Jimmy Kimmel responds to Trump after the president called for his firing over a joke: “It was not an incitement to his assassination”

“You know how sometimes you wake up in the morning and the first lady issues a statement asking for you to be fired? We’ve all been there, right?”. Jimmy Kimmel didn’t wait a minute into his show this Monday to ironize about the new confrontation with the US president over jokes made before a man tried to attack Donald Trump on Saturday at the correspondents’ dinner. A kind of déjà vu (as he titled his monologue, after the Government decided to cancel the broadcast of his show overnight last September).

Read more The first images of the interior of the Iryo reinforce the hypothesis of a rail break in the Adamuz accident

This time the consequences have not yet affected him, and his show continues unchanged, but the comedian has had to respond again to a president who has it in for him. It all started with a joke in his monologue last week. At one point in the performance, Kimmel became host of a fake correspondents’ dinner and joked that Melania Trump had “a glow like an expectant widow” (expectant means waiting for something, attentive, but in English it has a double implication, both of waiting and of being pregnant). Something that, after the attack this Monday, the first lady linked to Saturday’s attack.

Kimmel defended himself with irony, but also with the logic of his words without taking them out of context: “It was obviously a joke about their age difference, and the joyful look they have every time they are together. It was a very light joke about him being almost 80 and her being younger than me. It was not, under any circumstances, an incitement to murder, and they know it. For many years I have been very direct against guns,” explained the 58-year-old host. “And there was no reaction until this very morning, when I started my day with another storm of Twitter vomit in which the first lady was calling for my dismissal,” he added.

“People like Kimmel should not have the opportunity to enter our homes every night to spread hate. Kimmel, a coward, hides behind ABC because he knows the network will continue to cover for him to protect him. Enough is enough,” Melania Trump said in her message, appealing to the Disney-owned network. “It’s time for ABC to take a stand. How many more times will ABC management allow Kimmel’s atrocious behavior at the expense of our community?” A few hours later, her husband, on his social network Truth, joined the call for Kimmel to be “fired immediately”: “He has no humor whatsoever, as his abysmal ratings show. He made a statement on his show that is truly shocking. He showed a fake video of the first lady, Melania, and our son, Barron, as if they were actually sitting in his studio, listening to him speak, when that was not the case, nor would it ever be.” In his images, Kimmel made a montage of himself on the podium and guests in the audience, but it was clearly visible that the images were not live or in that location.

“I understand the first lady had a stressful experience this weekend, and probably every weekend is stressful in that house,” Kimmel continued. “And, furthermore, I agree that there is certain violent rhetoric that we have to reject. I think the way to start is to have a conversation with her husband. Donald Trump can say whatever he wants, as can you and I. Because under the First Amendment we have, as Americans, the right to freedom of speech,” he said on a night when mentalist Oz Pearlman, who was at the correspondents’ dinner on Saturday, canceled as a guest.

Rebound effect

Kimmel has become one of the biggest public enemies of Trump and his circle. In September, the Administration decided to cancel his Jimmy Kimmel Live! after a series of comments he made about activist Charlie Kirk after his death. Specifically, Kimmel said: “This weekend we hit rock bottom. The MAGA gang [from the acronym Make America Great Again] is desperately trying to characterize this guy who murdered Charlie Kirk as something other than one of them and doing everything possible to gain political advantage.” After those words, the Trump administration canceled his show on September 17, which sparked a wave of protests. The cancellation finally lasted nine days, until Kimmel returned with huge praise and even better ratings, with more than 6.3 million viewers, the highest figure in its history.

In that return program, Kimmel spoke for half an hour (his initial monologues last between 10 and 15 minutes) about the importance of the First Amendment of the US Constitution, which guarantees freedom of speech, and criticized the White House for that cancellation.

“Our government should not be able to control what we say or don’t say on television,” he stated then, upon his return, in late September 2025. “There’s something I want to make clear, because it matters to me as a human being. That you understand that it was never my intention to mock the murder of a young man,” he noted. Something he repeats now in his response: “I feel for what Melania, the president, and everyone in that room went through on Saturday. Honestly. Just because no one was killed doesn’t mean it wasn’t traumatic and terrifying, and we should all agree on that. But if you really want to think that a joke he made three days before the dinner had any effect on anything that happened, then perhaps you should look at this woman,” words after which Kimmel played a video of White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, in which she pointed out that “some shots will be fired tonight.”

Read more At least 14 women die in two-train collision in Indonesia