Jimmy Kimmel fired back Monday night after Donald Trump demanded ABC fire him “immediately,” using his Jimmy Kimmel Live! monologue to defend last week’s faux White House Correspondents’ Dinner roast—and reject any suggestion that his jokes contributed to Saturday’s violence at the real dinner.
“As you know, they had to cancel the [dinner] after a man with multiple guns and knives crashed the party and may have shot a Secret Service officer,” Kimmel began, referencing the security breach that forced the evacuation of Trump, members of his cabinet, and other attendees.
“No one was hurt, thank goodness,” he added. “A lot of people were shaken up on a night that is supposed to be light-hearted.”
Kimmel then revisited the premise his April 23 bit that earned him social-media scoldings from both the president and first lady Melania Trump—him imagining hosting this year’s WHCA dinner, seeing as the actual event hired a mentalist and not a comedian to entertain the crowd. Among the barbs he aimed at the dinner’s VIP attendees (represented in cutaways by archival event clips), Kimmel said, “Mrs. Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow.”
Kimmel on Monday night said that quip “obviously was a joke about their age difference, and the look of joy we see on her face every time they’re together.
“It was a very light roast joke about the fact that he’s almost 80 and she’s younger than I am,” the 58-year-old host added. “It was not by any stretch of the definition a call to assassination. And they know that.”
Kimmel noted he has been “very vocal for many years speaking out against gun violence,” acknowledged “that the first lady had a stressful experience over the weekend,” and concurred “that hateful and violent rhetoric is something we should reject.”
To that latter point, “a great place to start to dial that back would be to have a conversation with your husband about it,” he suggested to Melania.
Regarding the president’s call for his termination, Kimmel said, “Donald Trump is allowed to say what he wants to say, as am I, as are all of us, because under the First Amendment we have a right as Americans to free speech.
“But if you want us to believe that a joke I made … days before this dinner had any effect on anything that happened, well, maybe someone should look into this psychic lady, too.”
The show then cued up a pre-dinner clip of White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on the red carpet, saying of Trump’s planned speech, “It’ll be funny. It’ll be entertaining. There will be some shots fired tonight.”
“You know who’s gonna be furious when she hears that…?” Kimmel asked. “White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt.”
Watch Kimmel’s full monologue above.
It was eight months ago that ABC yanked Jimmy Kimmel Live off its schedule indefinitely after FCC chair Brendan Carr pressured affiliates to drop the show over Kimmel appearing to intimate in a monologue that Charlie Kirk’s shooter was MAGA.
Following a groundswell of viewer support for Kimmel, and after what were reported to be intense negotiations between Kimmel, then-Disney CEO Bob Iger and Disney Entertainment co-chair Dana Walden, Kimmel was reinstated less than a week later.
ABC and Kimmel later announced a one-year contract extension (though that deal reportedly had been hammered out last summer).
