doesn’t like.”

“This is a favored weapon of modern autocrats; its deployment against Kimmel is a qualitative escalation even above the administration’s previous acts of censorship (like targeting the author of a pro-Palestine op-ed for deportation),” it continues. 

“What just happened, in short, shows how far down the authoritarian road the United States has traveled in just eight months.”

The perspective shared by Beauchamp echoes statements made by Obama in June noting the country is “dangerously close” to losing its values of democracy.

The former president said the current political climate is “consistent with autocracies.”

“We’re not there yet completely, but I think that we are dangerously close to normalizing behavior like that,” the leader added. 

In recent months, Obama has slammed the Trump administration for federalizing local police and using military force in cities across the country.