Most people have heard of the stages of grief even if they aren’t familiar with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (article). Jimmy Kimmel certainly knows about it because he referenced it in his monologue. Playing psychologist, he altered the fourth stage just for Trump and showed how quickly he moved to the final stage of acceptance.
If you haven’t seen or read the portions of the Jimmy Kimmel monologue that led to him being fired click 1 here 1
Sabrina Haake has a great first sentence in her Substack “Jimmy Kimmel has a First Amendment claim against Trump's FCC. (here)” It is “If Trump’s skin gets any thinner the US will have its first translucent president.”
She goes on to say:
Trump, who relishes belittling people with unpresidential insults, like calling democrats ‘scum’ and ‘the enemy within,’ can’t take it when his slurs boomerang back at him.
Instead of accepting that jokes, jabs and insults come with the territory—satirizing presidents is an American tradition— Trump reacts like an enraged teenager when anyone insults him. Whenever the media fail to fawn, or worse, accurately report Trump’s unprecedented corruption or ineptitude, his first instinct is to use federal resources to seek retribution against them.
She then goes on to focus both on legal issues (she’s an attorney) and Trump’s psychology which covers much of what I planned to write about this morning.
My premise is that the real “crime” that led to Kimmel’s dismissal wasn’t what he said about Charlie Kirk. It is what he said about Trump. I am not alone in this. Others commenting on the firing have been expressing this opinion.
We’ll never know whether Trump himself pushed hard to have him fired. It may not matter since ABC knew how he felt about Kimmel and what would make him happy.
When it comes to Trump unless they keep Kimmel’s show the letters ABC forever will mean Always Bow and Cower.
Unless he’s really thick Trump had to know he waded into the shit when he saw the monologue. If he realized this he’d have been triggered when Kimmel talked about the fourth stage of grief after he played the clip of his bragging about his glorious ballroom. This is where he plans to have Trumpian Big Balls which he can show off to prove how great he is - make of that what you will.
He may have thought “enough is enough” and picked up the phone and called Bob Iger and told him to get rid of that Kimmel guy.
Trump set himself up. Not being the most self-aware person in the room he may not have realized that he made himself the butt of the joke with his own words. We know he boycotts that White House Correspondents Dinner because he had to sit through being mocked there by Barack Obama (see article which has a video).
Trump made himself the butt of Obama’s jokes by promoting the Obama birth certificate conspiracy (see Wikipedia).
That took some thought and planning. He spontaneously made himself the butt of Kimmel’s joke just by being himself.
In fact, in some ways Trump is the most unfunny joke in American history but if he wasn’t about to destroy democracy we would find his antics hilarious. Now when we hear well crafted jokes about him the saying “that’s so funny it hurts to laugh” applies.
Still, whenever possible those with a platform must keep mocking him.
What Jimmy Kimmel said about Charlie Kirk
"We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it. In between the finger-pointing, there was, uh, grieving on Friday − the White House flew the flags at half-staff, which got some criticism, but on a human level, you can see how hard the president is taking this.
Then he showed the clip of what the president said after a reporter asked him how he was holding up after the death of his friend Charlie Kirk and Trump said “I think very good” before going on to brag about the new White House ballroom he was having built:
“And by the way, right there you see all the trucks. They just started construction of the new ballroom for the White House, which is something they’ve been trying to get for about 150 years. And it’s gonna be a beauty. It’ll be an absolutely magnificent structure.”
The this is what Kimmel said:
Yes, he's at the fourth stage of grief: construction. Demolition, construction. This is not how an adult grieves the murder of someone he called a friend; this is how a four-year-old mourns a goldfish, OK? And it didn't just happen once. And then we installed the most beautiful chandelier. Responses you wouldn't believe. Who thinks like that, and why are we building a $200 million chandlier in the White House? Is it possible that he's doing it intentionally so he can be bad about that instead of the (Jeffrey) Epstein list? …
There was more:
“And it didn’t just happen once,” Kimmel continued, throwing to a clip from Fox and Friends, where the President again responded to a question about Kirk’s death by talking about his ballroom.
“Oh, when I heard it? I was in the midst of building a great… for 150 years they’ve wanted a ballroom at the White House, right?” Trump said before going on to reveal that the architects informed him of Kirk’s shooting.
“There’s something wrong with him, there really is,” Kimmel stated. “I mean, who thinks like that?”
More importantly, the late-night host questioned, “Why are we building a $200 million ballroom in the White House? Is it possible that he’s doing it intentionally so we can be mad about that instead of the Epstein list?”
TV Insider has an article about this which incudes his entire 16 minute monologue.
