As President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump continue to call for comedian Jimmy Kimmel to be fired for the 'expectant widow' joke he made last week, the commander-in-chief may want to check his own checkered history of making jokes at his wife's expense. During his first term in the White House, Donald Trump made a joke in the same vein as Kimmel's, saying that Melania Trump wouldn't necessarily be sad if he were to die.
'His wife cried her eyes out when I met her at the hospital that fateful day, I mean, not many wives would react that way to tragedy, I know mine wouldn't,' Trump said at a 2019 private fundraiser, referring to the 2017 shooting of Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.).
Kimmel's original joke — made Thursday, well before Saturday's WHCD — was part of a mock stand-up routine, with Kimmel pretending to perform as the 'alternate' host of the event.
'So I thought, why not … do some of the jokes a comedian might do if our president wasn't a trembling drama queen who's scared of comedy?' Kimmel said Thursday in his lead-up to the bit.
'Look at Melania, so beautiful,' the host then said during the segment. 'Mrs. Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow.'
Following Saturday's shooting, both the president and first lady called for Kimmel to be fired. 'Kimmel's hateful and violent rhetoric is intended to divide our country. His monologue about my family isn't comedy — his words are corrosive and deepens the political sickness within America. People like Kimmel shouldn't have the opportunity to enter our homes each evening to spread hate,' Melania Trump wrote on X Monday. Donald Trump quickly backed his wife in his own Truth Social post later that Monday. 'Jimmy Kimmel should be immediately fired by Disney and ABC,' he wrote.
This is not the first time the president has pushed for Kimmel's firing. ABC suspended Kimmel last year for comments he made about the suspect in the assassination of Charlie Kirk. FCC Chair Brendan Carr announced on Tuesday that the agency would be conducting an unprecedented early license review of Disney's eight owned-and-operated ABC stations.
