Jimmy Kimmel took a cue from Kid Rock’s alternative halftime show and offered Donald Trump his own version of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner speech.
Although Trump will be attending the dinner this Saturday for his first time as president, the event won’t include what is traditionally its most newsworthy part: the playful roast of the president by a famous comedian.
Instead of a comedian, the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) picked mentalist and author Oz Pearlman as the headlining entertainer.
“Our president is a delicate snowflake with the thinnest fat skin of any human being ever, and that means there’s going to be no comedian this year,” Kimmel explained in his Thursday monologue.
To make up for the lack of comedy at the dinner, Kimmel offered to “do some of the jokes a comedian might do if our president wasn’t a trembling drama queen.”
Kimmel gave a nine-minute roast that covered everything from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal to Trump’s war on Iran.
“By the way, before we go any further: Melania, this is Donald. Donald, this is Melania,” Kimmel joked, adding, “That was my impression of Jeffrey Epstein.”
Kimmel told Trump, “Don’t worry, if we bruise your ego, it’ll only make your hands look less disgusting.”
Referring to Trump’s hush-money trial in 2024, Kimmel added, “The president didn’t want me to tell any jokes about him tonight, but he also didn’t want to pay me $130,000 to shut up, so here we are. Sorry, Mushroom D--k.”
After each of the late-night host’s jokes, the show cut to an out-of-context reaction shot of a Trump official laughing or smiling.
Trump has long bucked tradition by not attending the Correspondents’ Dinner as president. In 2025, comedian Amber Ruffin was set to perform, but was abruptly fired by the WHCA after comments she made on an episode of The Daily Beast Podcast.
Ruffin called Trump officials “kind of a bunch of murderers” and said that she wouldn’t try to target both sides of the political spectrum equally.
Eugene Daniels, the president of the WHCA, soon announced that Ruffin had been fired from the event and that the WHCA would avoid “the politics of division” going forward.
The most brutal WHCD roast Trump has ever received came in 2011, when he attended the event as a guest.
Both Barack Obama and headlining entertainer Seth Meyers tore into Trump to mass laughter and applause, with Trump looking distraught in the audience.
“Donald Trump said that he was running for president as a Republican,” Meyers famously said at the event. “That’s funny, because I thought he was running as a joke.”
Obama used his speech to hit back at Trump’s insistence that he was really born in Kenya.
“No one is prouder to put this birth certificate matter to rest than the Donald,” Obama said. “And that’s because he can finally get back to focusing on the issues that matter: like, did we fake the moon landing? What really happened in Roswell? And where are Biggie and Tupac?”
