Jimmy Kimmel has taken more cheap shots at Donald Trump than anybody can count, and ABC keeps handing him the microphone.
His fans swear it’s all just jokes.
And Kimmel just handed his viewers a new assignment for the President’s next rally.
Jimmy Kimmel Found One Heckler He Wants to Clone
A protester at President Trump’s recent rally in Mississippi screamed a crude line about the new White House ballroom before security hustled him out of the building.
Most folks would chalk that up to the usual rally noise. Kimmel saw a movement.
During a recent episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live!, the ABC host replayed the moment and went to work. “Wouldn’t it be a shame if people started yelling that everywhere he goes? ‘Shove that ballroom up your fat ***!’” Kimmel said.
But he had a prop waiting backstage. “You know what would be even worse? If people started printing it on shirts,” Kimmel told his audience, right before he unveiled a red T-shirt with the same line printed across the front in big white letters.
Then came the wink. “Please, please don’t do this at his next rally tomorrow in Ohio or the next one in South Carolina,” Kimmel said. “Please! It’s beneath us.”
Nobody in that studio took it as a real plea. Comics have used the trick forever. Tell the crowd not to do something in a tone that guarantees a few of them will.
Kimmel Already Tried a Ballroom Joke Once, Two Days Before the Gunfire
ABC would rather viewers forget what happened the last time Kimmel aimed a gag at the Trumps and a ballroom.
On April 23, 2026, Kimmel staged a mock version of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on his show. He pretended to welcome the First Lady from the podium and told her, “Mrs Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow.”
Two days later, the real dinner had barely started when an armed man charged a security checkpoint at the Washington Hilton. Authorities say Cole Tomas Allen came carrying a shotgun, a handgun, and several knives, and that he wounded a Secret Service agent before officers tackled him. Agents rushed the President and First Lady off the stage while guests dove under their tables.
Federal prosecutors charged Allen with attempting to assassinate the President. A jury hasn’t convicted him of anything, and nobody has produced evidence that he ever watched Kimmel’s show.
But Melania Trump called the joke “hateful and violent.” The President demanded that Disney fire the host. “Jimmy Kimmel, who is in no way funny as attested to by his terrible Television Ratings, made a statement on his Show that is really shocking,” Trump wrote.
Kimmel’s defense? He told viewers the widow line simply poked fun at the age gap between the President and his wife. Nobody in the Trump family laughed. Hard to blame them.
Kimmel Picked the One Punch Line the Secret Service Can’t Laugh At
The morning after the shooting, Trump made his pitch for the ballroom on Truth Social. “This event would never have happened with the Militarily Top Secret Ballroom currently under construction at the White House. It cannot be built fast enough!” he wrote.
Critics on the Left rolled their eyes and kept fighting the project in court. The fight went all the way to the Supreme Court, and the justices ruled 5-4 in August to let construction keep rolling.
Trump celebrated with a promise that “Construction is under budget and ahead of schedule.” He called the finished project “THE GREATEST OF ITS KIND!” And the White House has said private donors are covering the roughly $400 million price tag, a detail Kimmel somehow never gets around to mentioning.
So follow the logic. Kimmel’s latest rallying cry mocks a building the President pitched as a safer place to host big crowds, and he wants that cry shouted at the one place where Trump still meets big crowds out in the open.
Rally Crowds Haven’t Been a Laughing Matter Since Butler
Every Trump rally now runs under a cloud that didn’t exist ten years ago.
On July 13, 2024, a gunman opened fire on Trump at an outdoor rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, grazing his ear and killing volunteer firefighter Corey Comperatore in the bleachers. Two months later, Secret Service agents spotted an armed man hiding in the bushes at Trump’s golf course in West Palm Beach. The attack at the Correspondents’ Dinner made three.
A heckler with a mouthful of profanity isn’t a gunman, and nobody should pretend otherwise.
But a shouting match in the stands pulls agents’ eyes toward one corner of the arena. A shoving match near the rope line forces the detail to sort out friend from foe in a hurry. Multiply that by a few dozen T-shirt-wearing fans of late-night TV, and the job gets harder for the men and women standing between the President and the next lunatic.
That’s the scene Kimmel wants his viewers to create. Maybe that’s reading too much into a late-night gag. Then again, Kimmel’s the one who keeps printing his gags on clothing.
Kimmel’s Red Shirt Collection Keeps Growing
This isn’t his first wardrobe reveal of 2026. Back in January, Kimmel held up a red shirt that read “Donald J Trump Is Gonna Kill You.” Later in the same show, after playing Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey’s profane rant against ICE, Kimmel announced, “That’s the shirt I want to see,” and somebody off camera tossed him one reading “GET THE **** OUT OF MPLS.”
Count them up. That’s three protest shirts in ten months, and every one of them tells a crowd to get angrier at the people Trump’s voters sent to Washington.
And the ballroom has been stuck in Kimmel’s craw for more than a year. In September 2025, days after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, Kimmel ridiculed Trump for turning a question about his grief into a plug for the construction project. “This is how a four-year-old mourns a goldfish,” Kimmel said.
ABC pulled his show off the air for nearly a week after that monologue. He came back. The ballroom jokes came back with him.
Maxine Waters Wrote This Playbook First
None of this is new on the Left. Kimmel just added a punch line.
In June 2018, California Congresswoman Maxine Waters told a rally crowd that anybody who spotted a Trump Cabinet member in a restaurant or a gas station should “get out and you create a crowd” and tell them “they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.”
Democrats spent the next few weeks insisting she didn’t mean anything by it. Then Trump officials started getting chased out of restaurants.
Kimmel’s version comes with a laugh track and a merchandise idea. The target hasn’t changed.
The same crowd that lectures the country nonstop about dangerous rhetoric and threats to democracy can’t seem to spot either one when a millionaire comic in Hollywood cheers on strangers to get in a President’s face. Out in the rest of the country, plenty of folks see it plainly enough. They watched a bullet come within an inch of the man two summers ago.
On April 23, 2026, Jimmy Kimmel joked that Melania Trump had the glow of an expectant widow. On April 25, Secret Service agents hustled her husband off a ballroom stage with an armed man inside the building.
Sources:
Breitbart News, “Video: Jimmy Kimmel Encourages Liberals to Heckle Trump Speeches After One Yelled ‘Shove That Ballroom Up Your Fat Ass!’”
The Daily Signal, National Religious Broadcasters seeks federal investigation of ABC over Kimmel “expectant widow” remark
KTLA, “President Trump calls for firing of Kimmel after ‘expectant widow’ comment days before WHCD”
The Philadelphia Inquirer, Melania Trump and the Jimmy Kimmel correspondents’ dinner joke
Gray News, “Jimmy Kimmel responds after Trump, first lady call for his firing over ‘expectant widow’ joke”
TheWrap, Rachel Maddow on the White House ballroom response after the correspondents’ dinner shooting
Fox News, “Jimmy Kimmel displays t-shirt with Minneapolis mayor’s call for ICE to ‘get the f— out’ of city”
PJ Media, “Jimmy Kimmel Turns ICE Shooting Into Anti-Trump Merch”
Associated Press via GV Wire, coverage of Kimmel’s September 2025 monologue