Disney Finds Its Inner Donald Duck

During World War II, the Walt Disney Company put its considerable creative machinery to work for the U.S. government, producing a series of animated films for the American war effort. There was, however, a bit of a casting problem. Mickey Mouse — cheerful, agreeable, beloved by children the world over — was simply too nice a character to be seen in the business of fighting fascists. So the studio turned instead to one Donald Duck, whose hair-trigger temper and bottomless capacity for outrage made him a natural for the leading roles. The result was, among other things, “Der Fuehrer’s Face,” the 1943 Oscar-winning short in which Donald wakes up in a nightmare version of Nazi Germany and doesn’t take it lying down. It remains one of the more entertainingly furious things the studio ever produced.

Donald Duck has been on our mind a bit over the last 24 hours.

For much of the past year and a half, the Walt Disney Company's posture toward the Trump administration and its Federal Communications Commission has looked considerably more like Mickey Mouse than Donald Duck. Under then-CEO Bob Iger, Disney wrote a check — somewhere in the neighborhood of $15 million, depending on which account you read — to settle a defamation claim brought by President Donald Trump over comments ABC anchor George Stephanopoulos made on air. The legal community's collective jaw dropped. First Amendment lawyers who believed ABC had a strong case to win at trial watched the settlement land and called it, in so many words, capitulation dressed up as strategy.

The characterization was hard to argue with.

Then came the FCC’s escalating pressure campaign against ABC. Chairman Brendan Carr launched an inquiry into whether “The View” — a program that has held a bona fide news interview program exemption from the equal-time rule since 2002 — suddenly no longer deserved that status. The trigger was a February appearance by Texas Senate candidate James Talarico. The Commission’s inquiry was directed specifically at KTRK, ABC’s owned-and-operated station in Houston.

The sequence of events that followed is worth laying out carefully, if only because the FCC would probably prefer that you not notice it.

On April 23rd, Jimmy Kimmel aired a mock White House Correspondents’ Dinner on his show and quipped that Melania Trump had “the glow of an expectant widow.” Both the President and the First Lady posted separate statements demanding ABC fire Kimmel. Then, on April 25th, an armed man was apprehended attempting to breach the security perimeter at the actual White House Correspondents’ Dinner. The President subsequently framed Kimmel’s joke as an incitement for violence.

Kimmel, on his show the following Monday night, April 27th, defended the remark as a joke about the age difference between the President and his wife — nothing more. The White House communications director responded by insisting ABC “needs to fire him immediately.” The FCC license review order dropped the very next day, covering all eight of ABC’s owned-and-operated stations. Those licenses are not due for renewal until 2028 at the earliest, with some running through 2031. The FCC’s official position is that the timing was merely a coincidence and that the early renewal demand was a natural extension of its ongoing DEI investigation into Disney. This investigation had already consumed more than 6,200 pages of documents from the company over the preceding five months.

You are invited to draw your own conclusions.

But something changed back in March. Iger stepped aside, and Josh D’Amaro — a 28-year Disney veteran who built his reputation running the company’s theme parks — took the reins as the company’s CEO. Jimmy Kimmel’s show has remained on the air across all the affiliates of the ABC network (including those of Nexstar and Sinclair, who preempted him in September 2025, after the host made a controversial comment following the assassination of Charlie Kirk). The company has not taken any action against Kimmel for his “expectant widow” remark.

And now Disney has filed a petition with the FCC that reads nothing like the company that quietly wrote that settlement check just sixteen months ago.

The Disney filing calls the FCC’s conduct “unprecedented, beyond the Commission’s authority, and counterproductive.” It argues the agency is engaging in “viewpoint discrimination and retaliatory targeting.” It points out, with some sharpness, that the Commission has shown zero interest in applying the same equal-time scrutiny to conservative AM radio talk shows that reach audiences just as large. It notes that over the past two seasons, “The View” extended invitations to JD Vance, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Lindsey Graham, Josh Hawley, Elon Musk, Kevin McCarthy, and Marco Rubio — every one of whom declined. And it reminds the FCC, in terms a first-year communications law student could follow, that the 2002 ruling granting the exemption “remains in full force and effect” and has never been challenged, modified, or overturned in the intervening two-plus decades.

The lone Democratic voice on the three-member FCC panel, Commissioner Anna Gomez, publicly cheered the filing. “What the public will remember,” she wrote, “is who complied in advance and who fought back.” The contrast she was implying was not subtle. CBS, facing similar pressure, pulled a Stephen Colbert interview with Talarico rather than contest the point. Conversely, Disney filed its petition for a declaratory ruling.

Whether Josh D’Amaro ordered this posture shift directly or whether it reflects a broader recalibration inside The Walt Disney Company is not entirely clear from the outside. What is clear is that the timing is not coincidental. A new CEO, seven weeks into the job, and the company that spent more than a year in Mickey Mouse mode has found something closer to Donald Duck’s register.

Carr’s FCC still controls the process. The license renewal reviews grind on. The equal-time inquiry over “The View” has not been resolved. Disney’s petition on that review asks the full Commission — not just the Media Bureau — to weigh in, and invokes the courts as an alternative if it doesn’t.

That is not the language of a company looking to make peace.

“Der Fuehrer’s Face” ends with Donald Duck waking up from his nightmare, clutching a small Statue of Liberty figurine, relieved to find himself back in America. The moral of the cartoon, stated without apology, was that freedom is worth getting angry about.

Some eighty-three years later, that still seems like a reasonable position for the Walt Disney Company to hold.

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Epilogue: Speaking of fighters, following Ted Turner’s passing last Wednesday, we’re remembering him this weekend by rewatching Keith Clarke’s excellent six-part documentary series about Turner, which is titled “Call Me Ted.” It’s available for streaming on HBO Max. Definitely worth watching.

(Editor’s Note: An AI model was used in researching some details in drafting our main article.)