"There are also documentaries where you walk around the White House trying on shoes."
The crowd roared. Then he twisted the knife while opening the Best Documentary envelope: "Oh man, is he going to be mad his wife wasn't nominated for this."
He also got in a devastating shot at the state of free speech in America. "There are some countries whose leaders don't support free speech. I'm not at liberty to say which. Let's just leave it at North Korea and CBS."
That CBS line was a direct reference to the network's decision to pull guests critical of Trump from Stephen Colbert's show after FCC threats. CBS has skewed increasingly pro-Trump since being taken over by David Ellison's Skydance, which quickly installed Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief.
Within hours, White House Communications Director Steven Cheung posted a rant calling Kimmel "a classless hack who is self-projecting his depression and sadness onto others." He added that Kimmel "lives a pathetic existence where nobody, not even his family, enjoys his miserable company."
That's the official White House communications director. Posting that. From his government account. About a comedian who made a shoe joke.
As one person on X put it: "Incredible that someone who allegedly speaks for the most powerful man in the world spent their afternoon writing a Yelp review about Jimmy Kimmel's home life."
This is a president who spent the same day calling for treason charges against journalists, threatening broadcast licenses, and sending 5,000 Marines to the Middle East. But a few jokes about a vanity documentary that bombed so badly it fell well short of its reported $75 million budget? That's what broke them.