Late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel addressed the social media post by first lady Melania Trump, criticizing him for a joke he made last week about her being a widow. The first lady posted the request on X on Monday morning, two days after Cole Allen broke through a security checkpoint at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner at the Washington Hilton on Saturday night. Allen has been charged with attempting to assassinate President Donald Trump.
As his audience greeted him with chants of “Jimmy! Jimmy!” Kimmel addressed the controversy in the opening monologue of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!”
“You know, sometimes you wake up in the morning, and the first lady puts out a statement demanding you be fired from your job,” Kimmel asked. “We’ve all been there, right?”
“What a day!” he added. “As you know, they had to cancel the White House Correspondents’ dinner in Washington on Saturday night, after a man, with multiple guns and knives, crashed the party and may have shot a Secret Service officer. Fortunately, the guy was wearing a bulletproof vest and is okay. They’re not sure exactly what happened, but they got the guy, and he was charged today. No one was hurt, thank goodness.”
“The White House Correspondents’ dinner, if you don’t know, it used to be an annual event, before Trump showed up, but every year, they’d have a comedian roast the room, the president, the vice president, members of the press, everybody got roasted. I did it once, I hosted it, it was a lot of fun.”
“But this year, they said ‘no comedian, we’re bringing in a mentalist instead,’” Kimmel said. “So, on Thursday, three days before the event, in order to keep that cherished tradition alive, I did my own version of the Correspondents’ dinner on my show. I put on a tuxedo. We pretended we had an audience of luminaries. We used old footage of the Trumps, of Pete Hegseth, JD Vance, Kid Rock, Vanilla Ice, all the members of his Cabinet, and we made it seem like they were all together in the room.”
“Again, this was Thursday, and there was no big reaction to it until this morning, when I greeted the day facing yet another Twitter vomit storm, and a call to fire me from our first lady, Melania Trump, saying I should be fired because of a joke I made, again, five nights ago,” Kimmel said. “It was a pretend roast. 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.”
“It was a very light roast joke about the fact that he’s almost 80, and she’s younger than I am. 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.”
The first lady’s post accused Kimmel of “spreading hate” and urged the television network ABC to stop “running cover to protect him” and “take a stand.”
“People like Kimmel shouldn’t have the opportunity to enter our homes each evening to spread hate,” said the first lady in her post.
“Enough is enough,” she concluded. “It is time for ABC to take a stand. How many times will ABC’s leadership enable Kimmel’s atrocious behavior at the expense of our community.”
Shortly after the first lady’s comments, President Trump made a post on his Truth Social account calling for Kimmel’s firing at ABC, mentioning that days after Kimmel’s skit, “a lunatic tried entering the ballroom of the White House Correspondents Dinner, loaded up with a shotgun, handgun, and many knives.”
“He was there for a very obvious and sinister reason,” said the president. “I appreciate that so many people are incensed by Kimmel’s despicable call to violence, and normally would not be responsive to anything that he said but, this is something far beyond the pale. Jimmy Kimmel should be immediately fired by Disney and ABC.”
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Later in the monologue, Kimmel said he understood the first lady had a stressful experience, but added that while he agreed “hateful and violent rhetoric should be rejected,” the first lady should begin to help “dial back” the rhetoric by having a conversation with her husband, President Donald Trump.
“I understand that the first lady had a stressful experience over the weekend — and probably every weekend is pretty stressful in that house,” Kimmel said. “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 it back, would be to have a conversation with your husband about it.”