Do we like Jimmy Kimmel?
Our score: 7 out of 10. He has spent years on the right side of the big fights, with a few old jokes and sketches he has since apologised for.
Kimmel is a late-night lifer: his 24th season of the ABC show started on 8 September 2026. He renewed his contract in December 2025, announcing it in his own monologue, and it now runs to May 2027. The whole political storm around him comes from being a loud, reliable critic of Donald Trump from a network desk.
The big one was September 2025. ABC pulled his show for nearly a week after FCC Chairman Brendan Carr criticised his comments about the killing of Charlie Kirk. He came back emotional, said he never meant to mock the death, and did not apologise. He also said Sinclair and Nexstar pulling the show from a quarter of ABC stations was “un-American”, and noted that Trump had tried to cancel him and instead made millions watch.
On the harm test he has marks against him, and he has apologised for them. In 2018 a Twitter stoush with Sean Hannity included a gay joke that critics called homophobic. Kimmel said he did not mean to belittle gay people and apologised. In 2020 he apologised for 1990s blackface sketches on The Man Show, including an impression of Karl Malone, and said he regretted the delay.
The recent fight started with a late-April 2026 joke that Melania Trump had “a glow like an expectant widow”, days before an armed man tried to enter the White House Correspondents' Dinner. Donald and Melania Trump both demanded ABC fire him, and Trump called it a call to violence. Kimmel said it was a roast joke about their age gap and not a call to assassination. Whether it landed as tasteless comedy or as something darker depends on how you read the timing.
The pressure went beyond words. The FCC ordered early licence reviews of eight Disney-owned ABC stations, and most outside observers read that as retaliation. Carr said it was part of an existing Disney diversity probe and not a response to Trump's calls. Disney said its stations comply with the rules and that it would defend them through legal channels, and it kept Kimmel on air.
The good stuff is mostly what he does with the platform. In January 2026 he offered Trump his own Emmy and other trophies if Trump pulled ICE out of Minneapolis. The White House spokesman called him a “no-talent loser” for it. Whatever you think of the jokes, he keeps picking fights on behalf of other people and not just himself.