Jimmy Kimmel poked fun at Melania Trump’s unexpected Jeffrey Epstein statement, suggesting she “must really hate” Donald Trump for making it just as the topic had died down.
The comedian weighed in on the first lady’s televised address during Thursday’s monologue for “Jimmy Kimmel Live!,” where he joked that Melania “delivered a doozy of a prepared statement demanding that we stop talking about something no one was talking about.”
After playing footage of Melania’s message, in which she denied being friends with Epstein or his accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, Kimmel wondered if the president “spit out a whole gallon of Diet Coke” during the speech.
“This is already better than her movie,” Kimmel said. “I love how she keeps calling him Epstein like it’s an episode of ‘Welcome Back, Kotter’ or something. And why is this happening today? He spent the past six weeks trying to bomb this Epstein story out of the headlines. Two days after the ceasefire, she puts it right back on top.”
He added: “She must really hate him. I don’t know how else to explain it.”
Kimmel was also particularly tickled by Trump’s reaction to the speech, where he told a journalist that he had no prior knowledge to the topic that his wife planned to discuss.
“Which shows you just how smoothly things are running over there,” Kimmel said. “For whatever reason, she didn’t ask. She didn’t give him a heads up. She just went right out in front of the cameras and fired away.”
While Kimmel acknowledged Melania for calling on Congress to let the Epstein victims testify under oath, he questioned the way she downplayed her connection to the deceased child sex offender.
“By the way, while you’re explaining how much you didn’t know Epstein, any particular reason you can think of that he had a picture of you guys on display at his house?” Kimmel asked. “Maybe this is the photo that came with the frame? I don’t know. I know that I, for one, when I see this, I think, ‘Well, these two don’t know each other at all,’ in this photo from which Ghislaine Maxwell was cropped out. This is quite a plot twist, right?”
Watch Kimmel’s full monologue above.
“Jimmy Kimmel Live!” airs weeknights at 11:35 p.m. ET on ABC.
