Posted on | September 19, 2025 | 1 Comment
Mike Magee
Jimmy Kimmel and Donald Trump don’t get along. Their feud is long standing. But their argument now has Constitutional standing of the 1st Amendment kind. A back and forth on Trump’s Truth Social site has been the stuff of legends. But on March 10, 2025, at the 96th Academy of Awards, Kimmel did what many thought was impossible. He displaced President Barack Obama as enemy #1 in the Trump “insult-him-in-public” orbit.
Not that Obama has ever been forgiven. On April 30, 2011, after months of constant needling from Trump demanding that the President release his long form birth certificate, the President chose the White House Correspondent’s Dinner to settle the score with Trump and Melania in attendance. The President’s sarcasm laced put-down lives on in YouTube infamy.
Multiple experts later claimed that April 30th was the night that Trump decided to go all in on Presidential politics. A subsequent FRONTLINE documentary said simply that he acted on a basic instinct that “redemption and revenge are intertwined.” In the documentary, Trump biographer, Michael D’Antonio, elaborated: “Donald dreads humiliation and he dreads shame, and this is why he often attempts to humiliate and shame other people. This is a burning, personal need that he has to redeem himself from being humiliated by the first black president.”
But you don’t have to be a Democrat to get under his skin. Consider conservative New York Times political columnists, Ross Douthat. Three months into Trump’s first term in March, 2017, he penned a New York Times editorial titled,“The 25th Amendment Solution for Removing Trump.” Speaking of the presidency, he wrote, “One does not need to be a Marvel superhero or Nietzschean Übermensch to rise to this responsibility. But one needs some basic attributes: a reasonable level of intellectual curiosity, a certain seriousness of purpose, a basic level of managerial competence, a decent attention span, a functional moral compass, a measure of restraint and self-control. And if a president is deficient in one or more of them, you can be sure it will be exposed. Trump is seemingly deficient in them all.”
Eight years later, Kimmel delivered this killer line to a worldwide audience: “Donald Trump is mentally ill. Say it out loud!” Then, as the Awards extravaganza was reaching its final “Best Picture” climax, Kimmel reappeared from stage left at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles, California, and said he had an extra minute to burn.
As the spotlight shone, Kimmel said , “This show is not about me, and I appreciate you having me. It’s really about you, and Emma, and all these great actors and actresses and filmmakers, but I was told we had like an extra minute, and I’m really proud of something, and I was wondering if I could share it with you. I just got a review.
“Has there ever been a worse host than Jimmy Kimmel at The Oscars. His opening was that of a less than average person trying too hard to be something which he is not, and never can be. Get rid of Kimmel and perhaps replace him with another washed up, but cheap, ABC ‘talent,’ George Slopanopoulos. He would make everybody on stage look bigger, stronger, and more glamorous. Blah. Blah. Blah. Make America Great Again.”
With the structured timing of a comedic pro, Kimmel waited as the laughter began to fade , and then said, “See if you can guess which former president just posted that on Truth Social. Anyone? No? Well thank you President Trump. Thank you for watching. I’m surprised you’re still up. Isn’t it past your jail time?”
The 2nd term President’s 34 felony count conviction on May 10, 2024, remained fresh in his mind.
A tragic and malignant Donald Trump remains our inheritance. Douthat and Kimmel are not alone in their conviction that he is unsuitable for the Presidency. In The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, a book published in October 2017, 27 psychiatrists said as much. Based on a Yale Psychiatry conference in April, 2017, titled “A Duty to Warn,” the psychiatrists reviewed in depth “the Trump dilemma” and his effect on American society. In short, we were amply warned, not only about him, but his autocratic friends providing the Project 2025 policy game plan fully funded by the likes of Peter Thiel and Elon Musk.
Those who continue to support his candidacy now do so despite the risk to all of us, and for their own personal gain. There remain a few on the religious right who honestly believe that “God put Trump here for a purpose” (to support patriarchy, outlaw abortion, advance Christian nationalism etc.)
Academics, Jurists, Priests, and Corporate CEO’s have been careful not to label Trump as mentally ill.
Sadly, his words in 2024 remind of another influential essayist, Kenneth Burke, whose 1939 masterpiece, The Rhetoric of Hitler’s Battle, is required reading for graduate students from English to Philosophy, and from Political Science to History and Religious Studies. The piece’s main focus involves a critical analysis of Hitler’s Mein Kampf (“my struggle”) which includes this stark warning.
Leaders of the free world need “to discover what kind of ‘medicine’ this medicine-man…concocted, that we may know, with greater accuracy, exactly what to guard against, if we are to forestall the concocting of similar medicine in America.”
Trump too has written his own fictional story; a despotic force with his own signature language. University of Massachusetts sociolinquist, Jennifer Sclafani, wrote a book about Trump-speak in 2018 titled, “Talking Donald Trump.” In it she explores “how Trump’s language has produced such polarized reactions among the electorate.”
Lara Trump, proudly announced, she too was now multi-lingual. “As my father-in-law says, ‘bigly’ … We’re going to win!”
Like zombies, Trump followers and the former Republican Party have now followed him into the basement, and are heading down a tunnel which has no end. It has been “a virtuoso performance without a grand finale.”
Does President Obama regret treating Trump like an Apprentice in front of a bunch of FOX-filled personalities? Probably no more than Trump may live to regret picking a fight with a super-tight band of the world’s greatest humorists and satirists.
Within 24 hours of Kimmel’s cancellation, Jon Stewart opened a dialogue with Trump in a UK Royal clad strategic retreat. His words: “Father has been gracing England with his legendary warmth and radiance. Gaze upon him, with a gait even more majestic than that of the royal horses that pranced before him!”
Ouch! And there’s more to come.
Comments
September 19th, 2025 @ 7:04 pm
“The tyrant dies and his rule is over; the martyr dies and his rule begins.”
Soren Kierkegaard