ORevery year, at White House Correspondents’ Gala Dinnera comedian takes the stage and mocks the president in front of reporters and cameras. This year Donald Trump imposed the cancellation of the monologue: No comedian could have targeted him in public. During his late show, Jimmy Kimmel overrode the veto pre-recording his alternative monologue, which aired on April 23. Between the jokes, one about Melania Trump which triggered the controversy.
«Widow in waiting»: Kimmel’s joke about Melania Trump
«Look at Melania, so beautiful, Mrs. Trump, you have a glow like a waiting widow». The logic of the gag was that of roast American, the comedy genre in which you hit where it hurts most: Trump is almost 80 years old, Melania is 56, and the expression on her face when she is next to her husband does not exactly convey marital happiness. A dig about age and marriage, not a threatas Kimmel would clarify days later.
But two days after that broadcast, the evening of the official dinner is ended dramatically: a man armed with a rifle, pistol and knives attempted to enter the lounge where the first lady was also located. No casualties, but enough to rewrite the context of everything that had been said before.
Melania Trump on the attack: «ABC fire him, he’s a coward»
It is in this climate that the first lady chose to respond. On Monday 27 April, the attack on social media was frontal: “Kimmel’s violent, hateful rhetoric is designed to divide our country. His monologue about my family is not comedy: le His words are corrosive and deepen the political disease that afflicts America.”
Melania accused ABC of systematically covering it up, she called it a «coward» who hides behind the net and explicitly asked that he be fired. Trump took it up a notch on Truth Social, speaking of “invitation to assassination” and demanding that Kimmel be “immediately fired from Disney and ABC”.
Kimmel responds live: «It was a joke about age»
The host didn’t take a step back. In the monologue of April 28 he dismantled the accusation point by point: the joke had been recorded three days before the dinnerso any causal link with the attack is meaningless. “It was in no way an invitation to murder, and they know it,” he said. He then changed his tone, addressing Melania directly: «I’m sorry for what you experienced Saturday night. Just because there were no injuries doesn’t mean it wasn’t traumatic.” Before returning to the irony, showing the clip of White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt who, before the dinner, promised “a few shots fired in the room”.
It’s not the first skirmish: in September his show had already been suspended for six days after a comment about Charlie Kirk. The war between the White House and late night American has been going on for years. This time, however, the backdrop is that of a real attack.
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