Jimmy Kimmel has spent the better part of a year poking Donald Trump in the eye on national television. Trump has spent the better part of a year trying to get him fired for it. Neither man shows any sign of letting up, and at this point, the whole thing has turned into the most entertaining feud in American media. But Kimmel’s latest round of acceptance speeches, first at the Critics Choice Awards and then at the Peabody Awards, cranked the tension to a level that even seasoned political watchers weren’t expecting.
Here’s everything that’s happened, how it got this weird, and why it keeps getting worse.
The Critics Choice Speech That Started a New Round
On January 4, 2026, Jimmy Kimmel Live! won Best Talk Show at the Critics Choice Awards at the Barker Hangar in Santa Monica. Kimmel beat out Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers, The Daily Show, Andy Cohen, and Hot Ones. He showed up with a comically long written acceptance speech that he physically unrolled on stage, which got a big laugh before he even said a word.
Then he opened his mouth and things got spicy. He cracked a joke about Trump’s “FIFA peace prize,” a reference to an award the president received at the renamed Kennedy Center during the World Cup draw. He thanked Disney CEO Bob Iger, entertainment co-chairman Dana Walden, and even Sam Altman from OpenAI, joking that Altman “now owns my voice and face.” That was a dig at Disney’s billion-dollar investment in OpenAI that lets users create clips using Marvel and Pixar characters.
But the real moment came at the end. Kimmel closed by saying: “Most of all I wanna thank our president, Donald Jennifer Trump, without whom, we’d be going home empty-handed tonight. So thank you, Mr. President for all the many ridiculous things you do each and every day. It’s been a banner couple of weeks, and we can’t wait to get back on the air tomorrow night to talk about them.”
The speech went viral immediately. And it set the tone for everything that followed.
How the Feud Got This Bad in the First Place
If you’re wondering why a late-night comedian and the sitting president are locked in what looks like a never-ending cage match, the short version is this: it all blew up in September 2025.
Conservative political commentator Charlie Kirk was shot and killed while speaking at Utah Valley University. On his show, Kimmel said: “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.” The backlash was immediate and brutal.
FCC Chairman Brendan Carr went on a conservative YouTube show and threatened ABC and its affiliate station owners with punitive regulatory action, including potential revocation of broadcast licenses, if Kimmel wasn’t reprimanded. Trump publicly celebrated when ABC pulled the show. He congratulated the network for having the “courage” to take Kimmel off the air.
The suspension lasted six days. Disney and ABC announced the show would come back on September 23. But two major station groups, Nexstar and Sinclair, initially refused to air it when it returned. They reversed course by September 26 after facing their own wave of criticism.
The Return That Backfired on Trump Spectacularly
Here’s where the story gets really good. When Kimmel came back, his return episode drew 6.26 million total viewers. That’s the largest audience in Jimmy Kimmel Live!’s 22-year history for a regularly scheduled episode. More than three times higher than his usual average. He pulled a 0.87 rating among adults 18 to 49, his best mark in over a decade.
And those numbers came despite the episode not airing in about 23 percent of the country’s TV homes because of the Nexstar and Sinclair blackouts. The monologue alone racked up more than 20 million views on YouTube, with additional clips going viral across every social media platform.
In that 18-minute opening monologue, Kimmel was apologetic about his Kirk remarks, saying it was never his intention to make light of a young man’s murder. But he also called the threats from FCC head Brendan Carr “un-American” and went directly at Trump: “The president made it very clear he wants to see me and the hundreds of people who work here get fired. Our leader celebrates Americans losing their livelihoods because he can’t take a joke.”
Then he twisted the knife: “He tried his best to cancel me, and instead he forced millions of people to watch the show. That backfired bigly.”
Trump Keeps Calling for Kimmel’s Head
You’d think after the ratings embarrassment, Trump might have quietly moved on. He did not. On Truth Social, Trump posted after the show’s reinstatement: “Why would they want someone back who does so poorly, who’s not funny, and who puts the Network in jeopardy by playing 99% positive Democrat GARBAGE.”
