Jimmy Kimmel — a man whose ratings have been circling the drain since approximately 2017 — went on his little ABC show on April 23rd and cracked a joke about the First Lady of the United States having “a glow like an expectant widow.” Two days later, someone opened fire at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in what appears to be the third assassination attempt against President Trump.

Now no one is saying Jimmy knew President Trump would have a third attempt on his life. But we are saying his excuse for making the joke doesn’t hold water.

Obviously, after the White House Correspondent’s Dinner shooting, making a joke about the First Lady having “a glow like an expectant widow” is not cool. But instead of Jimmy, saying, “Wow bad timing on that one, by bad Melania!” he doubled down on his “joke.”

Here’s what happened for those that don’t know. Kimmel, knowing there was no way in hell he’s score an invite to the White House Correspondent’s Dinner, did a skit on his show showing what he would say to the PResident and First Lady if he had been invited. During the bit, he described Melania Trump as looking like “an expectant widow” — as in, a woman eagerly waiting for her husband to die. Then, forty-eight hours later, a gunman disrupted the actual WHCD in what could have been a massacre. Nobody was killed, thank God, but the trauma was real for everyone in that room.

So what does Kimmel do when the entire country connects the obvious dots between his “widow” joke and an actual assassination attempt? Does he apologize? Does he show an ounce of humility?

Of course not. This is Jimmy Kimmel we’re talking about.

He went back on the air Monday night and *repeated the joke*. He actually sat there behind his desk and explained to his dwindling audience that it was “a very light roast joke about the fact that he’s almost 80, and she’s younger than I am.” He said it was “not, by any stretch of the definition, a call to assassination. And they know that.”

Oh, well, if Jimmy says so! Pack it up, everybody. The man who makes his living mocking half the country has assured us his widow joke about the wife of a man who’s survived three assassination attempts was just good clean fun.

(For the record, “expectant widow” doesn’t mean “your husband is old.” It means you’re waiting for him to die. Words mean things, Jimmy — even when you’re reading them off a teleprompter.)

Melania Trump responded exactly the way you’d expect a woman whose husband has been shot at three times to respond. She called Kimmel’s joke “hateful and violent” and said his monologue about her family “isn’t comedy — his words are corrosive and deepen the political sickness within America.” She called on ABC to “take a stand” against the comedian.

President Trump called the joke “far beyond the pale” and said Kimmel should be “immediately fired by Disney and ABC.”

Now, we all know Disney isn’t going to fire Kimmel. Disney is the same company that turned Star Wars into a DEI seminar and thinks a movie about a gender-fluid teenager is what American families are dying to see on Friday night. Kimmel is their kind of people.

But let’s talk about what’s really going on here, because this isn’t just about one bad joke from a late-night hack.

This is a pattern. These people — the Hollywood crowd, the late-night hosts, the “entertainment” industry — have spent years normalizing violent rhetoric against President Trump and his family. They put on plays where they stab a Trump lookalike to death. They hold up fake severed heads. They “joke” about the First Lady being a widow. And then when someone actually picks up a gun and tries to make their fantasies a reality, they clutch their pearls and say, “Who, me? I’m just a comedian!”

Three assassination attempts. Three. And Jimmy Kimmel thinks the appropriate response is to joke about the President’s wife looking forward to his death.

Then — and this is the part that should make your jaw hit the floor — when he got called out for it, he had the audacity to lecture everyone about how *he’s* been “very vocal for many years against gun violence.” Unbelievable. The guy who jokes about a woman being widowed wants credit for being anti-violence.

That’s like setting a building on fire and then bragging about your donations to the fire department.

Remember when late-night TV was actually funny? When Johnny Carson told jokes that made the whole country laugh regardless of who they voted for? Those days are dead and buried. Now we’ve got Kimmel, Colbert, and whatever’s left of SNL competing to see who can be the most vicious toward one family — and calling it “comedy” while their ratings collapse.

Kimmel’s show is ranked dead last among the late-night programs. Dead. Last. And somehow his response to hemorrhaging viewers is to double down on attacking the most popular president since Reagan. Brilliant strategy, Jimmy. Really sharp stuff.

Here’s what we know: if any conservative comedian — if such a thing were allowed to exist on network television — had made a joke about Michelle Obama being an “expectant widow,” they would have been fired before the monologue ended. Their career would be over. Their agent would drop them. Their Wikipedia page would be updated to read “disgraced former comedian” by morning.

But Kimmel gets to repeat the joke, lecture the country about civility, and collect his Disney paycheck. Because the rules only go one direction in Hollywood.

Melania Trump is right. This isn’t comedy. A woman whose husband has been shot at three separate times shouldn’t have to watch a millionaire television host fantasize about her becoming a widow on national television. And the fact that Kimmel thinks “it was about their age difference” is a defense tells you everything you need to know about the man.

He knows exactly what he said. He just doesn’t care. None of them do — until the cameras are off and the bodyguards go home and they remember that words have consequences for everyone except them.