U.S. President Donald Trump said on Monday that Jimmy Kimmel should be immediately fired by ABC and its parent company Walt Disney. He joined his wife Melania Trump in calling out the late-night talk show host for a monologue he delivered prior to a shooting that took place over the weekend near a gathering of journalists and politicians.
Last Thursday, in a segment that parodied the upcoming White House correspondents’ dinner, Kimmel said that Melania Trump “had a glow like an expectant widow.”
Two days later, Trump and his wife were rushed out of the dinner after a shooting in the lobby of the Washington Hilton where the event was taking place.
A suspect identified as Cole Allen charged through a checkpoint and fired at Secret Service agents, wounding one, before he was subdued and arrested.
Hours after the Trumps expressed their displeasure, Kimmel described the joke during his Monday night monologue as a light roast about the couple’s age difference and “not, by any stretch of the definition, a call to assassination.”
U.S. President Donald Trump, when asked during a news conference with U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer about a move by ABC to remove Jimmy Kimmel from the air, said the talk show host said ‘a horrible thing’ about Charlie Kirk — but attributed the decision to Kimmel’s ‘bad ratings’ and ‘lack of talent.’
‘Enough is enough’
Melania Trump had called Kimmel’s remarks “corrosive.”
“Enough is enough. It is time for ABC to take a stand. How many times will ABC’s leadership enable Kimmel’s atrocious behaviour at the expense of our community,” she said in a post on X. “People like Kimmel shouldn’t have the opportunity to enter our homes each evening to spread hate.”
The president, meanwhile, said the comedian’s joke was “something far beyond the pale. Jimmy Kimmel should be immediately fired by Disney and ABC.”
Kimmel said he doubted that “a joke I made three days before this dinner had any effect on anything that happened.”
It’s not clear if Allen, the suspect, saw the broadcast. According to the Justice Department, he made a reservation at the Washington Hilton on April 6. He took a train to the city, leaving California on April 21, three days before Kimmel’s parody, according to court documents obtained by multiple U.S. news organizations.
Melania Trump is criticizing late-night host Jimmy Kimmel following his joke calling her an ‘expectant widow’ just two days before a shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. In an X post, the first lady called on ABC Network to take action against his ‘atrocious behaviour,’ saying, ‘people like Kimmel shouldn’t have the opportunity to enter our homes each evening to spread hate.’
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on Tuesday ordered early reviews of Disney’s licences — constituting eight ABC owned-and-operated stations that weren’t up for renewal until October 2028.
The FCC stated the early reviews were prompted by an investigation they began last year. In announcing it at the time, chair Brendan Carr suggested Disney could lose its broadcasting licences for diversity practices he said could be “invidious forms of DEI discrimination.”
Last month, Carr had remarked the FCC could speed up renewals. Any attempt at licence revocation is likely to be met with strong and sustained legal challenges, though the advanced reviews mark an escalation in how the current administration is dealing with U.S. media outlets. The FCC has not revoked a broadcast TV station licence in more than 40 years.
Disney said it had received the FCC order, adding it has “a long record of operating in full compliance with FCC rules and serving their local communities with trusted news, emergency information, and public-interest programming.”
The company said it is “prepared to show that through the appropriate legal channels.”
Senate Commerce Committee Chair Ted Cruz, a Republican, criticized Carr’s action on Disney.
“It is not government’s job to censor speech and I do not believe the FCC should operate as the speech police,” he told Punchbowl News in comments confirmed by his office.
Josh D’Amaro, who became Disney CEO in March, must decide how to respond to the mounting pressure to fire Kimmel.
“This is unprecedented, unlawful and going nowhere,” the FCC’s sole Democratic commissioner Anna Gomez wrote on X in response to a Semafor article that broke the news earlier Tuesday.
“This political stunt won’t stick. Companies should challenge it head-on. The First Amendment is on their side.”
Kirk controversy led to suspension
Trump has repeatedly urged broadcasters to remove comedy or news programs he dislikes or that have been critical of him, and has pressed regulators to take action to revoke the licences of broadcasters he says treat him unfairly.
Broadcasters have broad First Amendment rights to make jokes — even ones that are distasteful, experts note. But late last year, Trump and Kimmel seemed similarly in opposition after the former publicly celebrated when Kimmel’s show was temporarily removed from the air after the host joked about the potential political affiliations of alleged shooter of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
“We hit some new lows over the weekend, with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them, and with everything they can, to score political points from it,” Kimmel said in his Sept. 15 monologue.
The next day, Carr decried Kimmel’s words as “appearing to directly mislead the American public.”
While warning that local broadcasters who aired Kimmel could face fines or loss of licences, he hinted that the FCC had “remedies that [it] can look at” in dealing with the host.
After those comments, Nexstar Media Group and Sinclair Broadcast Group — which collectively own about a quarter of ABC affiliates — ceased broadcasting Kimmel’s show, with the latter issuing a statement thanking Carr.
Jimmy Kimmel aimed his barbs at U.S. President Donald Trump and members of his administration in his return to late-night television after being suspended. He also paid tribute to the widow of slain conservative commentator Charlie Kirk.
Carr approved Nexstar’s $3.5-billion US acquisition of Tegna, but a U.S. judge has put the merger on hold.
Soon after, ABC issued a statement of its own saying it would indefinitely pre-empt Jimmy Kimmel Live!, though this was reversed about a week later after discussions between Kimmel and Disney.
In the interim, stars including Tom Hanks, Barbra Streisand, Jennifer Aniston, Billie Eilish and Ben Stiller signed a letter circulated by the American Civil Liberties Union calling ABC’s removal of Kimmel’s show a “dark moment for freedom of speech in our nation.”
Former U.S. president Barack Obama wrote on social media that the current administration had reached a “new and dangerous level by routinely threatening regulatory action against media companies unless they muzzle or fire reporters and commentators it doesn’t like.”
There were protests outside of ABC and Disney studios, while U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren characterized Carr’s statements as a form of federal interference.
She also compared Disney’s decision to pull Kimmel with Paramount cancelling Stephen Colbert’s CBS late-night show — a decision that came shortly after Colbert criticized Paramount for settling a defamation case with Trump. At the time, Paramount was pursuing an $8-billion US merger with Skydance, which the FCC later approved.
“First Colbert, now Kimmel,” Warren wrote on X. “Last-minute settlements, secret side deals, multibillion-dollar mergers pending Donald Trump’s approval.”
Paramount said it made the move for purely financial reasons.
‘Ill-timed or unclear’ words
Kimmel’s return episode garnered 6.26 million broadcast viewers, according to a news release from Disney and ABC Entertainment, despite not airing in 23 per cent of U.S. TV households. And his opening monologue from the night pulled in over 20 million views on YouTube, breaking the host’s all-time viewership record on the platform.
In that monologue, Kimmel apologized for his prior words, which he said, to some, “felt either ill-timed or unclear or maybe both.”
Shortly before that episode aired, Trump mused on his Truth Social platform that he might sue ABC over Kimmel’s reinstatement.
“Last time I went after them, they gave me $16 million,” he wrote, citing a settlement the studio paid toward Trump’s presidential library over a defamation case. “This one sounds even more lucrative.”
Weeks after that controversy, ABC and Kimmel agreed to a one-year contract extension, set to run through May 2027.
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