Jimmy Kimmel roasted the vice president for somehow bombing harder than Melania Trump’s disastrous “documentary.”
The late-night host mocked JD Vance for having “a rough week,” topped off by a hollow audience at a Turning Point USA event in Georgia.
Kimmel provided harsh criticism after displaying footage of dozens of empty seats at the campus tour: “There were more people in the theater to see the Melania documentary than JD Vance.”
Kimmel’s jab at Melania comes months after Amazon MGM’s multimillion-dollar documentary about the first lady failed to dazzle at the box office. Kimmel has previously taken aim at the film, which he described as “dreadfully dull.”
The longtime Trump nemesis even managed to throw in a dig toward the first lady at the 2026 Oscars, telling the audience, “Oh man, is he going to be mad his wife wasn’t nominated for this,” as he presented the award for Best Documentary Feature.
“Weirdly,” the late-night host continued in his roast of Vance, “Americans don’t seem to be responding to JD’s infectious charisma. Maybe it’s time for a new eyeliner.”
The Turning Point event was singled out for being “poorly attended,” as MS Now puts it, and was described by the Independent as a “lackluster event, a far cry from the youthful energy once harnessed for President Donald Trump.”
Vance, 41, stepped in to headline the event in place of Erika Kirk, the widow of TPUSA’s founder, Charlie Kirk, who withdrew after security concerns.
The right-wing organization’s spokesperson, Andrew Kolvet, said that 10,000 seats were reserved for the event, but 2,000 students showed up. Kolvet blamed liberals, saying, “Left-wing groups swarm the ticketing and they try and book up all the tickets, and then they don’t show and that’s one of their forms of protest. Normally, we’re pretty good at sniffing it out, but they use some new means and activities, and so we’re working with our ticketing systems to adjust for that moving forward.”
The campus talk was seemingly mired in disaster. Students protested outside the venue, holding signs bearing slogans such as “Jesus warned us about JD Vance,” as tensions between the White House and the Vatican peaked this week. Vance was also repeatedly heckled during the chat with TPUSA.
Kimmel outlined Vance’s “rough week,” telling his audience, “He failed to make a deal to end the war in Iran. He had to defend Trump bashing the Pope and the AI Jesus stuff. And now he’s made it his job to try to pretend his boss wasn’t a close friend of the world’s most notorious pedophile.”
