For the second time in seven months, President Trump is calling for Jimmy Kimmel to be fired, turning the host he hates into a proud defender of free speech. Following another round of calls for his head and a cancellation from the world’s most in-demand mentalist, Oz Pearlman, Jimmy Kimmel returned to television tonight and struck a much different tone from the last time he was pushed off the airwaves at the President’s behest. Instead of the emotional monologue he inspired audiences with in September, when Kimmel was put in timeout because the MAGA world willfully misinterpreted his comments about the Charlie Kirk shooting, the host took to ABC as cheerful as ever. Hours earlier, the First Lady tweeted that Kimmel’s “hateful and violent rhetoric is intended to divide our country,” and President Trump called for his firing. But with the audience at the El Capitan theatre chanting his name, he showed no regret for saying that Melania Trump had the radiant glow of an “expectant widow” three days before a gunman interrupted the White House Correspondent Dinner. Kimmel merely dismissed the charges and explained the joke: It was about the age difference between Melania, 56, and her husband, Donald, 79.
“It was a very light roast joke about the fact that he’s almost 80 and she’s younger than I am,” he said.
Last week, after learning there would be no comedian at this year’s WHCD, Kimmel opted to film a roast for his show “to keep that cherished tradition alive.” Kimmel put on a tux, and his editors intercut the jokes with old footage of the “Trumps, Pete Hegath, J.D. Vance, Kid Rock, Vanilla Ice, all the members of his cabinet, and we made it seem like they were all together in a room.” There was “no big reaction” to the segment from five days ago, Kimmel said. That is, until this morning, when he greeted the day “facing yet another Twitter vomit storm from our First Lady.” From there, he tried to explain himself.
“I said, ‘Our first lady, Melania, is here. Look at her. So beautiful. Mrs. Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow,’ which obviously was a joke about their age difference and the look of joy we see on her face every time they’re together,” Kimmel said. “It was not by any stretch of the definition a call to assassination, and they know that I’ve been very vocal for many years speaking out against gun violence in particular. But I understand that the first lady had a stressful experience over the weekend and probably every weekend is pretty stressful in that house. And, also, I agree that hateful and violent rhetoric is something we should reject. I do. And I think a great place to start to dial that back would be to have a conversation with her husband about it.”
The difference between Kimmel’s tone tonight and the one he struck last fall mirrors the exhausted reactions to this latest assassination attempt. More or less met with a collective shrug and a whole lot of conspiracy theorizing, the White House Correspondents’ Dinner inspired neither forced valorization nor a breathless press cycle about what Kimmel said on his comedy show. Rather, it became an excuse for Republicans to demand that taxpayers pay $400 million to build Trump’s ballroom, which he says would’ve protected him from the shooting that the very “attractive” law enforcement officials just protected him from. Simply put, Kimmel didn’t shy away from just making jokes about the incident and returned to mocking Robert F. Kennedy’s security detail for abandoning his wife, Cheryl Hines, in the fray. If anything, he wondered aloud why no one was looking into this “psychic lady,” Karoline Leavitt, for predicting “there will be some shots fired” during Trump’s speech at the event.
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