Late-night host Jimmy Kimmel said on Monday his joke about US first lady Melania Trump had been misconstrued and was not \u200ba \u201ccall to assassination.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kimmel used the opening monologue of \u201cJimmy Kimmel Live!\u201d to address comments made last Thursday in a parody segment on the White House correspondents\u2019 dinner.<\/p>\n
He said his quip that Melania Trump had \u201ca glow like an expectant widow,\u201d referred to the difference is ages of the first lady and her husband, President Donald Trump.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was a very light roast joke about the fact that he\u2019s almost 80 and she\u2019s younger than I am,\u201d Kimmel said. \u201cIt was not by any stretch of the definition a call to assassination.\u201d<\/p>\n
Earlier in the day, Trump said Kimmel should immediately be fired by ABC and parent company Walt Disney, joining his wife in calling out Kimmel for remarks made prior to a shooting near a weekend gathering of journalists and politicians.<\/p>\n
The Trumps were rushed out of Saturday\u2019s dinner \u200cafter the shooting in the \u200clobby of the Washington Hilton. A suspect identified as Cole Allen charged through a \u200bcheckpoint and \u200cfired \u2060at Secret \u200bService \u2060agents, wounding one, before he was subdued and arrested.<\/p>\n
Trump has repeatedly urged broadcasters to drop comedy or news programs he dislikes or which have been critical of him, pressing regulators to revoke licenses of broadcasters he says are unfair to him.<\/p>\n
Broadcasters have broad First Amendment rights to make jokes, however, even those that are distasteful, experts say. Melania Trump called Kimmel\u2019s remarks \u201ccorrosive\u201d and a symptom of what she described as a political sickness in the United States.<\/p>\n
\u201cI agree that hateful and violent rhetoric is something we should reject,\u201d Kimmel said. \u201cI do, and I think a great place to start to dial that back would be to have a conversation with your husband about it.\u201d<\/p>\n
The comedian played a clip of a \u2060CBS News\u2019 \u201c60 Minutes\u201d Sunday interview in which Trump called senior correspondent Norah O\u2019Donnell \u201ca disgrace\u201d for reading \u200can excerpt from the alleged gunman\u2019s writings and seeking a response.<\/p>\n
The issue poses an \u200cearly test for Disney CEO Josh D\u2019Amaro, who took the reins last month.<\/p>\n
\u201cEnough is \u200benough. It is time for ABC to take a stand. \u200cHow many times will ABC\u2019s leadership enable Kimmel\u2019s atrocious behavior at the expense of our community,\u201d Melania Trump said in a post \u200con X. \u201cPeople like Kimmel shouldn\u2019t have the opportunity to enter our homes each evening to spread hate.\u201d<\/p>\n
Donald Trump, who previously called for Kimmel to be removed from the air, said the comedian\u2019s joke was \u201csomething far beyond the pale. Jimmy Kimmel should be immediately fired by Disney and ABC.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kimmel expressed sympathy for Melania Trump, and those who attended Saturday\u2019s event, for enduring the traumatic incident. But he rejected the notion that a joke, delivered three days earlier, \u201chad \u200cany effect on anything that happened.\u201d<\/p>\n
Reaction elsewhere to the remarks was mixed.<\/p>\n
\u201cDisney and ABC are extremely lucky that Trump wasn\u2019t assassinated on Saturday two days after Jimmy Kimmel made \u2060the joke about an \u2018expectant widow,\u2019\u201d said Todd \u2060Doten, 57, a street vendor on Hollywood Boulevard.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf that had happened, there would be a backlash against them the likes (of which) they\u2019ve never seen before.\u201d Dee Thompson, a 64-year-old from North Carolina, worried about the free speech risks if Kimmel should lose his job. \u201cThey\u2019re going to take away freedom of speech for a lot of comedians, you know,\u201d Thompson added.<\/p>\n
In September of last year, the head of the Federal Communications Commission pressured broadcasters to take Kimmel off the air. ABC briefly suspended Kimmel\u2019s show that month over comments he made about the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.<\/p>\n
Hours before the suspension, FCC head Brendan Carr warned that local broadcasters who aired Kimmel could face fines or loss of licenses and said, \u201cit\u2019s time for them to step up.\u201d His comments drew pushback from the entertainment industry and politicians on both stripes, including Republican Senator Ted Cruz, who likened Carr\u2019s threats to those of an organized-crime boss.<\/p>\n
Trump, the subject of two prior assassination attempts, has repeatedly attacked the media and threatened broadcast licenses. Trump had praised Kimmel\u2019s suspension in September.<\/p>\n
In November, \u200bTrump criticized an ABC News correspondent for asking Saudi Arabia\u2019s crown \u200bprince about the 2018 killing of a Washington Post columnist and suggested the FCC should move to revoke the broadcast licenses of Disney-owned ABC stations.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Late-night host Jimmy Kimmel said on Monday his joke about US first lady Melania Trump had been misconstrued and was not \u200ba \u201ccall to assassination.\u201d Kimmel used the opening monologue of \u201cJimmy Kimmel Live!\u201d to address comments made last Thursday in a parody segment on the White House correspondents\u2019 dinner. He said his quip that …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":96935,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-96916","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96916","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=96916"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96916\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":96936,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96916\/revisions\/96936"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/96935"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=96916"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=96916"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=96916"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}