Kimmel pushes back on Trump calls for his firing, in first major test for Disney’s new CEO

CNN

By Brian Stelter, CNN

(CNN) — Late-night host Jimmy Kimmel found himself defending Americans’ right to free speech on Monday, after a joke he made several days ago prompted calls from the White House for ABC to fire him – again.

“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?” Kimmel asked at the beginning of his monologue on Monday’s episode of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!”

“What a day.”

The pressure – which is also coming from President Donald Trump and a host of his allies – has created a headache for new Disney CEO Josh D’Amaro, who succeeded Bob Iger just six weeks ago.

The Kimmel controversy is the first major Trump test for D’Amaro, who previously ran Disney’s theme parks and now oversees networks like ABC as well.

Kimmel quipped on last Thursday’s episode that the First Lady had “a glow like an expectant widow.”

“It was a very light roast joke about the fact that he’s almost 80 and she’s younger than I am,” Kimmel said (Donald Trump is 79; Melania Trump is 56).

But after a gunman opened fire outside the dinner ballroom at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday, Trump and his allies have recontextualized the joke as a call to violence.

“It was not by any stretch of the definition a call to assassination,” Kimmel said in Monday’s monologue. “And they know that. I’ve been very vocal for many years speaking out against gun violence in particular.”

“I agree that hateful and violent rhetoric is something we should reject,” Kimmel said. “I also should point out Donald Trump is allowed to say whatever he wants to say, as are you and as am I and as are all of us, because under the First Amendment we have as Americans the right to free speech.”

There is no indication that Disney is thinking about firing Kimmel.

A spokesperson for D’Amaro did not respond to a request for comment. Representatives for ABC and Kimmel have also remained tight-lipped since the controversy erupted.

But actions speak louder than comments, and Monday’s actions – like the business-as-usual attitude at Kimmel’s show – signaled that Disney is not buckling under Trump’s pressure.

Pro-Trump media outlets and influencers blasted Kimmel online after Saturday, foreshadowing a concerted effort from the Trump administration to push him out.

The alleged gunman was charged Monday with attempting to assassinate Trump.

The first lady condemned Kimmel on Monday morning, and the president followed up a few hours later, calling Kimmel’s on-air comment a “despicable call to violence” and linking it directly to the shooting incident.

Disney rerun

For Disney, this all feels a bit like a rerun.

Last September, amid an earlier Trump administration pressure campaign against Kimmel, ABC suspended the show “indefinitely,” only to bring it back less than a week later.

The network managed to anger both Trump opponents for benching Kimmel and appearing to capitulate to the president and Trump fans by allowing Kimmel back on the air.

That time around, when Iger was still CEO, ABC felt it had to move quickly after two big owners of ABC-affiliated stations, Nexstar and Sinclair, said they would preempt Kimmel’s show in their respective markets.

Iger’s deputy Dana Walden, who has a close relationship with Kimmel, later said the suspension was an effort to “take the temperature down” after Kimmel angered conservatives with a comment about the alleged killer of Charlie Kirk.

“We wanted to resolve the situation in a certain way to protect our employees, to think about our audience,” she told Bloomberg.

Walden is now D’Amaro’s No. 2 as the president and chief creative officer of Disney.

Nexstar and Sinclair are still in business with ABC and are still on the record as having reservations about Kimmel’s show. But they might hesitate to yank Kimmel this time around, since the backlash to their boycott was so intense last September.

Kimmel, who has been an outspoken critic of the president for years and has attended No Kings rallies in recent months, has argued that politics are “unavoidable” for him right now.

Earlier this month on Michelle Obama’s “IMO” podcast, he said, “I think it would be embarrassing if we didn’t talk about this. It would be shameful.”

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