Jimmy Kimmel responded directly to Melania Trump during his opening monologue on Monday night after the First Lady called for his firing following a series of jokes he made last week during a a faux White House Correspondents’ Dinner monologue. While Kimmel expressed relief that no one was injured during Saturday’s attempted shooting at the WHCD, he did not apologize, instead defending the jokes as satire and asserting his right to free speech.
Discussing the premise of last week’s sketch, Kimmel explained, “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.’ 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,” he continued. “I put on a tuxedo. We pretended we had an audience of luminaries. We used old footage of the Trumps, of Pete Hegseth, J.D. Vance, Kid Rock, Vanilla Ice, all the members of his cabinet, and we made it seem like they were all together in a room. We had a little roast.”
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“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,” Kimmel added. ‘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.”
“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… because, by the way, I also should point out: Donald Trump is allowed to say whatever he wants to say, as 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.”
Kimmel concluded his remarks by airing a clip from press secretary Karoline Leavitt during a WHCD red carpet interview during which she predicted “there will be some shots fired tonight.” “If you want us to believe that a joke I made three days before this dinner had any effect on anything that happened—well, then maybe someone should look into this psychic lady, too,” remarked Kimmel.
Kimmel’s full remarks:
“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? We’ve all been there, right? What a day.
“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. He was charged today. No one was hurt, thank goodness. A lot of people were shaken up on a night that is supposed to be light-hearted.
“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.’ 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, J.D. Vance, Kid Rock, Vanilla Ice, all the members of his cabinet, and we made it seem like they were all together in a room. We had a little roast.
“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.
“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.
“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… because, by the way, I also should point out: Donald Trump is allowed to say whatever he wants to say, as 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.”
“But with that said, I am sorry that you and the President and everyone in that room on Saturday went through that. I really am. Just because no one got killed doesn’t mean it wasn’t traumatic and scary. And we should come together and ‘Be Best.’ We really should.