For years, Jimmy Kimmel has made Donald Trump a recurrent target during both his late-night show and multiple stints as Oscar host. “We should be har
For years, Jimmy Kimmel has made Donald Trump a recurrent target during both his late-night show and multiple stints as Oscar host. “We should be hardened” to Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric by now, Kimmel told Rolling Stone in an interview published Tuesday, “but I’m not.” “It is shocking to me; it seems like a comic book villain. He seems like the kind of character that would flame out after a few years, but the fact that he’s still with us is remarkable,” he continued. The comedian tried to “show people who aren’t paying attention to the news what’s actually going on” ahead of the last election, but in the shadow of Trump’s victory over Democratic candidate Kamala Harris, “I see myself more as a place to scream,” Kimmel said.
Part of that shout into the void involves lampooning Elon Musk, Trump’s billionaire bestie. On a March episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Kimmel slammed Musk’s pleas for respect following protests at Tesla dealerships and vandalism against the vehicles. “Well, let me see if I can explain it for you,” said Kimmel. “When you pull out a chain saw to celebrate firing thousands of people, they get mad. My God. I mean, this poor guy. You do one, maybe two Nazi salutes, everybody gets all bent out of shape!” Musk responded by calling Kimmel “an unfunny jerk” on X.
“Well, he’s kind of the same as Trump in a lot of ways,” Kimmel told Rolling Stone. “I mean, he supported [Barack] Obama and then Hillary [Clinton], and now it’s convenient for him to support Trump. And to me, those are the worst people. I don’t think Trump believes in any of it, and I don’t think Elon Musk believes in it. I think Elon Musk sees this as a great way to accrue a lot of power and make a lot of money, and that’s exactly what he’s doing.”
Kimmel didn’t mince words when asked for his opinions of others in Trumpland—from ousted Fox News host Tucker Carlson (“Oh, he’s a complete phony”) to deputy White House chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller (“Yeah, he’s a scary motherfucker, that guy”). But neither came close to receiving the amount of vitriol the late-night host had for Musk.
“Here’s where I realized Elon Musk was a very bad person and a dangerous person: When Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul, an elderly man, was viciously attacked, his first reaction was to repost a brazenly false story suggesting that it was a male prostitute that did it,” Kimmel recalled. “That’s when I realized, Oh, this is a bad person. There’s no depth to which he will not stoop. An old man was hit with a hammer and that’s his first reaction. It’s vile.”
Although rumors of feuding between Musk and Trump have intensified, the richest man in the world recently sat ringside with the president at a UFC fight in Miami. Vanity Fair has reached out to representatives for Musk, Carlson, and Miller for comment.
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