In Ernest Hemingway’s debut novel, The Sun Also Rises, the author has one character (Bill) ask another (Mike) how he went bankrupt.

“Two ways,” Mike responds. “Gradually, then suddenly.”

Who knows what Hemingway, the great American writer and anti-fascist, would make of Donald Trump’s America, which this week seemed to segue from the “gradual” part of its march to authoritarianism, to the “suddenly” phase of that journey.

US President Donald Trump has raised the prospect of revoking the broadcast licences of networks airing evening shows that criticise him.Credit: AP

One of the reasons Hemingway fled America for Paris, where he became a leading light of the so-called “Lost Generation”, was because he felt artistic freedom was being stifled in his homeland.

In 1920, James Joyce’s Ulysses was banned in the United States under obscenity laws, because of its sexually explicit sections. In contemporary America, nothing is too obscene to be published or broadcast, and that’s before you even get to the unregulated sewers of the internet.

This week, long-serving Fox News host Brian Kilmeade proposed, during an on-air discussion, that mentally ill homeless people be killed by “involuntary lethal injection”.

“Just kill ’em,” he said.

Kilmeade later apologised for his “extremely callous remark”. He had endorsed a redux of an actual Nazi policy, but he wasn’t taken off the air. It was obscene, but that is no longer a reason to censor something in the United States. Censorship is now confined to media outlets which criticise MAGA in general, or Trump in particular.

This week, the late-night talk-show host, Jimmy Kimmel, had his show taken off-air after critical commentary about the killing of right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk.

Jimmy Kimmel’s........

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