Jon Stewart weighed in on MAGA turning the shooting outside the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner into an “assault on Jimmy Kimmel’s jokes,” calling it the “land of absurdity we find ourselves in.”
“I don’t know about you. I am sure you’re all fucking exhausted by all this,” said Stewart in a recent episode of “The Weekly Show” podcast.
His reaction arrived after President Donald Trump and Melania Trump, seemingly sparked by clips shared in right-wing social media circles, tried to pressure ABC to fire Kimmel after the host quipped that the first lady was glowing “like an expectant widow” in a show filmed days before the shooting.
Kimmel, who was suspended by ABC following comments on the suspect in Charlie Kirk’s assassination last year, hasn’t backed down to Trump despite the attacks.
On his “Weekly Show” podcast, Stewart emphasized that there is still “hope” for the U.S. despite Trump’s attempts to get Kimmel off the air.
“The hope is in the people that rise out of it. I’ve always believe this,” he said.
“When they say ‘Make America Great Again,’ Donald Trump will make America great again, just not in the way that he intended.”
He continued, “Because the reaction to his fragility and impulsiveness and incompetence will spur people that you would not expect to rise above the madness and help to begin to rebuild the very thing that we need in this country.”
Kimmel has become the focus of another round of right-wing ire, this time over a days-old joke about ex-New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani.
In his Tuesday monologue, Kimmel joked that Giuliani “rose from the grave” to call him “one of the most distasteful human beings in this country” in the ex-mayor’s commentary on the Trump drama last week.
MAGA influencer Benny Johnson highlighted a clip of the quip in a post to X after a spokesperson for Giuliani announced that the former mayor had been hospitalized and was in “critical but stable” condition on Sunday.
The reason why Giuliani was hospitalized — and how long he’s been hospitalized for — remains unclear.