There was no question about how Jimmy Kimmel would start his monologue Monday night.
“You know how sometimes you wake up in the morning and the first lady puts out a statement demanding you be fired from your job?” the late-night host said to ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” studio audience. “We’ve all been there, right?”
The crowd laughed knowingly. Earlier in the day, first lady Melania Trump released a statement on X and criticized what she called the comedian’s “hateful and violent rhetoric,” apparently referring to a bit that Kimmel did Thursday when he parodied the White House correspondents’ dinner. Kimmel, pretending to be the event’s comedian who was hired to roast the attendees, skewered members of the Trump administration and family.
“Mrs. Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow,” Kimmel said at the time, adding that the first lady’s birthday was coming up. “She’s planning to celebrate at home the same way she always does — looking out a window and whispering, ‘What have I done?’”
Two days later, the annual dinner was derailed when a gunman charged past a security checkpoint at the Washington Hilton and toward the ballroom where the event was underway. The suspect, identified by authorities as 31-year-old Cole Tomas Allen, was charged with an attempted assassination of the president.
In her statement, Trump drew a connection to Kimmel’s words and called on ABC to “take a stand” against the late-night host: “His monologue about my family isn’t comedy — his words are corrosive and deepens the political sickness within America,” she said, adding, “A coward, Kimmel hides behind ABC because he knows the network will keep running cover to protect him. Enough is enough.” A few hours later, the president posted to Truth Social and said, “Jimmy Kimmel should be immediately fired by Disney and ABC.”
On Monday night, Kimmel recapped the series of events for his audience, and noted that there was little reaction to his parody roast — which has now has more than 4 million streams on YouTube — until that morning.
The “expectant widow” line, he said, “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,” Kimmel, 58, continued; the first lady turned 56 Sunday. “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.”
Kimmel drew more applause from the audience when he said that he agrees with the first lady that everyone should reject hateful and violent rhetoric. “I think a great place to start to dial that back would be to have a conversation with your husband about it,” he said, as the crowd cheered. “By the way, I also should point out, Donald Trump is allowed to say whatever he wants to say — as you are you, and as am I, as are all of us, because under the First Amendment, we have as Americans a right to free speech.”
The host noted that “this was like déjà vu for me today” seeing this story all over the news. In September, ABC temporarily pulled Kimmel’s show off the air following comments he made about the killing of right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk; the president called for his show to be canceled and Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr suggested that Disney’s broadcast licenses could be in jeopardy because of Kimmel’s statements. Carr was criticized on both sides of the aisle, and several days later, Kimmel returned to the air with an impassioned call for free speech.
“I am sorry that you and the president and everyone in that room on Saturday went through that. I really am,” Kimmel added. “Just because no one got killed doesn’t mean it wasn’t traumatic. It’s scary. And we should come together and be best.”
Kimmel’s original guest lineup Monday included mentalist Oz Pearlman, who was the scheduled entertainment at the correspondents’ dinner — but the event abruptly ended before he could perform. Before Kimmel’s taping, Pearlman was replaced by “Pod Save America” host Jon Lovett.
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