Donald Trump is fond of telling interviewers that he has a “very thick skin”, but it now appears that it was insufficiently robust to prevent Jimmy Kimmel jokes from getting under it while he was in the White House.
Rolling Stone has revealed that in early 2018, a year into Trump’s presidency, he became so incensed with the late-night host’s jabs that he ordered White House officials to complain. At least two calls were made, the magazine reports, to top executives at Disney, which owns ABC, the channel which broadcasts Jimmy Kimmel Live.
“Nobody thought it was going to change anything but [Trump] was focused on it so we had to do something,” one unnamed former presidential administration official told Rolling Stone.
Kimmel replied over the weekend to the revelation that all his Trump needling had been effective. “Another perfect call …” he said, riffing off Trump’s brag about the “perfect call” he made to the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, that helped land him in his first impeachment.
Like most late-night hosts, Kimmel responded to the advent of the Trump presidency with alacrity. At the time the calls to Disney were being made, the comedian was comparing Trump to the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, and inviting a porn star on to the show to describe lewd acts she had allegedly committed with him.
“Happy New Year, everybody. We have two maniacs with nuclear warheads bragging about who has the bigger button,” Kimmel said in his first show of 2018, referring to Kim and Trump.
Days after news broke that Trump had paid $130,000 through his personal lawyer to Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about an alleged affair, Kimmel interviewed her. He read to her a description that she had given of having sex with Trump in 2006 and asked her was it true.
“Define true,” she replied.
That Trump should be riled by such late-night punches is perhaps understandable. That he should use the mighty power of the Oval Office to try to stomp them out is the kind of behaviour that has earned him comparison with the late Richard Nixon, who after the Watergate scandal became the only US president to resign from office.
Nixon also suffered from a president’s occupational hazard of letting public jabs get under his skin. He once grew so apoplectic towards a newspaper columnist that he planned to kill him by smearing a massive dose of LSD on the steering wheel of his car.
