First lady Melania Trump excoriated ABC and Jimmy Kimmel, describing the late-night comedian as a “coward” whose words “are corrosive and deepens the political sickness within America.”

The first lady called on ABC to take action against Kimmel in a Monday morning post on the X platform.

On his show late last week, Kimmel mocked President Donald Trump and the first lady in a parody of the planned White House correspondents’ dinner. The jokes came two days before the Saturday event was abruptly canceled after a gunman breached security at the Washington Hilton hotel before being tackled by the heavy security.

The suspect, a 31-year-old teacher from Torrance, California, was apprehended before reaching the ballroom where the president and first lady were seated on stage. Melania Trump dropped to the floor under the head table; and Secret Security agents escorted Trump off the stage.

The alleged gunman, Cole Tomas Allen, is facing three criminal charges — including an attempt to assassinate President Trump.

The White House on Monday sought to blame Kimmel and others for the rise in political violence.

“Jimmy Kimmel should be immediately fired by Disney and ABC,” Trump said separately in a Truth Social post.

Kimmel has not addressed the weekend incident. This year’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner was the first time Trump and Melania Trump had attended the gala, which has long celebrated First Amendment freedoms and the Washington press corps. After returning to the White House, Trump during a news conference briefly called for unity amid the country’s political divisions.

On a Thursday night broadcast of his program, Kimmel fashioned a monologue that he said would serve as an alternative version of the Washington-based correspondents’ dinner.

“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,” said Kimmel, who was the dinner’s headlining act in 2012 when President Barack Obama was in office.

“So I thought, why not take a page from the Kid Rock alternative halftime show and do some of the jokes a comedian might do if our president wasn’t a trembling drama queen who’s scared of comedy,” Kimmel said Thursday.

He went on to describe how the first lady had the glow of “an expectant widow,” an apparent reference to Trump’s age and health.

“People like Kimmel shouldn’t have the opportunity to enter our homes each evening to spread hate,” Melania Trump wrote.

During her White House briefing Monday, press secretary Karoline Leavitt linked comments by Kimmel, as well as other left-leaning personalities, for the attempted violence against Trump.

“Who in their right minds says a wife would be glowing over the potential murder of her beloved husband,” Leavitt said. “Having experienced what I did with the first lady on Saturday night, I can tell you that she was anything but that.”

Leavitt said it was “unbelievable” that major networks would allow such banter.

“The deranged lies and smears against the president, his family, his supporters have led crazy people to believe crazy things, and they are inspired to commit violence because of those words,” Leavitt said. “It has to stop.”

In her post, the first lady wrote: “Enough is enough. It is time for ABC to take a stand. How many times will ABC’s leadership enable Kimmel’s atrocious behavior at the expense of our community.”

The flap could become one of the first major challenges for Disney Chief Executive Josh D’Amaro, who succeeded Bob Iger last month, and veteran television executive Dana Walden, who became Disney’s president and chief creative officer. Disney is the parent company of ABC.

Representatives of ABC and Disney were not immediately available for comment.

The controversy comes seven months after Walden-led ABC briefly benched Kimmel over remarks he made in the wake of the shooting death of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. In that case, Kimmel seemed to suggest during his monologue that Tyler Robinson, the Utah man accused in the shooting death of Kirk, might have been a pro-Trump Republican and that MAGA supporters were trying to do “everything they can to score political points from” Kirk’s murder.

The controversy swelled on social media and Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr demanded ABC act on Kimmel’s comments. The federal government, which grants TV station licenses, might have to step in, Carr suggested — comments that raised alarm bells among free speech advocates about government censorship.

Soon after Carr’s comments, Nexstar Media Group, which controls 32 ABC affiliates, said it would drop “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” and ABC took the comedian off the air for a few days to allow the situation to cool. After about a week, Nexstar reinstated the show.

Kimmel later said his comments had been “intentionally and maliciously mischaracterized.”

Kimmel was slated to end his long-running program this spring but ABC renewed his contract for another year.

In addition, there have been considerable tensions over Kimmel’s frequent barbs about both President Trump’s and the first lady’s past friendship with convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who died in prison in 2019.

In his monologue on Thursday, Kimmel also referenced those ties.

“I do want to praise the POTUS. Look how far you’ve come. Thirty years ago, you’re just some rich guy on Jeffrey Epstein’s private jet out of Teterboro,” Kimmel said. “But you worked hard. You stayed friends. You shared some wonderful secrets. And because of that, you’re able to fly on that plane seven more times. Dreams really do come true.”

_____

©2026 Los Angeles Times. Visit latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.