Jimmy Kimmel Doubles Down on His Charlie Kirk ‘MAGA Gang’ Remarks by Mocking Trump’s ‘Jesus’ Posting

ABC’s late-night host, Jimmy Kimmel, apparently still has no regrets about his comments regarding the shooting of Charlie Kirk that led to him being briefly suspended last fall.In September, Mr. Kimmel suggested that a “MAGA gang” was responsible for the shooting of Kirk, even though Utah officials had said the suspect held leftist views. The anti-Trump comedian was later suspended by Disney for roughly a week as two of the nation’s largest station groups, Nexstar and Sinclair, said they would preempt “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” Ultimately, Disney and the station groups folded, and Kimmel returned to the airwaves. Instead of apologizing, he insisted that those who were upset simply did not understand his joke. And on Tuesday evening, Mr. Kimmel took another opportunity to defend his comment while mocking Trump for sharing a graphic that appeared to depict himself as a Jesus-like figure, with glowing hands, healing a man. The president, who took the post down, told reporters he thought the image was depicting him as a doctor and that the “fake news” twisted the narrative. Mr. Kimmel played a clip of Vice President JD Vance defending Mr. Trump, saying that the image was meant as a “joke.”“Even JD Vance wasn’t able to go along with this doctor storyline. He came up with an entirely different explanation,” Mr. Kimmel said before playing a clip of Mr. Vance speaking to Fox News’s Bret Baier.The vice president said, “I think the president was posting a joke, and, of course, he took it down because he recognized that a lot of people weren’t understanding his humor in that case.”Mr. Kimmel quipped, “He was posting a joke, you understand? And like all the best jokes, it had to be explained and then deleted. First, he was Jesus. Then he wasn’t Jesus, he was a doctor. And now, it was a joke.”“Why did I get kicked off the air again? I can’t remember,” he added. Mr. Kimmel’s lack of apology and doubling down on his insistence that his comment was a joke coincidentally came hours before the widow of Kirk, Erika Kirk, withdrew from an event with Mr. Vance due to threats. The news of her decision to back out of the event likely came as Mr. Kimmel’s show was being recorded, and after the script was written. However, the late-night host’s decision to double down on his comment highlights the extent to which he has cemented his power at ABC after his suspension.His lack of an apology was a major reason for his suspension, the Hollywood Reporter said last fall. An ABC source told the outlet that executives decided to pull the show after it became clear that Mr. Kimmel did not want to apologize and instead wanted to “explain” that his comment had been taken out of context. But months later, after ABC brought “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” back to air without an apology, the host appears to be emboldened.Last year, Mr. Kimmel signed a short-term, one-year contract extension to keep his show on the air. In March, he came under fire after he made a joke about the newly-installed Homeland Security secretary, Markwayne Mullin, running his family’s plumbing and HVAC business before entering politics. Mr. Kimmel suggested that Mr. Mullin was unqualified for the job because he was a “plumber,” skipping over his years in the House and Senate. Amid the criticism, the late-night host refused to back down and insisted that conservatives should apologize to Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for criticizing her limited experience in politics before she ran for the House.

Jimmy Kimmel Doubles Down on His Charlie Kirk ‘MAGA Gang’ Remarks by Mocking Trump’s ‘Jesus’ Posting

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