Last week, ABC host Jimmy Kimmel delivered a mock White House Correspondents Association Dinner speech that included a joke about First Lady Melania Trump being an “expectant widow.” The episode aired last Thursday, and two days later, a gunman emerged at the dinner itself and was arrested before he was able to harm anyone.
Since then, both the president and First Lady have called for ABC and Disney to fire Kimmel from his late-night show, marking the second push to remove him in two years. On Monday night, Kimmel returned to his show to defend himself.
“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?” Kimmel said on his monologue on Monday’s episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live! “We’ve all been there. Right?”
“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,” Kimmel said on his show Monday, as reported by Variety.
Jimmy Kimmel defends calling Melania Trump an “expectant widow” after she and Donald Trump demanded ABC fire him:
“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.… pic.twitter.com/wYhhzZAgkO
— Variety (@Variety) April 28, 2026
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“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 your husband about it.”
It doesn’t appear that Kimmel’s job is in any danger. After the Charlie Kirk controversy last year, affiliates pressured ABC to temporarily remove the host from the air, but that did not happen this time, and he hosted his show Monday as scheduled.
Photo courtesy of the Political Tribune media library.
