Jimmy Kimmel
Donald Trump attacked late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel in an early morning all-over-the-map social media post Wednesday. That night, Kimmel told his audience that he learned about Trump’s latest attack on him from all the text messages waiting for him when he woke up.
“Usually, like, I'll have maybe four,” he said. “I had 100 because it appears that I once again ruffled the feathers of our Kentucky Fried former president who is—apparently, with all that's going on—still smarting from my joke about him at the Oscars."
After reading Trump’s Truth Social screed out loud, Kimmel joked, "My first thought is I'm impressed by his use of the word 'vaunted.' He was even able to spell it correctly, which is really good!" He added, "But literally everything else is not just wrong, but ‘maybe we should be worried about him’ wrong. Like, ‘maybe we should take the keys away from grandpa’ wrong."
Kimmel then fact-checked Trump’s rant.
He conceded that Trump calling him "stupid Jimmy Kimmel" was a debatable fact. But he took issue with Trump’s claim that Kimmel is not only bad at hosting the Academy Awards, but he was somehow responsible for the show’s “big ratings drop”—a “weird” assertion, Kimmel said, because ratings were up this year.
Does the late-night comedian suffer from “Trump derangement syndrome,” as the Donald claims?
“There's only one person who suffers from Trump Derangement Syndrome,” Kimmel said. “His name is Donald Trump."
Kimmel noted that a big part of Trump’s attack on him seems to be rooted in his inability to distinguish Kimmel from Academy Award-winning actor Al Pacino.
"Now, don't get me wrong,” he said. “I wish I was Al Pacino. I'm just not."
As for Trump’s insistence that Kimmel’s wife, along with people behind the scenes of the show, were begging Kimmel to not read Trump's Truth Social attack live on air during the Academy Awards broadcast, Kimmel gave this hilarious blow-by-blow account of how that all went down.
What happened is they showed me what he posted. I looked at it. I said, “Oh, I'm going to read this.”My wife went, “Oh no.”
I said, “Oh yes.”
And that was that. That was the whole story.
Kimmel said he wasn't planning to accept hosting duties again, even though he's been asked, but now that Trump weighed in on it, he has to consider it.
"You know what? Maybe you can watch on the TV in the rec room at Rikers with all the guys," he said.
And since it clearly still bothers Trump, Kimmel played the clip of him making fun of Trump at the Academy Awards by reading out Trump's attack on him.
Kimmel then reminded the audience that his show received better ratings than Trump would have you believe, with a graph showing that ratings have increased in the two years Kimmel has hosted.
"I just want to say that that is not 'down.' You want to know what 'down' looks like?” Kimmel asked, before putting up a graph showing stock plummeting. “This is the value of Truth Social stock, your company. That's 'down.'"
Zachary Mueller is the senior research director for America’s Voice and America’s Voice Education Fund. He brings his expertise on immigration politics to talk about how much money the GOP is using to promote its racist immigration campaigns.
Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.
