The comedian maintains that the statement about the first lady referred to the age difference with Donald Trump
The American comedian Jimmy Kimmelwhich Donald Trump asked him to be fired for a joke about the first lady, Melania Trump, denied on Monday (27) that the joke was an incitement to violence against the president.
Trump said in one of his humorous monologues last week that the first lady radiated “the aura of a future widow.”
While the comedian maintains that it was a joke about the couple’s age difference, the president classified it as a “despicable call to violence”.
The comment was made two days before an armed man tried to break into the newspaper’s correspondents’ dinner. White House in Washingtonan incident for which he was accused of attempting to murder the agent.
On your Thursday show last weekKimmel was parodying a gala emcee and, at one point, he addressed Melania Trump: “Mrs. Trump, you have the aura of a future widow.”
Trump will turn 80 in June and is the oldest president in the history of the United States, while his wife, a Slovenian-born former model, is 56 years old.
Like other Republicans, the first lady criticized Kimmel on Monday and called on ABC to “take a stand” against the presenter. Kimmel, however, minimized the criticism and explained that “obviously” it was a joke “about the age difference between them”.
“It was a very light joke” about “the fact that he’s almost 80 and she’s younger than me,” Kimmel added on his Monday night show.
A The White House continued the attack on Tuesday. Communications director Steven Cheung called Kimmel a “shitty person” on social network X for “insisting on the joke instead of doing the right thing and apologizing.”
Jimmy Kimmel is a shit human being for:
#1. Making a disgusting joke about assassinating the President
#2. Doubling down on that joke instead of doing the decent thing by apologizing
ABC needs to fire him immediately and he should be shunned for the rest of his life.
— Steven Cheung (@StevenCheung47)
The presenter also called on Trump to talk about “hateful” rhetorican apparent reference to the president’s incendiary comments about groups such as migrants, his political opponents and the press.
“I agree that hateful and violent rhetoric is something we should reject,” Kimmel said. “I think a great way to start de-escalating this would be to have a conversation about this with your husband,” he added, addressing the first lady.
Big star of late night TV shows, the famous “late night shows”, Kimmel had already been accused by the right of politically exploiting the influencer’s murder pro-Trump Charlie Kirk last year.
Owned by Disney, ABC took the host off the air but reinstated him a week later following accusations of censorship.
