‘Kimmel Has All the Power’: Anti-Trump Comedian Doubles Down on Melania Joke as New Disney CEO Is Silent

A defiant Jimmy Kimmel doubled down on his joke about First Lady Melania Trump having a “glow like an expectant widow,” and continued to mock the first lady and President Trump. But unlike last fall, it does not appear that ABC is going to take any action. A media reporter for CNN, Brian Stelter, reported on Tuesday that ABC executives have privately signaled their support of their late-night host, adding, “Kimmel has all the power this time.”The new CEO of Disney, Josh D’Amaro, has been silent on the matter, with the liberal Hollywood press framing the Kimmel issue as his “next big stress test” to see if he’ll stand behind Mr. Kimmel and defend free speech or “cave” to Republicans.Mr. Kimmel, the host of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” (which is in fact not live), is facing criticism over a joke he told last Thursday as he performed an “alternative” to the press gala. During his skit, he mocked Ms. Trump, saying that she had a “glow like an expectant widow.” The joke was, in hindsight, seen as especially tasteless after a gunman allegedly attempted to assassinate the president and other administration officials. ABC received pressure to cancel Mr. Kimmel’s show. The first lady released a rare public denunciation of the late-night host, calling him a “coward” and demanding that the network “take a stand.” Mr. Trump said the network should fire him. As the controversy ballooned, Mr. Kimmel addressed the criticism during his monologue on Monday night, taking aim at the Trumps.“You know, 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?” he said. He noted that there was initially no major reaction to his “little roast” before Saturday evening. Mr. Kimmel doubled down on his joke, saying it “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,” Mr. Kimmel said. “But I understand that the first lady had a stressful experience over the weekend…. And probably every weekend is pretty stressful in that house.”He added, “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.”He also said he was “sorry” for what Ms. Trump and the attendees of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner went through.After defending his joke, he said that if people claim his joke was a call to violence, they should look into the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, for saying before the gala began that Mr. Trump’s speech would be “classic Donald J. Trump … it will be entertaining, there will be some shots fired tonight.”“You know who’s going to be furious when she hears that? White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt,” he quipped. ABC’s reportedly unwavering support of Mr. Kimmel stands in contrast to last fall, when he was briefly pulled off the air for suggesting a “MAGA gang” was responsible for the shooting of Charlie Kirk.After he made that comment, two of the largest station groups, Nexstar and Sinclair, demanded that he apologize for the “insensitive” comment and refused to air his show. ABC suspended Mr. Kimmel for roughly a week, but brought him back to the air — seemingly without making any concessions to Nexstar or Sinclair — and he defended his joke, suggesting that viewers who were offended simply did not get it. As the pressure builds for ABC to fire Mr. Kimmel after his joke about the first lady, it appears unlikely that the network will take any disciplinary action.Mr. Stelter said on CNN on Tuesday that ABC executives have sent “signals to Kimmel and to his team that the company is with him, that the company is not wavering, that the company is not going to … cower in the face of Trump’s pressure.”Notably, Nexstar and Sinclair have remained silent on Mr. Kimmel’s joke about Ms. Trump, and so far have not publicly threatened to refuse to air his show as they did in September. Another noticeably quiet individual is the Trump-appointed chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, who has not posted about the joke or publicly commented on it.Last fall, left-wing critics accused Mr. Carr of strong-arming the station groups into preempting “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” after he appeared on a conservative podcast and called for action to be taken against Mr. Kimmel. Mr. Carr said, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.” He later denied that he was threatening the companies and was instead warning them that someone could file a complaint against them with the FCC. Semafor, however, reported today that the FCC is moving towards actively reviewing Disney’s broadcast licenses. These are usually pro forma procedures, but Mr. Carr has been clear over the last year that broadcast networks use public airwaves and are legally obligated to provide fair news coverage.While Mr. Kimmel’s position at ABC appears to be much stronger than last fall, the White House is not letting up on its public pressure. On Tuesday morning, the White House communications director, Steven Cheung, wrote on X, “Jimmy Kimmel is a [expletive] 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.”Mr. Cheung said ABC should “fire him immediately” and that the comedian “should be shunned for the rest of his life.”

‘Kimmel Has All the Power’: Anti-Trump Comedian Doubles Down on Melania Joke as New Disney CEO Is Silent

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