Then in April 2026, the feud escalated again. Kimmel delivered a mock White House Correspondents’ Dinner roast and joked about Melania Trump: “Look at Melania, so beautiful. Mrs. Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow.” That joke, clearly about the couple’s age difference, got reframed by the right as something far more sinister.
Melania herself responded on Twitter, writing: “His monologue about my family isn’t comedy. His words are corrosive and deepens the political sickness within America.” Trump followed up by posting that Kimmel’s comments went “beyond the pale” and that he should be “immediately fired by Disney and ABC.”
Kimmel’s response on air on April 28 was classic Kimmel. He showed Trump’s Truth Social post on screen, the one reading: “When is ABC Fake News Network firing seriously unfunny Jimmy Kimmel, who incompetently presides over one of the Lowest Rated shows on Television? People are angry. It better be soon!!!” Then he pulled up a headline showing Trump’s own approval ratings had hit an all-time low for his second term.
“If incompetently presiding over not just one of but the lowest rating in history is the reason I should be fired, we should both be out of a job because you’re not doing too good either!” Kimmel said. Then he offered a sardonic olive branch: “Let’s see if we can come up with a cease-fire agreement. This could be good for both of us. I get to keep my job, you get to end your 11th war.”
The Peabody Speech That Really Set Things Off
Just when you thought the feud had a natural ceiling, the Peabody Awards happened. On May 31, 2026, at the 86th annual ceremony at the Beverly Wilshire, Jimmy Kimmel Live! was named a winner. Ben Affleck introduced Kimmel, and his intro was pointed: “Comedy and satire are vital parts of democratic speech, whether the government likes them or not.” Affleck also noted that “when they pulled his show off the air, Jimmy refused to back down.”
Kimmel, joined by his sidekick Guillermo Rodriguez, delivered the kind of speech that was clearly designed to make headlines. “I called our president Fattyshack, and somehow we got a Peabody out of that. This country really has gone to shit,” he said. He added: “Making jokes about the president in America shouldn’t win you a prize. We have the right, guaranteed by the Constitution, to criticize and satirize our leaders.”
He thanked the millions of people who spoke out when his show was suspended, saying: “You sent a message that we do care and we stand up and we will not stand by when comedy and journalism and dissent are censored and regulated and criminalized.” He closed by thanking Trump with a fresh batch of nicknames, including “our commander-in-thief” and “Abrascram Lincoln,” for “inspiring us to fight for our freedom of speech.”
Even Conservatives Have Started Pushing Back on Trump’s Approach
One of the more interesting wrinkles in this whole saga is that the pushback against Trump’s campaign to silence Kimmel hasn’t just come from the left. Social media users dug up old statements from FCC Chair Brendan Carr where he called free speech the “bedrock of democracy” and said “The FCC does not have a roving mandate to police speech in the name of the public interest.” Those quotes aged poorly.
More surprising were the conservative voices who broke ranks. Candace Owens said the suspension wasn’t justified and wanted “the attacks on free speech to stop.” Ben Shapiro said the FCC “should not be threatening action against ABC.” Joe Rogan warned conservatives that government involvement in “dictating what a comedian can or cannot say in a monologue” is dangerous, saying “this will be used on you.”
Carr was later questioned about the suspension during congressional testimony before the Senate Commerce Committee in December 2025, and again at a House subcommittee hearing in January 2026. The scrutiny hasn’t stopped.
Disney Isn’t Blinking
Despite Trump repeatedly calling for Kimmel to be permanently removed from television, Disney has done the opposite. Bloomberg reported in early December that ABC renewed Kimmel’s contract through at least May 2027. Meanwhile, CBS actually did cancel The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, citing financial reasons. That contrast is pretty telling.
Kimmel’s December 18 show, the final episode of 2025, featured him getting emotional while thanking fans. “This year, you literally pulled us out of a hole, and we cannot thank you enough personally,” he said. Then he added: “There is still much more good in this country than bad. And we hope that you will bear with us during this extended psychotic episode that we’re in the middle of.”
At this point, every time Trump demands Kimmel be taken off the air, Kimmel’s ratings go up and he wins another award. As feuds go, this one seems to be working out a lot better for the comedian than the president. And based on what we’ve seen so far, neither side is anywhere close to calling it quits.