U.S. President Donald Trump jabbed at late-night host Jimmy Kimmel early Thursday after he opened his show on Wednesday night with comments about the Epstein files and questioned whether Trump knows anything more about the sex offender’s crimes.
“We are carefully following the path of Hurricane Epstein right now. It is a Category 5; it is expected to make landfall sometime very soon,” Kimmel said.
Hours after the show aired, Trump posted on Truth Social that Jimmy Kimmel Live! should be taken off the air, months after the president welcomed a short-lived suspension of the late-night talk show.
The president did not mention Epstein by name, but criticized the ABC network for continuing to broadcast Kimmel’s show.
“Why does ABC Fake News keep Jimmy Kimmel, a man with NO TALENT and VERY POOR TELEVISION RATINGS, on the air?” Trump wrote, “Why do the TV Syndicates put up with it?”
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Trump also called Kimmel’s comments “totally biased.”
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“Get the bum off the air!!!” Trump added.
In his monologue, one day after the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate voted in quick succession to pass a bill compelling the Department of Justice to release files relating to the deceased convicted sex offender, Kimmel said: “We are now one step closer to answering the question: what did the president know, and how old were these women when he knew it?”
The bill would, however, exempt any documents that are part of the ongoing investigation.
The president has insisted that the push to release the Epstein files stemmed from what he calls a Democrat “hoax” to disrupt his presidency — despite mounting pressure from within his own party to unseal them and his agreement to sign the bill to do so.
While Trump has never officially been accused of wrongdoing in the Epstein case, he has frequently been associated with the convicted sex offender, who died in prison in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges. Their relationship is well-documented, with the two appearing together at social events in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Trump’s name, along with those of many other high-profile individuals, is also written multiple times on flight logs for Epstein’s private plane in the 1990s, though he denies ever having been on board.
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Trump has denied any wrongdoing in relation to the allegations against Epstein.
The result of the vote to pass the bill, which moved through Congress with almost unanimous support on Tuesday, became the butt of one of Kimmel’s jokes.”Congress went 427 to 1. It was such a landslide, Trump might actually be able to re-bury the Epstein files under it,” Kimmel added, before commenting on Trump’s conduct in the White House.
“Usually when Trump gets a bill, he declares bankruptcy and doesn’t pay it, but this one, he’s gonna have to sign,” Kimmel continued. “Or at least he says he’s gonna sign it, which means there’s about — maybe a 12 per cent chance he will.”
“Trump hasn’t been this nervous about signing something since Don Jr.’s birth certificate,” the late-night host joked.
Kimmel’s remarks came about two months after his show was temporarily taken off the air, then allowed to recover after comments he made about the killing of right-wing political commentator Charlie Kirk, who died after being shot in the neck at a Turning Point USA rally on Sept. 10.
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