The White House Correspondents' Dinner went ahead Thursday night without a comedian. Jimmy Kimmel decided to fix that himself.
Dressed in a tuxedo and stepping behind a mock dais on the set of Jimmy Kimmel Live, Kimmel staged what he called the "All-American White House Correspondents Dinner," a name lifted directly from Kid Rock's "All-American Halftime Show," which had been organized as a protest to Bad Bunny's Super Bowl halftime performance. Kimmel was explicit about the parallel, saying he was "taking a page from the Kid Rock playbook."
The real Correspondents' Dinner, a Washington tradition that typically features a comedian roasting the press and the president, this year booked mentalist Oz Pearlman as the featured act. Kimmel addressed this directly. "Our president is a delicate snowflake with the thinnest fat skin of any human being ever," he told his audience. "And that means there's going to be no comedian this year."
From there, the monologue moved fast. Kimmel compared formal attire at the dinner to "every page of the Trump Epstein files." He referenced the $130,000 hush-money payment to Stormy Daniels. He made several cracks about Trump's appearance, asking about his complexion, "Who did your makeup? Kraft singles?" He connected the president's energy and oil policies to a legacy of "breaking wind and passing gas."
Melania Trump was not spared. Kimmel targeted her recently released documentary, which scored a 10% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes. "The world's first motionless picture," he called it.
He moved on to Vice President JD Vance, Stephen Miller, and Kash Patel before turning his attention to FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, whom Kimmel accused of attempting to pressure his local affiliates to pull his show off the air last September.
The bit was structured as a direct response to the absence of political comedy at an event that, for decades, has relied on it.
