Jimmy Kimmel knew he’d never score an invite to the White House Correspondent’s Dinner. He’d never be welcomed there or allowed to get anywhere near the President. So you know what he did? Like a petulant child, he stamped his feet and put on a fake White House Correspondent’s Dinner to tell everyone what he *would have* said had they invited him. During his fake WHCD speech he said the First Lady had a glow about her like an “expectant widow.” Classy.
And then the shooting by a deranged leftist who had listened to Democrats compare President Trump to Hitler, and call his a rapist, a fascist, a threat to democracy, and everything else for the last 10 years went and tried to take out the president at the White House Correspondent’s dinner happened.
Now, no one is saying Kimmel knew that just two days after he made the joke about Melania looking like an expectant widow an assassination attempt would be made. But we are saying it’s in poor form for how serious the event was. But did Kimmel say anything remotely like “Wow! What bad timing. Sorry you almost lost your husband and the father of your child to a deranged killer!” No, of course he didn’t. Instead Kimmel doubled down, offering up the LAMEST of excuses so ABC won’t fire his ass for making jokes about the President getting assassinated.
Not surprisingly the entire country recoiled in disgust at Kimmel’s joke about Melania. Kimmel went full comedian-victim and insisted it was just a harmless age joke. You know — because Trump is 79 and Melania is 56. Ha ha. Widow. Get it? Hilarious timing, Jimmy. Really read the room on that one.
ABC and Disney — the same corporate apparatus that suspended Kimmel’s show for six days back in September 2025 after he went too far mocking conservative activist Charlie Kirk — apparently looked at this sketch and said, “Yeah, greenlight it.” FIrst Lady Melania Trump posted on Truth Social demanding Kimmel be “immediately fired by Disney and ABC.” She called it what it is: a call for violence. And she’s right.
Kimmel’s defense was priceless. He claimed with a straight face that the president and first lady “know the sketch wasn’t a call for violence” and reminded everyone that he’s been “very vocal” in his opposition to gun violence. Oh, wonderful. The guy who just joked about the president’s wife becoming a widow is very anti-gun. We should all feel reassured.
That’s like setting someone’s house on fire and then pointing to your smoke detector collection as proof you care about fire safety.
And speaking of arsonists playing firefighter — Barack Obama crawled out of whatever ocean-side mansion he’s been hiding in to post on X that its “unclear” what the motives of Cole Allen were. Ummmmm unclear to who, Barack??? Apparently just you. Obama — whose party spent years calling Trump a fascist, a dictator, an existential threat to the republic. Obama — whose allies built an entire media infrastructure around the idea that Trump is so dangerous that “by any means necessary” became a mainstream liberal slogan. That guy wants us all to calm down now.
The manifesto didn’t come from nowhere. When you spend years telling people that the president is literally destroying democracy, some of them are going to believe you. When late-night hosts treat the First Lady like a punchline two days after her husband was nearly assassinated, you’re telling your audience that these people aren’t fully human. That their suffering is entertainment.
Scheduled guest Oz Pearlman canceled his appearance on Kimmel’s show Monday night. Smart man. Nobody wants to be the guy sitting on the couch laughing while America watches a comedian defend widow jokes about an assassination attempt.
But here’s the part that should really bother you: none of this is new. We watched a Wisconsin brewery celebrate the assassination attempt. We watched Democrat politicians struggle to condemn the shooting without immediately pivoting to “but Trump’s rhetoric.” We watched the media memory-hole the fact that Allen was a Kamala donor and a “Teacher of the Month” — because acknowledging that the radicalized shooter was one of their people would require a level of self-reflection that Hollywood and the Democratic establishment are physically incapable of.
Kimmel has been doing this act for years — hiding behind “comedy” to say things that would get any conservative permanently banned from public life. Imagine if a Fox News host had called Michelle Obama an “expectant widow” after someone tried to shoot Barack Obama. Imagine the wall-to-wall coverage. Imagine the congressional hearings. Imagine the tearful op-eds about stochastic terrorism.
But it’s Kimmel, and it’s Trump’s wife, so we get a Monday night monologue where the comedian explains that actually, WE’RE the ones who don’t understand comedy.
We understand it just fine, Jimmy. We understand that your “joke” aired 48 hours after a man with a shotgun tried to kill the president. We understand that your network greenlit it anyway. We understand that your idea of comedy is imagining the violent death of someone you politically oppose and then dressing it up as an age gag.
And we understand that when Melania Trump called it a call for violence, she was being generous. It was worse than that. It was normalization. It was telling your audience that the assassination of a sitting president is so unremarkable that you can crack jokes about his widow before the Secret Service agent’s bruise has even healed.
Disney owns ABC. Disney owns Kimmel’s show. Disney made a choice to air this. Remember that the next time they lecture anyone about “family values” or “responsible media.”